Ray Hadley’s executive producer quits morning show over spat with its new host
The executive producer behind the enduring success of 2GB’s hit morning show has spectacularly quit the talkback program just weeks after having a blistering bust-up with its new host.
Here’s one that you won’t be hearing about on Nine Radio’s news rundown: the highly regarded executive producer behind the network’s popular 2GB morning show has spectacularly quit the program – just weeks after having a blistering bust-up with its new host, Mark Levy, and complaining about him to network management.
Diary can reveal Olivia Wilbury and Levy’s budding six-month partnership was all but left in tatters after they engaged in a scorching “frank and robust” exchange of views in front of stunned fellow staff members during a heated production meeting at the talkback station’s Pyrmont studios in Sydney.
We’re not sure what was said precisely (we’ve heard a couple of different versions, all of which have been enough to make even us blush), but it was certainly fiery enough that Levy felt the need to apologise afterwards … and Wilbury the need to take up the matter with the network’s national content director, Greg Byrnes.
So it must have been one hell of a stink.
After all, Wilbury is as tough as they come, and made a name for herself as a hard-hitting producer under Levy’s predecessor, Ray Hadley, before being hand-picked to run his show as executive producer for the final three years of his decades-long reign atop the radio ratings – and he’s no shrinking violet either.
Either way, word of the blow-up – and all but total breakdown of Levy and Wilbury’s work relationship – has spread like wildfire inside the talkback network in recent weeks amid mounting speculation that 2GB’s morning show simply wasn’t big enough to accommodate their duelling personalities.
In the end, Byrnes decided the best solution was to simply divide and conquer, and separate the two key staff members rather than risk losing either one of them; and offered Wilbury the “opportunity” to leave the morning show after seven successful years and trade places with host Michael McLaren’s executive producer on his afternoon program.
The fact she readily accepted the deal probably tells you just about everything you need to know about the simmering brouhaha … though Byrnesy, on a bit of a roll, bless him, wanted to have a crack at that one too.
“From next Monday, Olivia Wilbury will move into the EP role on Afternoons, with Jacob Pittolo to take on the EP role in Mornings,” he said while announcing the old switcheroo in an all-staff email last Tuesday. “This ‘job swap’ is part of our ongoing commitment to refresh and rejuvenate our production processes and on-air sound.”
Well, that’s definitely a unique explanation.
At least, there was a brief hint of the real underlying reasons for Wilbury’s redeployment at 2GB when Levy offered her a final farewell on-air on Friday.
“I just want to say a big thank you to Olivia Wilbury, who’s … going to work with McLaren on the afternoon program,” he told his listeners.
“Olivia, I said it to you privately, I’ll say it to you publicly as well – (she’s) one of the most intelligent women I think I’ve ever met, and certainly has a very strong opinion on a whole range of issues.
“I think her intelligence levels are better matched with Michael McLaren as opposed to me.”
Sport and weather coming up next?
Harris quits Ten
Much like Mark Twain’s “death”, reports of Sarah Harris’s supposed “sacking” at Ten have been greatly exaggerated.
How so? Well, because Harris wasn’t sacked at all.
She quit.
While the network’s national news boss, Martin White, has been busy poaching reporters from rival stations to shore up his new nightly current affairs program, 10 News+, it turns out not everyone was in a rush to sign up for the show – not least his own channel’s only star.
Contrary to what everyone else has been saying, Diary can reveal Ten most definitely asked Harris to stay on and helm the program after axing The Project this month.
But having fronted just about every new program at the network (and quite a few of the older ones) over the past 12 years, we hear Harris told them she felt it was a good time to take a bit of a breather and have a reset.
In good news for Ten though, we hear the new show’s inaugural executive producer, Dan Sutton, has at least managed to add some much-needed firepower to the program behind the scenes and convinced gun producer Naomi Shivaraman to come on board in a consulting role.
It’s a savvy signing given Shivaraman’s extensive experience both in long-form investigations at 60 Minutes and short-form turnarounds while chief of staff of Seven’s Sydney newsroom.
It’s also a much-needed one given we hear Ten is still struggling to find enough producers to fully staff the show when it launches in just two weeks – when it runs for an hour a night, six evenings a week.
That’s one hungry beast.
Breen machine
There’s just never any telling where former newspaper editor, ex-magazine boss, one-time talkback radio shock jock and present-day A Current Affair reporter Neil Breen will pop up next.
In January, we revealed he’d somehow found his way into the final five contenders vying to replace Simon Hobbs as Nine’s Sydney news boss following the exec’s unexpected exit late last year. And, no, he hadn’t accidentally wandered into the wrong room, he was actually on the list.
How did we know?
Well, in a bumbling tech blunder for the ages, his name quite literally popped up – along with those of his fellow candidates, including veteran Nine newshounds Damian Ryan and Mark Burrows and 60 Minutes’ journalism Swiss Army knife Amelia Adams – in the “daily meeting schedule” prominently displayed on the side of the screen during their respective zoom interviews for the gig. Awkward.
Ultimately, they all lost out to Nine’s former European correspondent and one-time spinner for the vastly underrated Gladstone Port Corporation, Michael Best, which is just about the greatest result for everyone involved … except Best, that is.
He’s now buried under a mountain of staff rosters and budget balance sheets in at the network’s Denison St headquarters in North Sydney.
As for Breenie, well, as luck would have it, we hear his name is just about to pop up once again, this time when he is named as the first national sports editor working across The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in the coming days.
It’s not a bad call either, given the talented all-rounder is without doubt one of the best sports journos and editors in the country, and the gig will involve him having to be across just about everything.
Word is Breenie will move into the newly created role after the SMH’s much-loved chief sports editor, Ian Fuge, signs off from the Sydney tabloid for the final time on July 4 but ahead of the impending retirement of the masthead’s equally popular sports editor and “punk rock war lord” Ben Coady.
The surprise shake-up will see Breenie staying on as a core member of Nine Radio’s Continuous Call Team covering the NRL while juggling the new role – and also achieving one of his lifelong goals of working side-by-side with Nine newspapers’ resident sports columnist and Aussie history buff Peter FitzSimons.
After all, Breenie’s been such a longstanding and ardent admirer of Fitzy’s work, he desperately tried to convince him to defect to The Sunday Telegraph while he was editor there some 15 years back.
Indeed, he even thumbed through a copy of the author’s 480-page treatise on the failed 1854 Victorian miners rebellion at the Eureka Stockade in hopeful anticipation of their imminent time together – only to learn both attempted coups had failed after Fitzy insisted on an annual dowry of $1m to sign on with the Tele.
Of course, he did get the chance to work with Fitzy’s other half, Lisa Wilkinson, not long after that, when he popped up as the executive producer of Nine’s Today breakfast show in 2013, after his close friend and then network chief David Gyngell tasked him with fixing the ailing program.
As our regular readers know only too well, asking newspaper editors to “fix” ailing television programs rarely ends well and, sadly, this was not destined to be the exception that proved the rule with Breenie resigning after just nine months amid murmurs of brutal on-set blow ups and bitter staff infighting.
But the less said about that the better, because there’s far greater entertainment on the way.
After all, Breenie’s new sports editing gig will put him on something of a collision course with SMH editor Bevan Shields, whose never-ending list of bizarre humblebrags includes the odd boast that he just doesn’t quite get cricket.
Little wonder staff are already breaking out their popcorn ahead of what should be an eventful summer.
Netflix and chill
It’s the magical vanishing act almost worthy of a Netflix special in its own right, with speculation Que Minh Luu has already severed ties with the streaming giant just one month after it was announced she was stepping down as the service’s Australia and New Zealand content chief … but most definitely remaining on-board as a “consultant”.
The one-time ABC executive oversaw drama, comedy and indigenous programming at the public broadcaster for a little over three years before joining Netflix as the director of “local originals” back in July 2020.
Since then, Luu has commissioned a string of Aussie hits, including a reboot of Heartbreak High, the Apple Cider Vinegar miniseries based on the life and lies of cancer faker Belle Gibson, and the small screen adaptation of Trent Dalton’s debut novel Boy Swallows Universe.
However, her strange decision to pass on a second season of Ronde and Easy Tiger Production’s “neo-Western drama” Territory with rising star Anna Torv still has almost everyone in the industry scratching their heads – particularly given the program had rocketed to second place in Nexflix’s “global top 10 English TV shows” and attracted 6.4 million views within days of its premiere last October before hitting top spot in 11 countries.
Like, seriously, what more could she have possibly wanted? It looks like we’ll never find out.
Although Netflix insisted they would “continue working with (Luu) on our ANZ slate as a creative consultant” for an unspecified period of time after her mysterious resignation in April, it seems time may have already passed with Luu recently updating her LinkedIn profile to describe herself as “ex-Netflix” and noting she signed off from the entertainment outfit last month.
Seven finally tackles story
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether something is actually a yarn until you see it smack bang on page one of The Australian … apparently.
That certainly seems to be the case with respected television veteran Sandra Odorisio’s powerful story about retired rugby league hardman Trevor Crow and his heartbreaking battle with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in March.
Splashed across front of the Oz (and two pages inside), the in-depth article revealed “the unbearable reality of living with a dementia-affected ex-footballer” as his wife Sandra Crow bravely invited Odorisio to document their daily struggles.
Indeed, the important news feature was accompanied by some of the most compelling – and confronting – vision you’ll see in any investigation into the debilitating brain disease.
Which was why Diary was surprised to learn Seven actually turned down the opportunity to share the Crows’ story before it appeared in The Australian in March … even though the network’s then news boss, Anthony De Ceglie, had issued a directive to his program chief insisting they increase the channel’s rugby league coverage.
Now, we’re not suggesting De Ceglie, who quit the network to run an NRL club just two months later, deliberately avoided tackling the contentious topic because he was worried it might upset his soon-to-be-new-boss, NRL chair Peter V’landys.
Because we definitely don’t think that at all. No way. Not at all.
But we were somewhat surprised to hear that within weeks of De Ceglie departing Seven last month, the network has had a sudden change of heart and now wants to tell the Crows’ story after all.
In fact, they’ve even had their chief reporter, Chris Reason, on the job and interviewing the couple – oddly via video link from the channel’s Media City headquarters in Sydney, even though they live just two hours up the M1 motorway in Newcastle – and repackaging the vision from Odorisio’s story for The Australian for an upcoming feature.
Make of that what you will.
Last word on Q+A
Talk about the kiss of death … a couple of weeks back we noted Patricia Karvelas had actually started pulling a crowd on Monday nights for the ABC’s panel show Q+A, with the program’s ratings up year on year just as it went on its mid-year hiatus.
What we didn’t realise at the time was that the break would be permanent and the show would be officially axed just a fortnight later.
Was it something we said? It usually is.
But not this time.
Diary hears the show was scrapped because the new double-act running things in at Aunty, chair Kim Williams and managing director “Hollywood” Hugh Marks, want to put the “broad” back in broadcasting and ensure the ABC’s content appeals to all Australians, not just the inner-city set.
Finally! Somebody gets it!
Of course, the real driving force behind Q+A’s resurgence in its final months was largely due to its hardworking executive producer, Eliza Harvey, who somehow managed to cut the mammoth cost of making the show while reviving some of its once-mammoth viewer engagement.
While Harvey’s mission impossible ultimately proved too little too late, we’re pleased to see she’s staying on to be part of the cultural revolution at the ABC.
In the Spotlight
If there’s one thing the excitable team at Seven’s Spotlight enjoys, it’s a little melodrama.
In fact, they were so pumped about their yarn on the Kenyan workers allegedly being exploited by “big tech” to train artificial intelligence, they spent much of the past week posting ads for it. (We spotted at least eight different ones – making it their most heavily promoted story of the year).
They even sent out a blaring press release trumpeting it as a “world exclusive”.
“In this exclusive investigation, reporter Michael Usher tracks down the people behind the algorithms – the so-called ‘ghost workers’ of AI,” the release boasted. “These are the invisible people labelling data, moderating content and training the systems that now shape our everyday lives.”
Dramatic stuff, indeed.
The only issue? 60 Minutes in the US conducted the same “world exclusive investigation” just six months ago when their reporter Lesley Stahl also travelled to Kenya to meet the underpaid and overworked digital workers “sorting, labelling and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI”.
What’s more, it appears the two shows even “tracked down” some of the same people. What a coincidence.
We reached out to Seven to ask if their world exclusive investigation involved much more than exclusively investigating what was on TV on the other side of the world.
They assured us their version had a couple of fresh elements – before getting the sniffles and complaining they felt under “attack” … all because we dared to ask a genuine question about a press release they had actually sent us in the first place!
Really?
Last week we revealed 60 Minutes Australia’s sole male reporter (you remember his name? No, us neither) was secretly on leave at Nine while weighing his future at the show.
Before that we revealed The Project was secretly under review at Ten and about to get axed.
But ask Seven if one of their self-proclaimed “world exclusives” is secretly just a recycling of another network’s story and their lips start quivering and they whine about being under siege.
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