The ABC’s flagship panel show, which for every episode of its 12-year run has made its studio audience its hero, will have, well, no audience In the post-coronavirus world. Kinda takes the “Q” out of “Q&A”.
Thankfully, Q&A will have video questions from home viewers on Skype as an audience substitute. ABC boss David Anderson on Friday cancelled “live audiences for any broadcast and for all locations” from Monday. That decision was triggered by ScoMo’s Friday announcement banning “non-essential” gatherings of 500-plus people.
Q&A had already been making coronavirus crisis plans for days — fitting given that Monday night’s instalment is titled “The corona challenge: are we prepared?”.
Under final details still being hammered out on Sunday, Q&A host Hamish Macdonald will continue to host a live five-member panel in the ABC’s Southbank studios in Melbourne.
But that means Q&A’s signature noisy audience clapping will be eerily absent. The panel will take questions entirely from people in the safety of their homes, either live via Skype or by prerecorded video questions.
The show will also beef up its quotient of pre-edited story packages to run on Q&A, to make sure the show has enough material for a whole hour.
Diary hears Q&A had initially received a tentative sign-off to proceed with a studio audience earlier on Friday. But after ScoMo’s crowd edict, there was a change of heart, with Anderson banning audiences shortly after 5pm. This is despite the fact that Q&A’s studio audience on Monday night, for example, would have been just 300.
Earlier last week, the ABC had sent emails to audience participants, urging anyone who had “flu-like symptoms” not to attend the filming in the interests of the entire audience. Extra hand sanitiser was being marshalled at the ABC’s Southbank studio before the cancellation.
-
Sarah to dumpChina?
The ABC is considering ditching plans to send Sarah Ferguson to Beijing as its China bureau chief, Diary can exclusively reveal.
In fact, we hear this prospect — completely unthinkable a year ago when the ABC announced Ferguson’s move to China amid much fanfare — is now more than likely.
Diary has learnt that a series of “Plan B” scenarios have been drawn up for Ferguson at the ABC, with the favoured option being her becoming the ABC’s correspondent in Jakarta. But Hong Kong is also still in the mix.
The easiest option would be Ferguson directly swapping roles with existing ABC China correspondent Bill Birtles, who was due to move from Beijing to Jakarta for Aunty next month. But as Birtles already has a Chinese work visa, he could simply stay on there, with Ferguson instead taking up his planned ABC correspondent’s role in the Indonesian capital.
Alternatively, Ferguson could become the ABC’s correspondent in HK, where Aunty currently doesn’t have anyone. But that would still leave Birtles in Beijing, requiring the ABC to find a new Indonesian correspondent, and banking on the Chinese territory agreeing to grant Ferguson a work visa there.
On the face of it, the long delay in the issuing of Ferguson’s visa is because the Chinese embassy in Canberra has been completely overwhelmed by issues surrounding the coronavirus, while large slabs of the Chinese public service have been inactive.
Surely it couldn’t be anything to do with the reputation of Ferguson as a fearless and dangerous reporter, could it?
Whatever the reason, it certainly must be frustrating for Ferguson, given Diary hears she has invested many months in Mandarin lessons. Privately, ABC sources are still clinging to hope they can convince the Chinese authorities to allow Ferguson to head to Beijing. But if it’s not sorted out by April or May, the prospect of Ferguson’s Plan B will come sharply into focus.
Diary was unable to get hold of Ferguson last week as she was recording a podcast relating to Revelation, her explosive documentary on pedophilia in the Catholic Church starting this week. Meanwhile, her husband, Tony Jones, was unusually cryptic on Friday about the couple’s plans.
“We’ll definitely be going somewhere in the next couple of months,” was all he would tell Diary.
-
Minding McAvaney
Locking down Bruce McAvaney to call footy games off a television monitor in a sterilised room. Yes, it’s one of those previously unimaginable crisis scenarios that suddenly became very real last week.
Seven, like the ABC, was last week war-gaming coronavirus emergency plans. Already, fist bumps and elbow taps are standard company policy at Seven.
Now protecting McAvaney, 66, for decades Seven’s legendary network sports anchor, is a top priority, given he is managing a non-life-threatening form of leukaemia and his health has to be carefully managed. So with AFL games now to be played before empty stadiums, McAvaney and fellow commentators may call matches from the safety of a sterilised room at the Seven Broadcast Centre, based at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium.
Diary can also reveal that from Monday, Seven is already separating its various divisions around Australia into “red” and “blue” teams that work from home on alternate weeks, to build “redundancy” into the business in case of a coronavirus outbreak. Closing Seven’s Martin Place and Docklands studios is also a big part of its crisis scenarios.
Bizarre scenarios for big-name network talent moved out of the realms of fantasy last week, with rival Nine forced to implement unprecedented measures in the aftermath of a David Campbell Today Extra interview with coronavirus-positive Hollywood legend Tom Hanks’ wife Rita Wilson.
Campbell has now embarked on a self-quarantine period. Karl Stefanovic replaced Tracy Grimshaw on A Current Affair on Thursday and Friday nights after Wilson had used the same make-up room as Grimshaw.
But for Seven, it is live sport causing the big headaches.
Seven continues to prepare for the Tokyo Olympics, with McAvaney currently scheduled to spearhead the network’s coverage. But in a cancellation scenario, plans are well afoot to replace two entire weeks of 18-hour-a-day Olympics coverage if necessary.
Diary hears one option is to extend the upcoming season of Big Brother, starring Sonia Kruger, by a fortnight to accommodate a cancelled Olympics. There are few better shows than BB to fill empty hours of airtime.
Meanwhile, the word is Seven is facing unexpected costs for minutiae like the sterilisation of outside broadcast trucks for the AFL season.
It’s extra spending Seven can ill afford, given that Diary hears the poor performance of My Kitchen Rules contributed to a double-digit hit to Seven’s ad revenues in February.
-
BB safe as houses
The safest coronavirus-free zone in the whole country right now must be Seven’s Big Brother house in Sydney’s North Head.
BB was the original show to make self-isolation go, well, viral, decades before the coronavirus came along. Diary hears housemates were locked in the BB house three weeks ago without as much as access to a mobile phone, making them blissfully unaware of society’s recent madness.
The BB bunker even has unlimited access to a luxury item that others are getting into punch-ups over: toilet paper.
-
Fan ban for Waleed
Commercial networks are affected to varying degrees by the shutdown when it comes to live audiences. Ten, which probably has the biggest quotient of publicly attended studio shows, has acted quickly to make them audience-free.
Waleed Aly will have to forego the adulation of live fans on The Project, after Ten banned them from its Sydney and Melbourne studios from last Friday.
Ten executive vice-president Bev McGarvey tells us two of its other marquee shows, Dancing with the Stars and Studio 10, are also audience-free from now on. Meanwhile, the reunion finale of Australian Survivor: All Stars — meant to be filmed before a live studio audience later this week — will now also have no audience.
Eddie’s tapes in the can
Nine has been luckier than Seven and Ten. Eddie McGuire’s Hot Seat Millionaire, filmed before a live audience, taped a large bank of episodes on Thursday and Friday, beating ScoMo’s crowd edict by a whisker.
Diary is told Nine now has months’ worth of shows in the can, so it needn’t worry about audience bans for a while.
It’s a similar tale for The Voice, which has filmed its blind auditions and battles already. But Nine will make a decision in May on whether The Voice’s live performances will be crowd-free.
Meanwhile, on the Ben Fordham/Bec Maddern-hosted Ninja Warrior, filming from this week, Nine will now most likely proceed with just families and friends of competitors as crowd support.
-
Mal-Joyce showdown
It was the heavyweight political confrontation that was always whispered about, but never revealed.
Now Diary can make it official that Barnaby Joyce did indeed storm Malcolm Turnbull’s Parliament House office in Canberra to tear the wallpaper off the walls, immediately after Turnbull’s famous February 2018 “bonk ban” press conference.
The fascinating fact has emerged as part of The Back Story, a self-funded series of interviews by admirably dogged ex-Ten journo Jonathan Lea, who of course pursued Bill Shorten about his costings on climate change policies during last year’s federal election campaign.
In Turnbull’s 2018 press conference, he told Canberra press gallery journalists: “Barnaby made a shocking error of judgment and appalled all of us.” But Joyce was listening. Diary has now obtained a copy of part of Lea’s interview with the former deputy PM, in which it emerges that a furious and blindsided Joyce was watching Turnbull’s press conference live, just a few metres away.
“I was in the office next door, watching on television and I opened the window and I could see it just out there,” Joyce told him. Lea prodded him: “I had visions of you wanting to storm into Malcolm Turnbull’s office.”
Joyce replied: “Yeah, I went around straight away.” And Joyce tells Lea that while he “respected” the office of prime minister, the gloves “came off” once personal lives came into play.
Apart from Joyce, Lea’s anticipated series also features chats with a highly emotional Pauline Hanson, independent Warringah MP Zali Steggall, Pat Dodson and Dave Sharma, who holds Turnbull’s former seat of Wentworth.
-
Sanitiser sting
Last week it was the case of the alleged phantom toilet roll nicker at Channel 10. But this week’s big whodunit is who is stealing hand sanitiser at News Corp’s Holt Street headquarters in Sydney.
A cranky Holt St building manager Brian Moses tells Diary he has been forced to turn amateur sleuth in his search for the culprit/s who stole six highly prized one-litre hand sanitiser bottles from News Corp’s national HQ.
“They’re as scarce as hen’s teeth at the moment,” he grumbles. Moses reckons that at this rate, he might be doing “roll calls” on toilet paper in the building, just to make sure none of that precious stuff has been nicked as well.
No word yet on whether prospective informants will be rewarded in cash — or loo rolls.
-
Dickie home alone with virus
It’s been a tough week for Nine’s legendary entertainment editor Richard “Dickie” Wilkins.
The shock news came through on Sunday night that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
When The Australian’s Media Diary contacted him on Friday, he revealed that he’d had the test, but he was very confident it was purely “precautionary”.
He told us he’d briefly met Tom Hanks’ wife Rita Wilson twice: backstage at the Sydney Opera House nine days ago, and later at Nine’s Sydney studios last Monday.
He had tweeted out a selfie with the Hollywood star, and very sensibly, as it turned out, excused himself from his Weekend Today hosting duties, with Tom Steinfort standing in. “I’m home alone,” he lamented to Media Diary on Friday.
There was no one at home for Dickie to infect. Wilkins dropped another bombshell to Diary on Friday: that he had split with his partner of two years, former Le Lido Paris dancer Virginia Burmeister, “some time ago”. “It’s all very amicable,” he told us.
Then, on Sunday night, came this announcement: “Richard Wilkins has tested positive to COVID-19,” a Nine spokesman said.
“Richard is not showing any symptoms of the virus and has been self-isolating, on his own at home … Anyone he has been in contact with prior to Thursday afternoon has been notified and will be tested.
“Richard is feeling well and still without symptoms.”
Meanwhile, Today Extra hosts David Campbell and Belinda Russell, who also met Rita Wilson, were tested but returned negative results.
ABC’s allegations against Indigenous group ‘baseless’
The public broadcaster omitted key details about the chair of an Indigenous group it said had been the subject of police reports, in an article prompting multiple complaints | WATCH CCTV
Cullen and ‘Lambo guy’ are surprise new kids on Seven’s Block
Former Today show sports presenter Alex Cullen is in confidential discussions to play a starring role in a new reality series backed by the very billionaire who effectively got him fired from Nine.
Q&A will be a vastly different beast from Monday night.