Thorny issues for Backyard baron

A special investigation by The Australian back in 2004 revealed how lawyers and confidentiality agreements were used to keep Don Burke’s critics quiet.

Don Burke in China for a Burke's Backyard in 2004. Photo: Supplied

In 2004, the late Elisabeth Wynhausen and Vanessa Walker spent several weeks investigating what they described as “some of the colourful claims, rumours and innuendos about one of television’s most talked about characters”, Don Burke.

The late Elisabeth Wynhausen and Vanessa Walker.

In a feature story published in The Australian on April 15, 2004 — one for which Burke himself refused to be interviewed — Wynhausen and Walker revealed how confidentiality agreements and legal letters were used to stop people speaking out against the television personality. This is the feature story as it was published in 2004 — just months before Burke’s Backyard was axed.

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Ask the Nine Network why Burke’s Backyard didn’t resume straight after the summer recess this year and the network’s publicity people will tell you, with an exasperated sigh, that there is no reason. It’s just the fluidity of programming.

But in what some believe is a typical outburst, Backyard creator Don Burke last week lashed out at Nine, telling Melbourne’s Herald Sun that they seem to like the show best ... without him.

Burke told the newspaper he could picture the network laying it straight on him. “Well, we’ve just discovered what we like most about you Don — your absence.”

He also accused Nine of pulling the show unexpectedly off air in November last year without consulting him.

In short, he suspected Nine’s affair with Burke’s Backyard was going stale.

Despite the one-sided public tussle, Nine this week dutifully announced Burke’s Backyard would be back on air on April 23, with a couple of minor tweaks to its format. It says it’s business as usual.

That leaves two questions: what is it with Don Burke and what will become of his show?

In a long-running examination of his career, Media has investigated some of the colourful claims, rumours and innuendos about one of television’s most talked about characters. Despite being aware of Media’s interest, Burke has declined to be interviewed for this article.

On Channel Nine since 1987, Backyard ratcheted up ratings after an assistant in the programming department suggested switching it from Saturday noon to Friday night prime-time. The result was television legend.

Compulsive Viewing, Gerald Stone’s book about the glory days at the Nine Network, reports that the show promptly doubled its ratings. It stayed near the top for 10 years, a feat rivalled by only a handful of shows such as Bandstand and 60 Minutes.

In its heyday Backyard had more than 1.6 million viewers. But before it went off air last November, it was down to 1.145 million — just over the 1 million viewers said to make or break a show.

By then it was lagging far behind some of the lifestyle shows its success had helped generate, such as Nine’s Getaway and Backyard Blitz, a spin-off from Burke’s Backyard.

Produced by Burke’s CTC Productions from an idea from Nine, Backyard Blitz has propelled host Jamie Durie to stardom. But while the network celebrated, Burke was said to seethe.

Jamie Durie, Don Burke and Deborah Hutton as co-hosts of Renovation Rescue back in 2003. Photo: Supplied

“Burke is jealous of Jamie Durie,” says a former senior Nine executive.

In 2003, Backyard came back after the summer break in a format some said had been souped-up but dumbed-down, with a cast of presenters too busy interacting with each other to explain how to DO things. It looked as if the info had been leached from the infotainment.

But information had given the old show its substance. What other television presenter not only remembered the names of thousands of plants (“10,000”, says a former member of the crew) but could reel them off as required, looking more natural than it seemed possible to look on camera, all in a single take?

“When it comes to presenting on air, he’s the consummate professional. If you have six standups you’ll be in and out in 25 minutes,” says a former producer.

David Lyle, the show’s first executive producer, is now a US-based independent producer. “Don Burke is one of the most gifted television presenters it’s ever been my misfortune to work with,” Lyle said last year from his home in Los Angeles.

“The cornerstone of his success was that [he understood] gardening was not about old people talking about roses with Latin names but young people ‘backyarding’. He demystified it — and pitched to the people who were spending more.” If Burke promoted Indian hawthorn or Coprosma on a Friday night, nurseries would sell out on Saturday.

No one questions Burke’s prodigious talent as a presenter. Yet three days after this newspaper first began researching a profile on Burke, in late 2002, and asked former employees about him, his lawyers fired off the first of a barrage of letters in an attempt to stop inquiries.

For a celebrity long in the public eye Burke seems nervous of untrammelled publicity. Can it be because he provokes strong reactions from many of the people he has worked with?

“Don Burke is a man it is very easy to dislike,” says the former senior Nine executive. The same man has told others there are two people he would never poach from Nine for varying reasons — Burke and Ray Martin.

The Backyard Blitz team, (from left) Scott Cam, Jody Rigby, Don Burke, Nigel Ruck and Jamie Durie, in 2004. Photo: Getty Images

In Compulsive Viewing, Stone suggests that the star system at Nine indulged celebrities whose egos “grew in inverse proportion to their shrinking self-esteem”. But even by these standards, Burke appears to be in a league of his own.

Says another former Nine executive who does not wish to be named: “He was too difficult to handle at the network. When he proposed having his own production company, it was a relief to Nine.”

One former colleague says Burke liked to claim his tough negotiating style had contributed to Nine proprietor Kerry Packer’s heart attack. In reality he seems driven by a compulsion to best almost everyone, even the members of the Jack Russell terrier club who turned up at Fagan Park in the outlying suburb of Galston, Sydney, with their dogs and children one morning to be filmed for the Road Test spot on Backyard.

Hostilities broke out when the owners refused to provoke the dogfight Burke wanted to film — to prove his point that the breed is aggressive. Burke, who bred prize-winning budgerigars as a boy, dismissed their arguments, saying he was a “geneticist”.

“I said I thought he was a horticulturalist,” says club member Sandra Ferris. “He said we were the most ignorant people he had ever met.”

In another fight with pet lovers, Burke took the Royal NSW Canine Council to court in a failed attempt to uncover details of a supposed smear campaign against him. He seems to alienate many people, says Ferris. “I feel a bit sorry for him. Only a mother could love the poor fellow.”

Don Burke back in 2004.

On one level Burke has been fabulously successful. He has a large home in Sydney and a 10ha horse stud at Freeman’s Reach, near Windsor, NSW. Last year his company, Binnowee Investments, bought a building in Chatswood for close to $4 million for CTC Productions. He has a 50 per cent stake in the gardening magazine spun out of Backyard and another half share in Blitz.

Burke first made his mark with a gardening column in the afternoon tabloid the Daily Mirror, a gardening show on radio and a gardening spot on the Today Show.

Even in the early days of Backyard he was said to have inspired fear and loathing. “Stories abound about how difficult he can be to work for,” says Pam Hose, a former Nine publicist, “but he doesn’t expect more of others than he gives himself, which is 100 per cent all the time.”

But the turnover of staff at Backyard remained unusually high. “He’ll tell editors how to edit, shooters how to shoot. Don doesn’t have opinions, he has right points of view,” says Lyle. “He has no gratitude or loyalty. He would be turning on people from seven in the morning until 11 at night.”

Many of the producers and researchers who came and went from the program signed confidentiality agreements on the way in — or out.

While some people react negatively to him, Don Burke inspires a kind of loyalty in others. At 56, he is still married to Marea, the childhood sweetheart he met at a Catholic youth group. Marea is very much involved in the running of the company and is said to organise most aspects of Burke’s life, even numbering the clothes he will wear each day when he is on the road filming.

“A day with Don would start at six in the morning,” says a former member of the crew. “By the end of the day you’ve worked 10 hours. You want to get away from him but you can’t — he can’t go out alone. He needs the crew around him.”

Yet Burke seems strangely isolated. Despite his uncanny ability to connect with people through the medium of television, away from the small screen it seems he is completely cut off from the common run of humanity — a fact he has commented on in his inimitable way suggesting that the world is somehow out of step, not him.

While other lifestyle shows top the ratings, Burke’s ratings are in decline and his viewers, like him, are ageing. “Maybe Burke’s Backyard is approaching its use-by date,” he told the Herald Sun.

But part of his unusual talent is the ability to impose his vision on the world and he may once again bend reality to his will.