Sunrise, Today and Wake Up: behind the on-air smiles, it’s war

BEHIND the relaxed facade of breakfast TV, tensions are high. As Lisa Wilkinson attests, it’s no place for the faint-hearted

Today’s Lisa Wilkinson. Photo: Ellis Parrinder

BEHIND the relaxed facade of breakfast TV, tensions are high. As media maven Lisa Wilkinson attests, it’s no place for the faint-hearted...

“When we first met at the Logies, it was love at first sight, I could feel it in my gojis.”

It’s 7.44am and Karl Stefanovic is getting in early for Valentine’s Day, surprising co-host Lisa Wilkinson on air with a specially commissioned love song. An acoustic indie-pop ditty linking warm memories with dubious rhymes bounces along beneath a montage of highlights from their seven years sharing a tasteful cream couch on Nine’s breakfast show Today. A bracing hook line reminds us that Seven’s Larry Emdur famously introduced them while propping up the bar at the 2007 Logies.

“My pretty Mona Lisa, I’m glad Larry let me meet ya.”

An assistant waits in the wings with a tray of green juice. Behind the coiled nests of electrical cords and a monitor sporting a sticky-taped photo of Stefanovic with a blacked-out tooth sits a platter of fruit. (You just know they’re having coffee and muffins over at Sunrise.) On camera, Stefanovic, 39, ribs Wilkinson, 54, about her watermelon-eating technique; she grabs his hand fondly.

“I hate the way you eat a watermelon - yeah!”

Over time, this enduring early-morning union has settled into a couple of well-worn grooves. He’s the larrikin kid brother, dipping metaphorical pigtails in ink, collapsing into uncontrollable giggles at the hint of a double entendre. (He is also, as his predecessor Steve Liebmann notes, “one of the best on-the-spot reporters I have ever seen when a big story breaks”.) She’s a classy, unflappable media maven who has clocked up 33 years as a journalist and indulges Karl’s japes.

It’s a partnership that came so close to stealing the coveted breakfast TV crown from Seven’s Sunrise. But then a former Snowy Mountains farm girl named Samantha Armytage planted her feet beneath the glass-topped desk of the rival program on August 12, 2013 - and detonated a bomb under the shiny, happy surface of Australian morning television.

The battle of the breakfast shows, always intense because of their crucial importance as a “front door” to a network’s overall programming, escalated late last year into a full-scale war. Rumours and counter-rumours followed Armytage’s promotion to Melissa Doyle’s recently vacated seat as Sunrise sailed away from Today once more - just after Today had finally narrowed a decade-long gap. In the midst of it all, Ten, keen for a piece of the action, launched its morning program, Wake Up.

A gleeful media pile-on has since laid bare a world of backroom chicanery across the networks - of ruthless knifings, desperate manoeuvres, clashing egos and unseemly score-settling. Collateral damage so far includes two executive producers, one newly minted on-air host and at least one long-term friendship, as well as the hitherto rock-solid union of those on-air valentines, Karl and Lisa.

Morning television is a particularly personal timeslot and its genial, bantering presenters are like family to the millions who tune in for their daily dose of news and entertainment while shovelling in cereal or ironing a shirt. Their presence should feel as comfortable and unchallenging as a fleece onesie. So what exactly happened to turn breakfast into a battlefield? It all started with that farm girl.

“In commercial TV the aim is to be number one - that’s always the aim,” says Michael Pell, the baby-faced executive producer of Sunrise, whom staff affectionately refer to as Kim Jong Pell. “So you’re constantly having to evolve, to reinvent, do things differently. We’re trying to outdo ourselves all the time.”

In the middle of last year, the evolution of Sunrise took a surprising turn. The decision was made to replace the hugely popular Doyle who had, with co-host David Koch, steered the runaway success of what Pell still refers to as “the daggy little show that could”.

Mel, 44, and Kochie, 57, sat atop the ratings pile for 10 years, and the feel-good Sunrise juggernaut undeniably kick-started the ratings war that eventually saw the Seven network overtake Nine’s long-held market lead. Its chatty, informal approach also rewrote the rule book for delivering news on commercial television, with even prime-time news reporters encouraged to loosen their ties.

But Today was closing the gap, making inroads, particularly, in the big markets of Sydney and Melbourne. Speculation persists that Pell pushed for a change at Sunrise after watching Today whittle his show’s lead all the way down from roughly 203,000 viewers a day in 2006 to just 6000 a day in mid-2013. Today had actually won the month of July and there was a feeling it might stay on that winning trajectory. An insider says the whiz-kid producer Pell was quietly telling friends he wouldn’t have a job by Christmas if the gamble didn’t pay off.

Pell, however, insists it was Doyle’s decision to move on to a “more newsy” role at the network. (She is now reading Seven’s 4pm news and doing on-the-spot reporting from major events, such as Schapelle Corby’s release from jail.)

The woman tapped to fill Doyle’s shoes was the Sunrise team’s self-described “naughty cousin” Samantha Armytage, 36, a long-time friend of Pell’s who had co-hosted Weekend Sunrise with Andrew O’Keefe for six years. Incredibly, from the moment she took over as Kochie’s co-host, ratings soared. “There’s a nice bit of mischief about Sam - that no-nonsense, country-girl approach comes through on air and she’s very likeable,” says veteran news chief Peter Meakin, 72, who’s just started at Ten after celebrated stints at Nine and Seven. “She looks like the sort of girl who’d be fun to spend time with. I must admit Sam is a particular favourite of mine.”

Flirty interviews with Russell Crowe and One Direction’s Harry Styles followed as Armytage’s single status became part of her “brand”. The term Strippergate was coined to describe the commotion that followed an online segment in which she wrapped her leg around a stripper pole. (”It got a bit silly,” Armytage says now.) But the new Sunrise star also had heartland appeal: she frequently referenced her parents, farmers living in Wagga Wagga, and did a number of interviews in which she admitted to struggling with body issues. “Look, Sam is 36, she’s not a supermodel but she’s good-looking, and men think she’s attainable,” is how one industry insider bluntly summed up her appeal.

With Armytage in the chair, Sunrise started beating Today by as many as 50,000 viewers and trounced it on all but three days for the rest of the year. The show even managed to out-rate Today (by 32,000 viewers) when a power outage plunged its set into darkness for an hour on January 31 this year. “People were predicting Armageddon [over Doyle’s departure],” says Pell. “[I felt] a bit of surprise, a touch of relief but [there’s] also a bit of satisfaction that the viewers are responding to what you’ve done. I’d hoped the change would help everyone on Sunrise and on Seven news. I expected that could happen in the first three months; I was surprised it happened so quickly.”

“With Sam, we knew exactly what she’d be like - she’s part of our culture,” says Koch, seated in the modest office he shares with Armytage upstairs from Sunrise’s glass-walled studio in Sydney’s Martin Place. “We have such a strong culture that it spits out people that don’t fit in.”

Armytage seems nonplussed by the fuss her appointment kicked up. “It eternally surprises me how interested people are,” she says, with her signature throaty laugh. “People are always interested in TV but the breakfast genre really seems to have people talking. I guess we are in their lounge rooms for so many hours every morning; they care about, you know, what we do. But there is so much chatter. You have to block it out or it would drive you mad.”

Advertising on the breakfast shows in Australia is worth about $120 million a year, according to media analysts Fusion Strategy and, importantly, the shows jump-start the day and breathe oxygen into the entire network schedule. They also punch above their weight in terms of the unique viewers that make up the cumulative ratings figures. The daily ratings averages sit between 300,000 and 400,000, but up to 2.5 million people a week are actually tuning in at some point, if only for 10 minutes before they rush off to catch the bus.

That’s why the minute-by-minute ratings breakdowns that ping into network executives’ email inboxes every 24 hours are pored over. It’s why Nine boss David Gyngell is understood to have ordered his Today team to keep a lid on things ahead of the company’s $1.9 billion business float in December last year.

But the press kept talking about the “sexy” Armytage replacing “mumsy” Doyle (Pell vehemently denies these words were ever spoken at Seven) and, fairly or unfairly, because breakdowns showed the Sunrise ratings surge was largely in certain male demographics, it was Lisa Wilkinson at Today who felt the pressure. “Seven showed what a change can do - its audience basically went up 10 per cent,” says a Nine source. “Lisa freaked out.”

Rumblings that Wilkinson was already unhappy with the increasingly blokey milieu at Today came to a head in October when she walked off the set mid-show over what she saw as a demeaning aside by Stefanovic. “There are a lot of things at play in making a breakfast TV show work and sometimes those things are going to make the press,” Wilkinson says now, that renowned unflappability to the fore. “Ultimately, for us, what matters is what goes to air.”

Still, the strain on the Today team was starting to show. Soon there were leaks of a shouting match between executive producer Neil Breen, the former Sunday Telegraph editor Gyngell brought aboard in late 2012, and sports presenter Ben Fordham. And Wilkinson was said to be upset that Stefanovic had been handed a series of plum interviews, including one with Tony Abbott.

Nine denied a rift but the negative publicity continued to cast a shadow and Breen fell on his sword, leaving the program last November. “These things are about, in amongst everything, the chemistry of everyone on and off set,” says Wilkinson. “That can be a stable landscape for a long time and then one thing can shift and that can have a domino effect. I think there was an element of that going on at the time.”

And that much-publicised flare-up between her and Karl? “Yes, there was one morning - out of, you know, how many mornings are there that we put a live TV program to air? - that things didn’t quite go the way they could have,” she says. “We are a group of journalists and we have very strong ideas every single morning about the rundown, and what news items are worthy of going at the top of the agenda. The fact that once in seven years Karl and I had a strong disagreement is kind of a badge of honour for us. It’s surprising that we haven’t had more.”

She strenuously denies ongoing speculation that all is not well between her and her long-time co-host. “Because we get on so well and because it’s TV, people figure it must be fake,” she says. “But TV cameras are like microscopes and if we were faking it, people would know. And you’d make yourself sick trying to fake it for 171/2 hours of live TV every week.”

In any case, Wilkinson has entered “that disconcerting place”, as she described it to colleagues at last year’s Andrew Olle Media Lecture, “where you somehow go from reporting the news to being it”.

Intense media scrutiny is hardly surprising, however, when the stars of breakfast TV have become the new national face of the networks. “By and large they are bigger stars than the people who appear on the flagship prime-time programs,” says Meakin. “In the old days you had Jana Wendt and George Negus and Ray Martin and Richard Carleton. They were the big news stars; no one was bigger than them. But if you went out to the street now and asked people to name the [current] 60 Minutes reporters, some people would have a problem.”

While the off-air drama must have been distracting, Wilkinson counters: “You certainly wouldn’t last if you were soft about the hours, the intensity of the experience, the hard work you have to put in and the cohesiveness of the team you have to have around you, the trust you have to have in each other.

“There are lots of things Karl and I don’t agree on - you can see it most mornings - but for the most part we have a very similar sense of what’s newsworthy, we have very similar senses of humour and we just get on,” she adds, noting that she and Stefanovic regularly attend barbecues at each other’s Sydney homes and that Karl and her husband, journalist and author Peter FitzSimons, are fierce tennis opponents.

She says she keeps abreast of ratings figures but doesn’t live by them. “They change around, they move, they swap,” she says. “Yes, we watch to see what the trends are but Karl’s job and my job is to do the best possible hosting job we can. There are plenty of others at the network to worry about the minutiae of the numbers.”

Meakin, however, is not convinced by the rosy picture painted by Nine. “I do detect a certain amount of tension over at Channel Nine at the moment,” says the former head of Nine news and current affairs, who counts both Wilkinson and Stefanovic as friends. “If there are problems between the hosts and it’s detectable on air then that’s a minus for the show. And I notice that Sunrise is doing pretty good business at the moment.

“They are very different personalities, there’s no doubt about that. That’s a good thing more than a bad thing most of the time. But, hey, marriages run on the rocks occasionally - on-air relationships are no different. I imagine it’s possible for them to get back on course.”

Meakin, a rascally pot-stirrer from way back, adds: “The first thing [breakfast hosts] can’t be is boring. If people want to be bored they can watch the ABC - there’s a whole network set aside for them.”

Breen is still with Nine, working as a senior sports journalist. “I had a crack,” he said, upon announcing his departure from the Today role. “If you play the game hard and fast you need to expect a few bruises along the way.”

Sunrise’s Pell says he feels for his former rival. “It’s a tough game and you are talking about people’s livelihoods,” he says. “But it’s like politics - it’s not for the faint-hearted and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t prepared to have a really big fight occasionally.”

Pell’s relationship with Adam Boland, his former mentor and lover, was also a victim of the breakfast TV wars. What could have been a friendly rivalry when Boland (the wunderkind executive producer responsible for the ordinary genius of Sunrise) joined Ten in March last year to launch Wake Up descended into a spat that, at one point, spilled over into the press, with Boland giving a bizarre interview taunting his former protege. “I think it’s safe to say he’s not on my Christmas card list and I’m probably not on his,” Pell says now. “But I wish him all the best.”

Meakin describes Wake Up, currently the third wheel in the commercial TV breakfast landscape, as “not a bad little show”, though he adds: “It would, however, be stupid of me not to say that it’s got to do better.”

Launched on November 4 with the hope of resurrecting the ailing Ten Network’s fortunes by emulating a little of the Sunrise magic, Wake Up debuted with just 52,000 viewers. (The ABC’s Bananas in Pyjamas regularly gets 200,000.) It was a disappointing start for the show Boland had promised would reinvent a breakfast TV landscape he deemed “stale”. He had tweaked, rather than upended, the standard format by installing a triumvirate of hosts - Natarsha Belling, Natasha Exelby and former Australian Idol host James Mathison - and setting up a studio at Sydney’s Manly Beach. (Channel Ten reportedly sank millions into its new breakfast programming onslaught, with expensive cabling running from its Pyrmont headquarters to Manly.)

But by late November, Wake Up’s audience had sunk to 27,000 (about one-fifth the audience of ABC News Breakfast) and Boland jettisoned Exelby, citing poor chemistry with her co-presenters. Two months later, Boland announced he was exiting television altogether after earlier admitting to suffering from depression and bipolar disorder.

Meakin says he would “hope to see some improvement” in Wake Up over the next six months, but he’s adamant the program needs to retain a point of difference. “It has to have its own identity - there’s no future in it being a clone of Today or Sunrise,” he says.

As part of network boss Hamish McLennan’s event-TV strategy, Ten has continued the ratings momentum of the cricket Big Bash League with the Sochi Winter Olympics. “Whenever you get a big event, it’s a chance to capture an audience and the trick is to keep them,” Meakin says. “You only need two or three triumphs and all of a sudden you’re running hot.”

When Lisa Wilkinson stood before a roomful of her peers on October 25 last year to deliver the Andrew Olle Media Lecture, she was poised and elegant in black, a quantum leap fashion-wise from her days as a 21-year-old Dolly editor in a banana-yellow novelty jumper. How she looked, of course, was immaterial - and this was the central tenet of her vivid and somewhat incendiary speech. As the first female journalist invited to give the lecture since Jana Wendt in 1997, Wilkinson used the platform to highlight the sexism and ageism visited upon women in the media. There was no rage. Just a measured chiding of the men and, often, women who try to bring women down - belittle them, shrink them, turn them into vacuous eye candy - by focusing on their appearance.

The breakfast TV wars have thrown into sharp relief the thrust of Wilkinson’s speech. In the cruel world of commercial TV, women are scrutinised more closely, and cycled through more quickly, than the men, who are indulged in the role of “loose cannon”.

The rush to compare and contrast Doyle and her replacement Armytage in terms of age, marital status and sex appeal - some of the online comments were truly vile - shocked many in the industry. “I actually found it offensive on behalf of both women,” says Pell. “They are both exceptional journalists and among the nicest people you will ever meet.”

Armytage says the realities of her job mean she has to take “aesthetics” into consideration but she refuses to worry about the ceaseless commentary lest she “give it too much power”.

“We get a lot more scrutiny is the truth of it, in terms of how we look,” says Wilkinson. “The boys, God love ‘em, can turn up every day in the same suit and no one would notice. [But] I don’t think it’s any different to what happens outside television - women are scrutinised much more closely on how they present themselves to the world. All I can do is hope that I do a good enough job that my work is the important part of what I do.”

Despite the entrenched double standards - and the “blaring foghorn” of a daily 3am alarm - Wilkinson still considers hers the best gig in the country. “As long as I’ve got this job I feel very fortunate to have it,” she says. “On American TV, audiences are demanding maturity and we are seeing that in Australia too. I look around me and see that women 45-plus have some of the major news and current affairs gigs in the country.” She reels off a list that includes Sandra Sully, Liz Hayes, Juanita Phillips, Caroline Jones, Jenny Brockie and Jennifer Byrne. “I feel very privileged to count them as colleagues,” she says. “That is what people want - some life experience brought to news and current affairs and I’m glad I’m around for that.”

The question remains: can Today snatch away the crown that seems welded on to Sunrise? “I think all things are possible,” says Meakin. “If you were to ask Michael Pell that, he’d say absolutely. All right, they might change a compere, they might add someone to the mix, they might give a million dollars away every day. There are so many things they can do - most of them expensive - but there are things they can do to regain the initiative and I wouldn’t underestimate Channel Nine. They don’t like losing.”