Gold Logie winner Larry Emdur: ‘I could have walked away from it’
Logie winner Larry Emdur may be Seven’s golden boy but there have been times in the past 40 years on TV he’s doubted everything. Today he feels lucky — he just wishes he felt that 30 years ago.
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There were times when Larry Emdur didn’t know if a life in television would pay off.
But after 40 years of jazz hands and smiling on our screens, he wakes up smiling now too. Because the two shiny Logies he’s got on his kitchen table – not forever, just for now, he laughs – are proof of that. Life is good.
Because he’s spent three of the past four decades married to the love of his life, Sylvie – one of the reasons he was able to navigate and survive the often brutal media landscape at all.
Two healthy, happy kids.
One very cute and often obedient family dog. A 60th birthday in the pipeline.
Seven’s golden boy is pretty golden – he just wished he felt like this 30 years ago.
“I got up the other morning and there’s two Logies sitting on a kitchen table and I look at this figure and go – firstly, I’m 60 years old – I started when I was a kid, so how did I become the oldest guy in the network? How did that happen? And then, how is this happening to me now?” he says.
“And I feel incredibly lucky, I really do.
“It would have been nice to feel this way at 30 or 40, when I was feeling very unbalanced and very unsure and couldn’t see three months ahead or six months ahead, drowning in mortgage and all that sort of stuff.
“It’s a funny time in life to hit this feeling – maybe it’s all those years of resilience paying off, I suppose, but it would have been a nice feeling to have when the kids were at school or when I had a mortgage – it was all different then, that’s for sure.”
He’s speaking from the family’s Sydney home, three weeks post Gold Logie buzz.
He’s gearing up to film The Chase – his 500th episode – but today, he’s had a nice lunch and he and Sylvie are about to take their dog for a walk along the beach.
Their “non TV life” is something they hold sacred.
And it’s his family – and particularly Sylvie, who is inherently private – whom he credits for lasting 40 years in an industry he could easily have walked away from in the tougher moments.
Because across those four decades, despite his current golden glow, he’s had his fair share of hard times.
“If I forgot everything else on Logies night, and all that happened was that I thanked my wife for her support and getting me through all of this stuff – that would have been enough,” he says.
“Because there are plenty of times where they’ve been uncomfortable times in the business – and I’m lucky to have had some great times, but I’ve had some horrible times – and if it wasn’t for the strength of my family and the love of my family, personally, I would have just walked away from the business – easily – and gone and lived up the North Coast and worked in a pub.
“They’ve definitely been my complete support – emotional and physical and everything – and that’s Sylvie on one hand, but then my kids on the other. And my wider family – my mum and my sisters – everyone’s had a piece of this pie.
“It’s easy to support someone when everything’s great, and then it’s a whole different story when everything’s not great.’’
Emdur considers himself lucky he didn’t walk away. Because who could have known the best was yet to come.
“It’s actually extraordinary – I’ve been in the business for so long, and I’ve never felt so much love,” he continues.
“I’m waking up with this smile on my face. It’s really bizarre, but I feel really content. I feel like it’s all paid off.
“It’s clearly a time in my life where I’m sort of winding down, I suppose – I’m nearly 60, so to hit this, at this time in my life, is a real bonus.
“And if it was all to finish up tomorrow, I’d be totally fine with that, because it’s just a really nice bookend to a long and happy career. I just feel really lucky to have been doing something that I love for so long and accumulated so many good friends and great relationships.
“I feel very lucky that I found this thing and this place and these people in this tribe – I just feel happy.’’
The Morning Show co-host and host of The Chase Australia burst on to our screens for beloved game show The Price is Right from 1993 to 1998, and again from 2003-2005 when
it was on Nine. It then went to Seven in 2012, and despite the love for the show, even today, it was cancelled the same year.
Then there were a handful of stints on famed Hey Hey it’s Saturday, as well as Cash Bonanza and Wheel of Fortune.
So how did the game show king feel about always being “on” and happy?
“I’m lucky because I’ve been on vehicles that require that frame of mind and that posturing – I’ve never had to manufacture that,” he explains.
“Being on The Price is Right, you just had to be happy – and it was a very happy place.
“It was an upbeat and lively and exciting place, and I probably never experienced that again.
“That was a one-off event in my life – it was a very fun, positive, exciting, exhilarating place to be, as crazy and as silly as it was.
“So I’ve been lucky that most of my career all I’ve ever had to do is, firstly, be me, but secondly, be a reasonable human being and be happy.
“The Morning Show is great – we do some heavy news days for sure – but a lot of it is just fun and light and bright, and Kylie and I just having a coffee on the couch like a couple of good mates, and I love that.”
So do the Logies on the kitchen table make him feel invincible?
“I don’t think so,” he admits.
“I think, historically, there’s plenty of evidence that the Logies are actually the nail in your career coffin – people have crashed and burned after the Logies. But all said and done, I’ve always understood that. Always.
“And I’ve always said to Sylvie, every single- year contract I’ve signed – the first contract for The Morning Show was, I think, six months – so I came home to Sylvie and said, ‘I’ve got a job for six months now.’ That was 17 years ago.
“But I think that’s helped me with stability in my career, because I’ve understood that that’s the reality of the business.
“But no, I don’t think the Logie has made me any more valuable or any more money or any more popular or anything like that – but it’s a lovely thing to have on the shelf of the nursing home.”
And he won’t forget it in a hurry. Fulfilling a promise he made publicly, he had his backside tattooed live on The Morning Show featuring the Logie statue with the initials of the other Gold contenders.
After our chat he and Sylvie will walk the dog, then he’ll get busy with The Chase – and that means being in the studio until 7pm most nights.
“So I’ll get home and I’m bashed – so Sylvie gets that side – where everyone else gets the jazz hands, happy, smiley, Larry – I get home after those Chase records, and I curl up on the couch in the foetal position, and I can’t talk – so Sylvie gets that Larry, but I think she loves him still.”
And even The Chase is reaching new heights – a mega money spinner will premiere next week, when contestants could potentially win an extra $100,000. And he’s excited.
“Well, I love this,” he says of the show’s newest feature – just what cash-strapped, game show-loving Aussies need right now.
“It’s a second chance.
“I think it’s the biggest thing that ever happened to The Chase, and it’s exciting for me, because there’s a very big difference between a quiz show and a game show.
“And game shows I’ve loved forever.’’
Much like the shiny new money spinner, he’s “totally spinning around”, he admits of his own second wind. “I really am,” he says.
“I don’t want to do that ‘hashtag blessed’ thing – but I just feel really lucky, and I feel really humbled by the attention.
“I’m in love with my wife and my family – and I blurt all this stuff out, and I hear myself say it and I go, ‘That just sounds so cliche’ – and I know it’s not everyone’s story.
“But it’s a great year. It’s been a fantastic year, full of love and business success, and the Logie topped everything off.
“We’ve got our 30th wedding anniversary coming up and that’ll mean more to me than anything, and then I turn 60, and that’s something I never saw coming. I’ve denied that coming for about 55 years,” he laughs.
Emdur says he feels great about the impending – and often daunting – milestone.
“Work life couldn’t be better,’’ he says.
“Family life couldn’t be better. What else do I need? I’ve got plenty of mates who are just looking at that calendar for retirement age, and hated their jobs from day one, or plenty of mates are divorced, and we’ve seen families split up and kids not talking to their parents – there’s lots of this stuff going on.
“I just feel outrageously (lucky) … I feel like I’m gonna wake one day and it’s all gonna change, but so I just need to enjoy it for now.”
Enjoy it he is. He lives not far from where he grew up in Bondi, and his two sisters and mum remain close. Another piece of their “non TV” life is a holiday house they escape to on the Hawkesbury River. He’s even started a booming whisky business, The Ben Buckler.
“We’ve just built a lovely little shack up the river, and that’s our thing now – that was a project for Sylvie for a couple of years, and she’s done a beautiful job there,” he says.
“And we go there and we potter, and Sylvie does some garden stuff and I do some chores around the house.
“Last week we were chopping firewood.
“That’s our ‘not TV’ life.
“And we travel as much as we can, and we’ll do more and more of that the less busy I become – although each time I say that, I just become busier and busier – but that’s us. We lead a really happy, comfortable life.
“In recent years, I have thought about: what does my retirement look like? Because I’m getting to that age, and what do Sylvie and I do now for the next 20, 30 years of our life – and I’ve been thinking all that stuff, and then all of a sudden, all these good things happen and you go, I’m surprisingly at this phase in my life.
“And really surprisingly, because I would never have banked on having two great shows and having a successful whiskey business and all this sort of stuff that’s jumped out at me this year.
“I never thought that’s what my 60th year was going to look like. Ever.
“I would have thought we’re retired, living up the coast and working on a motorbike in the garage – I would never have thought two great shows, and the whiskey thing’s just starting, and that’s exploding, and I did not see that coming.
“So it’s going to be a really interesting last chapter of my life – and I wasn’t ready for that.
“You can never plan for this stuff in TV, that’s what I learned early.
“I was never in a position to say, ‘Well, I have five more good years then I’ll find another show to do’ … that’s never your choice in television.
“So I feel extra lucky that all these stars have aligned as the last chapter in the book.”
So did his Logie winning luck start young?
“No,” he laughs.
“The only thing I’ve won was the Rose Bay Public School under-five marching competition, and that was 55 years ago.
“The next thing I won was a Logie – so that was a long break,” he laughs.
He dismisses recent reports that a stalker had him “living in fear”, and acknowledges there was an incident, which was handled properly and is not an issue.
“I am living – nothing is taking away from this,” he says. “We are living our best life at the moment. It’s the best time. I don’t feel threatened at all. There was an incident and that’s been looked after. No one was anywhere near me, the police have taken action, I’m not involved, and I feel totally and completely safe.”
So – apart from turning the big 6-0 in December, what’s next?
“The kids are grown up so when I’m not working anymore, we’ll happily go and live overseas and we’ll have our gap year,” Emdur says.
“Sylvie’s got a Pinterest board about 50 megabytes big of places we’re going to go.
“We’ll live overseas for a while.
“But that’s got to be when I’m not working, and I can’t see when that is at the moment – which is a good thing,” he laughs.
“But for the time being, it’s been such an interesting career with so many ups and downs, and I guess at the moment when everything’s going great, I don’t feel at all compelled to walk away from that.
“But when that time comes, we’ve got a comprehensive plan to be on a plane about three days later and not be seen again for a long time.
“I can’t see myself slowing down,” he says.
“I did ask Kochie (David Koch) after he announced (his retirement), I said, ‘Mate, you’re number one there, how did you know?’ – because in our business, this egomaniacal proven business, it’s like, how do you know when to walk away, particularly when you’re on top?
“And he just looked at me with his wise eyes, and he went: ‘you’ll know’.
“So I guess I’ll know.
“But I have no plans to go.
“Whether the network has other plans, but when it happens, we’ll be packing up quick smart, and we’ll be out of here.”
The Chase Australia: Mega Money Spinner premieres on Monday at 5pm on Channel 7 and 7plus
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Originally published as Gold Logie winner Larry Emdur: ‘I could have walked away from it’
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