Mama Mia

by Mia Freedman

  Lots of people come back from a holiday in Byron Bay with new resolve to change their lives. Often, this includes a plan to move to Byron Bay. And usually, within a week or two, this plan slowly fades into a grey box marked ‘Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time’. Byron time.

  For me, the decision I made up at Byron over my Christmas holidays, while radical, was not fanciful. But it certainly was life changing.

  I knew TV wasn’t my thing. My stress levels were out of control and the medium just didn’t suit me. I wanted out. Jason had been planning to sell his business for some time. He wanted out too.

  So we made the decision to extricate ourselves from our jobs by midyear and go overseas with the kids for a few months. We’d never travelled with them before and we wanted an adventure.

  Full of Byron optimism, at the time I didn’t realise that the following six months would be the most tumultuous and emotional period in my professional life.

  TV: JUST NOT THAT INTO ME

  SMS text to me from Wendy:

  ‘Don’t look at what’s been written in the paper today, my darling. Just don’t. xx.’

  So I had this idea for a show. Actually, that’s a total lie. It wasn’t my idea at all; it was Barbara Walters’ idea. She’s the iconic American broadcaster who first thought of having an unscripted daytime show with a bunch of women talking about life. She cast herself and four others, plonked everyone around a table and launched ‘The View’ in the mid 1990s. The women spoke freely about news, current affairs, pop culture and their personal lives and it was like nothing else on TV at the time.

  It’s sometimes said there are no new ideas in magazines or TV, just recycled ones. If a TV show or a magazine is successful overseas, an Australian version is inevitably launched here. Occasionally, something out-of-the-box comes along, but most of the media we consume is a variation on something that preceded it.

  I was flailing around at Nine in the climate of uncertainty that had settled over the network, as rumours we would be sold appeared true. I didn’t have much to do and I was enormously frustrated.

  So the idea of launching a daytime show like ‘The View’ for an Australian female audience was hugely appealing. First, it would give me a focus for my energy. A specific project to drive. Something to do. Second, I felt passionately that daytime TV wasn’t providing interesting local content to all the women at home with babies and kids, to baby boomers who had retired but who definitely weren’t the bridge-playing knitters of a generation ago, and to part-time workers and students. Why was there nothing on TV during the day that catered to this audience of smart, time-poor women? Something that gave them a quick hit of news, social issues and gossip in an hour every day? Pilots had been made by other networks, including Nine, but none had made it to air. Naïvely, I thought I could be the one to do it. How hard could it be?

  I believed the key to getting this show right was the casting. I wanted women who had lots of complicated notches on their life belts. Women who had lived and loved and suffered and triumphed and would be prepared to be honest about it all on TV. Not because I wanted to make a sensationalist show but because I was sick of the polished images of women in the media and I wanted something more real—something women at home could relate to emotionally.

  Once we’d settled on four hosts—Mary Moody, Lisa Oldfield, Zoë Sheridan and Libbi Gorr—we brought them together for a screen test and they gelled straight away. Once I’d had the cast signed off by my bosses, the next key appointment was the executive producer. This was the day-to-day manager of the show and I knew I needed someone very experienced. At the suggestion of one of my colleagues, we signed up Tara Smithson, who was the most tenacious, hard-working person I’ve ever met and from whom I was to learn so much.

  The next couple of months were a whirlwind of organisation. From set design to staffing the production team, meetings about lighting and PR and marketing and sponsorship and budgets. It was exhilarating to be so busy. I was working closely and intensely with a small team, mostly women and a few men. All of them were passionate and excited about what we were doing.

  I can pinpoint the day the first nail was hammered into the coffin of ‘The Catch-Up’ and it was my fault entirely. It was weeks before the first show even went to air. While we were in development and casting, I’d heard repeated rumours that Seven were planning their own daytime show to rival ‘The Catch-Up’ and I was worried they’d beat us to air, gobbling up scarce ad dollars and forcing us to shelve our plans. Contract negotiations with the hosts were dragging on because it was January and everyone was on holidays.

  I was impatient and anxious, and I wanted to plant our flag in the daytime turf before anyone else did. In hindsight, I’m not sure if this was a legitimate concern, an impulsive response to an imagined threat or just plain ol’ paranoia. Maybe all three.

  The ideal and obvious thing would have been to send out a press release announcing the show with a glossy group shot of the cast. But we were still fine-tuning contracts and the hosts weren’t yet available to be photographed. The media section of The Australian had been keen to do an interview with me when I started at Nine but I’d demurred because I didn’t really have anything to say. Now I did. But I was wary. So I made a request to the journalist who wanted a photo to go with the story. ‘If you need a photo, I don’t want it to be a solo one.’ As an alternative, I suggested a group shot with three of the women who were working with me behind the scenes on the show: the casting director, the ad sales manager and the executive producer.

  ‘Sure,’ she replied.

  I organised for all four of us to get spruced up before the shoot in the hair and make-up department, and when the photographer arrived, he obligingly shot the four of us together. After the others had left, he casually asked, ‘Mia, can I just get one of you by yourself so we have it for the files?’

  This was a tricky question and I wavered. My brain said, ‘Say no. You don’t want them to have any solo shots that they could possibly use for this story.’ But my ego said, ‘Why not? You’ve had your hair and make-up done and you’re wearing a nice frock and the file shots they have of you are crap. Wouldn’t it be nice if they had a decent photo to use for anything they write in the future? Wouldn’t it? Huh? Huh?’

  Ego won. Bloody, bloody ego.

  The day the story was published, I woke at 5.30 am to read it online. At first glance, it seemed okay. It wasn’t a puff piece—there was valid criticism about my having no TV experience and the show sounding like a rip-off of ‘The View’, but I was expecting that. It was true. There was no picture, but often photos weren’t published online.

  I was working from home that day and it was late in the morning by the time I made it to the newsagent. Oh fuck. On the front page of the paper—I hadn’t even got to the media section yet—was a horrible photo of me, taken from below. My arms were crossed in front of me. I was all chins and a terrible ‘power’ pose. What a dumb cliché. I knew it had been a mistake when the photographer had suggested I should fold my arms while he crouched on the floor with his camera pointed up at me. But I was in polite, compliant mode and didn’t want to come across like a diva so I agreed. Fool? That would be me.

  I quickly paid for the paper, dashed to the car and rummaged for the media section inside. Fuck, fuck, fuck. My picture was huge and it took up most of the front page of the section. I was wearing a red dress and was sitting on a chair in an empty TV studio. My legs were crossed and you could see halfway up my skirt. I was smiling widely and looking decidedly horsey, as if my teeth might leap out of my mouth and into the face of the reader at any moment. Hello rising nausea.

  I knew instantly that this was going to be trouble. I was devastated that they hadn’t used the photo of the four of us and not just because I passionately felt those women deserved public recognition. Part of my sick feeling was because I knew there’d be people inside and outside Channel Nine who would be resentful that I was receiving this kind of attention. I was totally unpr
oven in TV, I wasn’t on-air talent and ‘The Catch-Up’ wasn’t even a prime-time show. Why the hell should I be on the front page? And they were right. That would be the first nail then.

  In another body blow to a show that hadn’t even launched yet, it had been decided that the network needed to change the predominantly fifty-plus daytime audience to a younger one. The lowest hanging fruit on the tree was the long-running American soap ‘The Young and the Restless’, whose audience was older—therefore less attractive to advertisers—than any other daytime show on the network. The economic reasons for axing ‘Y&R’ were sound, but the PR consequences were an absolute nightmare.

  The show’s loyal audience, some of whom had been following the soapie for decades, certainly weren’t going to go quietly into the sunset. They were livid.

  They didn’t have to look far for a target for their fury because the show that was replacing ‘Y&R’ was ‘The Catch-Up’. So before it even began there was a large, established group of pissed-off viewers who wanted ‘The Catch-Up’ to die a fast and agonising death as punishment for replacing their beloved soap. Their outrage received mass media coverage.

  For me, the highlight of this pre-launch media attack came when a particularly savage piece ran in the paper. It slammed the idea of the show and criticised me personally. Increasingly touchy and exasperated, I’d been fuming about this story all morning and was returning from the canteen with a sandwich when I found myself face to face in the lift with the journalist who had written it. What are the chances of that? He’d been invited to the station with other TV critics to preview a new program and was no doubt thrilled to be stuck in a confined space with someone he’d dissed in his column.

  It was instantly and horribly awkward but I couldn’t help blurting out, ‘Thanks for your delightful story this morning.’ To which he replied, ‘Well, it’s what I think and it’s all true.’ We ended up in a heated slanging match in the middle of the executive floor, which lasted at least fifteen minutes and only ended because someone from Nine publicity came and discreetly ushered him into the screening room while trying not to glare at me.

  News of our dust-up quickly circulated around the network and the media. Ding-ding! Next round. I was beginning to feel a little punch-drunk, and we hadn’t even gone to air yet.

  The day ‘The Catch-Up’ premiered, I was nervous but exhilarated. I was way out of my depth but in one sense I was back in my element, working with a small group of passionate people striving to produce something we all believed in. It wasn’t unlike magazines but had infinitely more adrenaline and pressure. Oh, and infinitely more people gunning for it to fail.

  Day one’s ratings came in and they were great. One of my colleagues had come up with the idea of launching on Oscars day so we could cross to the red carpet and do the first televised look at the frocks. This worked a treat. The show’s ratings were well above what ‘Y&R’s had been and the demographic was significantly younger.

  The next day, the audience dropped massively and I was gutted. Welcome to the roller coaster, I was told by my empathetic colleagues who rode it regularly. Fasten your seatbelt and grab a vomit bag. You’ll need it.

  It didn’t take long. Within days, I began to absolutely dread 8.30 am. Ratings o’clock. I’d never experienced stress and nervous anticipation like it. The numbers that pinged onto my screen at 8.30 dictated the mood of my day and my view of the show. When the numbers were good, I was happy with what we were doing. When they were bad, I wanted to change everything. ‘Go easy and take some deep breaths,’ I was cautioned by the more experienced executives who knew what they were talking about. ‘The daytime sample is very small—only a couple of thousand people—so you have to expect wild fluctuations. We won’t really know anything for weeks until things settle down and some patterns emerge.’

  This was welcome advice. But still, I began waking at 3 am, obsessing about what the numbers would be. I was chewing my cuticles until they bled. I began to lose weight.

  ‘The Catch-Up’ quickly became a lightning rod for media attention and punched well above its weight in press coverage. It was all overwhelmingly negative. Other Nine executives were as gobsmacked by the avalanche of attention as I was. There was daily coverage in all the major metropolitan papers. Double-page features in the Sunday papers. Endless amounts of talkback-radio snarking.

  This was unheard of for a non-prime-time show and even prime-time shows would struggle to garner as much media attention and hold it for so long. But it wasn’t the kind of attention we wanted. It was all poisonous. The media absolutely hated ‘The Catch-Up’ and were united in their desire to help kick it to death.

  Perhaps it was because the hosts were unlike any other women on TV in their spontaneity and honesty and willingness to expose their flaws and discuss their lives. We’d deliberately chosen candid, interesting and opinionated women with big life experiences and divergent world views. No pre-packaged, glossy sound bites from this lot.

  I’m not sure if it was nerves or naïvety or competitiveness or the kind of TV Tourette syndrome I had once suffered from, but in those first few weeks, the on-screen confessions didn’t stop. Each one was more sensational than the last. Lisa said she’d been a drug addict. Zoë talked about one-night stands. Mary discussed her affairs and mentioned that after her mother died, they’d had her open coffin on the kitchen table. Libbi showed the birth photos from her caesarean. Individually, they were brave, moving moments. Together, it was a little…overwhelming.

  The media could barely keep up with the revelations and neither could viewers. Then, Pauline Hanson released her autobiography in which she claimed she’d had an affair with David Oldfield—before he married Lisa. David denied it live on our show but then went on ‘Today Tonight’ and failed a lie-detector test.

  ‘Shameless publicity stunts,’ sneered many journalists, accusing us of planting these sensational revelations to boost ratings. But in reality, the combination of the show’s unscripted format, the fact we were live and that our hosts were all so fast and open meant that we couldn’t avoid controversy, let alone control it. Stuff just came out. We never knew what they’d say. It was exciting and terrifying. Sitting in the control room as we went to air live without a delay button, there were many, many days when the executive producer and I would look at each other, mouths gaping, after one of the co-hosts revealed something we hadn’t expected. Probably an expression not dissimilar to the one on Steve Liebmann’s face that morning on ‘Today’ when I’d asked him about sperm falling into underpants. Ah, live TV.

  Apart from the surprise revelations, the media was extremely interested in the relationship between the four women. In truth? Sometimes it was rocky. Given that we had deliberately chosen women with vastly different political and social views, you wouldn’t expect it to be a total laugh-riot love-fest and it wasn’t. Did they clash? Sure they did. On air and off air. But we never tried to make any secret of that. They had interesting and articulate debates on the show about everything from abortion to immigration, gun control and politics.

  Ultimately, it was an intense experience and friendships formed, some closer than others.

  Meanwhile, rumours and press reports portrayed the cast as a pack of backstabbing bitches who hated each other. When interviewed about the alleged catfights on the set, I joked, ‘They sometimes disagree but they all love each other and they even play with each other’s hair.’

  When the hell will I learn to play it straight in print interviews? When this comment was printed in the context of a story about the show being a disaster, my throwaway line about hair came across as moronic. Some things just don’t translate and you’d think I’d have learned that by now. But I’m always nervous talking to newspapers because my natural inclination towards humour, irony and piss-taking is a car crash when you read it in black and white

  We all had a lot of laughs together, but with all the negative coverage, it was proving very difficult to shake the stench of failure. Even though the
ratings were still up and down, it was painfully clear that the show hadn’t been an instant hit. Everyone’s morale was starting to lurch, including mine. One day I remember picking up a newspaper to read that since my embarrassing quote about the hosts of ‘The Catch-Up’ playing with each other’s hair had been published, I’d been ‘gagged’ from speaking to the press. That day was perhaps my skin’s thinnest moment. I fled my fishbowl office and went into the bathroom to cry, wondering for the hundredth time if I’d truly fucked my career by moving to TV. One good thing about working in a male-dominated environment? There’s nobody to hear you cry in the female toilets.

  I became a bit paralysed at this point. I wanted desperately to turn things around and salvage the show but I didn’t know what exactly to do. Repeatedly, I asked for advice. Repeatedly, I was told the show was okay, and that sometimes there’s just no explanation for why something isn’t kicking. Ratings in Melbourne and Sydney were passable, but in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane they were dire.

  I’d decided I wanted to leave Nine well before ‘The Catch-Up’ started, but I’d been determined to launch the show and stabilise it first. Now the day-to-day running of the show was in the skilled hands of the production team, and apart from providing moral support and leadership, I just didn’t know what else to do.

  Quietly, behind the scenes, I began to talk to management about my exit.

  Since nothing about Channel Nine at that time was ever quiet, rumours of my resignation quickly began appearing in the papers. I stayed silent.

  As ‘The Catch-Up’ prepared to celebrate one hundred episodes, a timeslot change a few weeks earlier was showing encouraging signs of building the audience. In the coveted twenty-five to fifty-four-year-old demographic, the show was beginning to regularly win its timeslot in several cities. Its future was far from guaranteed and sponsors were shaky but things looked tentatively hopeful.