Sweet Surrender by Mary Moody Page B

the show was always the content. I knew it was necessary to keep it broad and entertaining, but to me the topics we discussed were invariably too frivolous, too lightweight. I had plenty of opportunity to voice my opinion in the production meetings that preceded the show. Every morning we met with the creative crew to toss around ideas for that day’s show. One of the problems was that the other girls, who all had quite long distances to drive, were sometimes late arriving to this meeting. We only had an hour to thrash around ideas and then we had to head to the dressing room for hair and make-up. Every day, it seemed, we had less and lesstime to make intelligent decisions about what issues we would deal with on the show.
    From my perspective, there was definitely a dumbing-down factor. At first I had been told that we were aiming for an audience of intelligent career-minded women who were at home with young children, but I quickly realised we were aiming for the sort of audience who watch Dr Phil or American soaps. It was disappointing.
    We were given a variety of guests to interview, as well as guest panellists who would join us for most of the show and also be involved in interviewing the other guests. We had Julia Gillard (we talked mostly about her hair and her boyfriend), Amanda Vanstone (we talked about her dinner parties) and Kathy Lette (we gave her new book a big plug). Nine wanted men on the panel from time to time, so we had Sam Newman from
The Footy Show
(I found him a very strange character) and Andrew Bolt, a right-wing newspaper columnist from Melbourne who didn’t really know how to handle four prattling women. If they were the best ‘blokes’ in all Australia that we could entice onto the show, it raised some real questions.
    Mia wanted controversy and Lisa did her best to create it. Pauline Hanson released a book in which she claimed she’d had an affair with David Oldfield. The minute the story hit the papers he was invited onto the show to give an emphatic denial – it was squirmingly embarrassing to see him being interviewed by a panel of women which included his wife, and Libbi’s body language made it patently obvious she did not endorse the decision to bring him onto the show.
    The desire to make ‘news’ led our inexperienced team down treacherous paths. We were given the gangland queen Judy Moran as a guest, but were not advised to avoid certain subjects because of a big court case running in Melbourne. She was a spine-chillingly scary woman – cold and intimidating – and I really would have been happy to sit out that particular interview. Not surprisingly, she made actionable statements – we were foolishly unaware. When it became apparent thenext morning that the Nine Network was now in serious trouble with the Victorian judicial system, we were given an in-depth briefing by the station’s lawyers. It was like closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.
    A few weeks after we first went to air, it was decided that having all of us interviewing one guest at a time wasn’t working very well. Our interviewing styles were vastly different, and I often felt I was struggling to get a question in. I think we all felt the same way at various times.
    It was agreed we would put our hands up for those interviews that most interested us and that we would be split into pairs according to these preferences. Generally Libbi and I teamed up, as did Zoe and Lisa. This was a much better system from my perspective. Some of the guests we were given were absurd. There was a ‘baby whisperer’ who charged anxious parents a small fortune to stay overnight and teach their babies to sleep (it used to be called mothercraft). There were the identical twin sisters who talked in unison, answering each question in perfect synchronisation. There were various clairvoyants and psychics who were going to ‘pick up on’ various aspects of our