Sweet Surrender (9 page)

Another of our guest presenters had a problem with the bottle. Again I could smell it in the dressing room, and the second day she came on with us she appeared totally smashed. That said, she was hilariously funny and I don't think the audience would have been any the wiser.

I also had a bodice-ripping moment. Minutes before we were due on air the zip on the glamorous dress I was wearing broke (the dress was far too small). Our delightful assistant wardrobe manager, John, tried to repair it, tried to pin it, and then tried to get the dress over my head, but it was just too tight. The only way he could remove it so I could leap into the ‘standby' outfit was to physically tear the dress from my body. I was literally running down the corridor to the studio; getting dressed as I went.

It really helped being able to see the funny side of the circumstances we found ourselves in and to laugh at the absurdity of the whole situation. We were all trapped by the lure of a success and even though the odds were probably always stacked against us, we were giving it our best shot and giggling a lot along the way.

After each show there was a debrief, and a planning session for the next day. Afterwards I would pick up my research materials and stagger back to my small apartment in Milsons Point to collapse in an exhausted heap. Before the show actually started, I had had visions of spending lots of time socialising with my Sydney-based friends and relatives and going to movies or live shows, but the job was just too draining and there was also a lot of reading and research to do every day for forthcoming episodes. In truth, living in a small apartment in the city was a rather lonely and depressing existence. I was inclined to fall into a chair and look at the previous day's episode to try to get a perspective about how the show was going (I often cringed at the clumsiness of some of the interviews). With no one to come home and talk to in the evenings, I drank too much wine in an attempt to unwind.

One night, however, Libbi asked me to her place for dinner, to meet her partner Stewart and their little boy. I was tired, but thought it was probably a good idea if we spent some downtime together. It was a lovely relaxing evening which revealed a side of Libbi I hadn't seen before. At work she was focused and driven, trying to pull the show
together. Often she appeared embattled. At home with her family the softer side of Libbi was apparent, and it made me realise how great the burden of surviving in the world of television can be. At that point I decided that I really liked and respected Libbi and that, if nothing else, we could support each other through the difficult times ahead.

Amid all the pressure of putting the show together every day we limped along, week after week, with bad reviews and negative publicity, including personally targeted gossip which destabilised the team. I was always amazed when we turned up Monday morning and still had a show to do. Then the writing began to appear on the wall. The first hint was when the WIN Network that covers dozens of regional stations around the country dropped the show. It represented a huge percentage of our audience. We weren't advised that this was going to happen – the first we knew of it was when David, at home at the farm, turned the TV on to watch the show and discovered it was no longer running on our local station.

Next, Eddie McGuire stood down as CEO. He was our champion and, more importantly, Mia Freedman's biggest supporter – he had helped her to make the huge career leap from being an high flyer in the world of women's magazines to becoming a television executive, a leap that must have infuriated a lot of people who had worked in television for decades. She was a newcomer with a prominent media profile and a lot of power, and that didn't sit well with everyone. For the first few months Mia was with us all the way – she was at every early-morning production meeting and every pre-show production meeting, and always hanging around the control room, and then afterwards in our dressing room to encourage us or just debrief. Suddenly we stopped seeing her around. It was as though she had vanished somewhere on the third floor.

The final nail in the coffin, from my perspective, was the Logies. There was a lot of hype at the station about the annual TV awards ceremony. Our red carpet frocks were chosen with great fanfare –
indeed we were given three choices and the audience were asked to vote for their favourite. The awards would be held in Melbourne on a Sunday night. Zoe and I flew down on Friday afternoon after the show – a big mistake. We went partying with a bunch of her delightful, zany friends, and I ended up at six in the morning in a nightclub somewhere, wondering what on earth I was doing. A little too much excitement.

Lisa arrived in time for lunch with us on Saturday. I only lasted an hour in the restaurant, then staggered back to bed for the afternoon, realising that if I didn't pace myself I would be exhausted by the time the Logies came around the following night. That evening I found Lisa and Zoe wandering very much the worse for wear around the lobby of our hotel. I was worried that the place was swarming with photographers and managed to entice them up to one of our rooms to order some food, hoping it would settle things down. Lisa stopped off in her own room, then suddenly appeared wandering down the corridor wearing a very revealing nightdress. I could tell that we were heading for another wild night. I opted out early, hoping like mad they would be sensible and get some sleep.

Libbi arrived on the Sunday morning to total chaos. She went looking for Lisa and found her in a distressed state; it seemed that Lisa had been violently ill all over her hotel room. Nobody really knew where Zoe was. We had been asked to present ourselves for hair, make-up and wardrobe by 11.30 am. This was when I realised that our hotel was across the road from the main venue for all the action, Crown Casino, which was perhaps the most telling clue of all. We were expected to wander back and forth across the road to get prepared for our red-carpet walk at 5.30 pm. All the other on-camera personalities were staying in glamorous suites in the main hotel at Crown. At one point, mid-afternoon, Libbi and I found ourselves in a situation where we were obliged to cross the street past thousands of television fans who were lining up to watch the spectacle, wearing our old jeans and with our hair in rollers. It took a lot of the glitz and glamour away from the
day and made it obvious to me that we were not really high priority Channel 9 personalities, just minor celebrities a long way down the totem pole.

Somehow Lisa and Zoe scrubbed up for the night. But while they were interviewing various celebrities on the red carpet, Libbi and I managed to get totally lost within the bowels of the hotel. At one point we elbowed our way through a throng of fans and ducked under the gold ropes, only to be coolly ejected from the event by a security guard.

I found the Logies ceremony boring in the extreme, and ducked out during one of the commercial breaks and simply went to bed. I didn't make it to the after party. Early next morning none of my co-presenters appeared in the hotel foyer when the taxis arrived to take us to the airport. We had to be back in Sydney by nine that morning to prepare for our show at midday. I made panicky phone calls to the production office and asked various people at the hotel to bang on doors to get the girls moving. At the airport I sat alone, despondently wondering what on earth I would do if they didn't show up. How could we do a show? Suddenly Lisa appeared in a Russian-style black fur coat and Cossack hat, looking for all the world like Cruella de Vil from
101 Dalmatians
, and wearing an expression like a stunned mullet. Then Libbi turned up, dressed in a flimsy sun frock and minus her shoes. With all the back and forth between hotels the day before, somehow most of her clothes and accessories had gone astray. She only had her glamorous Logies gown (red and strapless and not suitable for a 7 am flight) and this little dress.

Zoe didn't make the plane. She was eventually shaken awake by hotel security and caught a later plane that had her at Channel 9's Artarmon studios just in time for a dash of make-up. What a motley crew we looked. If the network's executives had been harbouring any doubts about dropping the axe on our show, I think that day's performance destroyed any compassion they may have felt for us.

When the axe fell, it fell quickly. Mia and Tara hadn't attended the Logie awards. They made excuses, but it was obvious to me that something was going on behind the scenes. Several weeks later in early June, while we were waiting to do our live cross to Pete Timms in the middle of a show, he suddenly spoke into our hidden earpieces.

‘What's happened to Mia?' he asked.

Libbi and I exchanged glances. Before we could ask him what he meant, we realised all our microphones had been switched off by someone in the studio control room so that he could no longer hear us and we could not answer him.

‘Something funny is going on,' Libbi whispered to me and then, suddenly, we were back on air.

At the end of the show we were asked to go directly to the production office. Mia was there, along with several network heavies. She announced her resignation to the assembled production staff, and we were then told by one of the executives that Friday's show would be our last. People were crying – it was a very emotional scene. All of us knew, from the production assistants to the studio director, that the
ratings had been falling and the show was struggling to keep its head above water. But we had always been promised that we would be given until the end of the year, regardless of ratings, to get established and find a loyal audience. I knew this was the standard line taken by TV networks dealing with struggling new programs, but many of the others seemed to have taken these promises as gospel.

While the rest of the team appeared distraught, I felt a huge surge of relief. All the tension and pressure I had been carrying around for months slipped away. I realised that the show had completely consumed my life. I had been living and breathing the crazy, phoney world of daytime television for the last five months, but now I was finally free.

I felt desperately sorry for Mia and Tara, who had put their hearts and souls into this show. I was also devastated for our team of young producers, who had worked ridiculously long hours to keep the show bubbling along. Five hours of live television a week takes a tremendous amount of effort behind the scenes, and they had worked themselves half to death because of their commitment to us and to the program. Most of them would now be unemployed.

Sadly and unfairly, the media laid most of the blame for the show's failure squarely at Mia Freedman's feet. The newspaper columnist Sandra Lee wrote:
Freedman missed what the audience intrinsically knew: there was no chemistry no matter how much the women said they liked each other
.

I couldn't help but think that perhaps it was my fault because I hadn't believed in The Secret!

Lisa, whose name was also often mentioned during that week by television columnists writing about what went wrong, decided to take the blame publicly.

‘My only regret is that I dragged down three brilliant performers,' she said. ‘I know I'm crap. I'm sorry that I brought this upon them.'

Some saw it as a shameless strategy to get her photograph in the newspaper yet again, but I couldn't help but feel she genuinely blamed
herself to some extent. She lacked confidence and took feedback from viewers and media very much to heart. During the run of the show she would dash back to the dressing room and immediately fire up her laptop computer, logging on to
The Catch-Up
website to read the blogs from irate viewers. She would read out loud the negative ones about herself and, despite her bravado, I could tell she was badly hurt by some of the more cutting remarks. You have to be very thick-skinned to cope with the deeply unpleasant comments made by some members of the audience. My way of dealing with the criticism was to avoid looking at the TV pages of newspapers and magazines, and I didn't read the website. I was happy to remain blissfully ignorant.

In many ways, the casting of Lisa had been a risky decision. Although her emotional sensitivity didn't surface immediately, she was more or less ‘set up' as the conservative voice, and the fact that Libbi and I were often strongly opposed to her views meant that for the entire run of the show she must have felt pitted against us. It was a bit like leading a lamb to the slaughter!

In my view there were many, many factors stacked against the show's success. Mia was inexperienced in television and had to struggle against the internal politics within the Nine Network. It's almost impossible to make a program unless there's great support at the executive level. From a production perspective I don't think there was ever a clear view of how the show would work. It was like an evolving experiment from day one, with continual changes that must have confused our audience. Our time slot changed from 1 pm to midday, our seating positions on the panel changed, and we were asked to alter our debating styles. At first, we were directed to remain friendly at all times, but by the end the producers were devising a segment to be called The Bear Pit, which was intended as a free-for-all. They wanted more controversy and believed that if we had more heated debates we would attract media attention, as
The View
had done in the US. If the show had kept going I am sure it would have developed into a daily public slanging match with Libbi
and me on one side, and Lisa on the other – so much for the original concept of ‘agreeing to disagree'.

I have not kept in contact with Lisa. But several weeks after the show folded, I called her on her mobile phone and she told me she'd been very unwell. To me, the fact that she became ill so soon after the show was axed was telling. Like all of us, she must certainly have felt the strain.

I've seen Zoe a couple of times since the show and we phone or text each other just to keep in touch. She has continued doing voiceover work for television and radio commercials, but at the time of writing was still looking for another permanent job. Financially, it's been quite a struggle for her to keep going. Libbi and I established a strong friendship and went on to work together presenting a summer radio show for the ABC.

In spite of all of this, I wouldn't have missed
The Catch-Up
for the world, and after the show was canned I didn't feel any sense of failure. I was fortunate, I expect, in being the oldest cast member, because I wasn't as driven to succeed on television as the others. My career has always been primarily as a writer and I saw the show as a bit of a bonus – an opportunity to experience something totally different – and not as a major stepping stone. I also felt homesick for David and the farm during those long, tough weeks living in the city, living and breathing nothing but Channel 9. I wanted to spend more time with my daughter and my sister, both of whom were needing me. I had a cookbook to finish writing, a garden that was crying out for some attention and I was also hoping to get away to France at some stage soon.

Everyone involved in
The Catch-Up
had worked incredibly hard, and at times we really achieved what the program set out to do. As someone who relishes extreme experiences – and there's no question that living for nearly six months in the world of daily live television is about as extreme as it gets – I loved every minute.
Non, je ne regrette rien
.