Sweet Surrender by Mary Moody Page A

knew a little about Mia Freedman, who was a high-profile, clever young journalist who had trained on magazines at Australian Consolidated Press – the same background as my own. I was curious about her role at Channel 9, having followed the reports of the continuing upheavals at the network in the pages of the press. My memory of working at the station all those decades ago was of a very male-oriented environment, and I was aware that more recently the network had scored with programs like
The Footy Show
, which gave good ratings, and tried to compensate for failures in other areas, such as news, current affairs and the morning show.
    For the interview I dressed in a strappy sun frock and high heels, having picked up a few clues from my previous casting experience, and decided to indulge in a spray tan to colour up my pale, freckly skin. Henrie met me in the foyer and once more I found myself in the lift heading for the executive suites on the third floor. Mia greeted me enthusiastically. A beautiful, delicate young woman with an open face and ready smile, she immediately engaged me, saying: ‘You are hot, Mary. Just look at you. Do you mind me asking how old you are?’
    I was thrown off guard, not by Mia asking my age but by her use of the word ‘hot’, which I had never heard in this context before (I would hear it many, many times over the next six months). It’s youth-speak. When she said I was ‘hot’ I momentarily wondered if I was having yet another menopausal hot flush, but no, it turned out that she meant that I looked young and groovy for a grandmother of eight. I was off to a good start.
    After chatting broadly about the concept for the new show I confessed to Mia and Henrie that as I don’t watch daytime television and have never subscribed to pay TV, I hadn’t seen the American program
The View
. But I told them I had a good friend in Bathurst who watched the show religiously. ‘I learn a lot and I laugh’ was the way my friend described it. Mia loved this take on it; she repeated it several times, smiling widely.
    The program we discussed that day was to be called
The Catch-Up
, and sounded similar in most respects to the one that hadn’t made it to air two years before. Mia and Henrie told me they planned to interview a lot of potential cast members but were not doing auditions, which was a great relief to me. They aimed to make up their mind quite quickly and let me know. Was I available the following year, five days a week?
    I said yes.
    Within three weeks they had narrowed down the field. Mia wrote:
    Our casting blueprint was always: interesting, complex, smart, funny,
warm
women who are prepared to laugh at the world and themselves, be honest about their experiences and express their opinions.

    
Of all the women we spoke to about this project (and there were dozens), Henrie and I have whittled it down to four we adore – and you’re one of those four
.
    I was the only survivor from the previous attempt to get a daytime chat show off the ground, and again I was to be the oldest. The other women cast were Libbi Gorr, aka Elle McFeast, by far the most experienced of us on-camera (she would be the anchor); a charming young radio host by the name of Zoe Sheridan; and Lisa Oldfield, wife of the former One Nation politician David Oldfield.
    The concept was to throw together a mix of women of different ages and perspectives. We were told we had been chosen for what we could ‘bring to the table’ in terms of our varied lives and experiences.
    It would seem that my main qualification, apart from my previous experience on ABC-TV’s gardening show, was the fact that I was both a mother and grandmother, and had ‘lived’ life, especially in the last few years; Libbi, of course, had a high-profile media career and had recently had her first child at the age of forty-one; Zoe was enthusiastic and bubbly and had worked in radio