Passionate About Her Stuff

The Age

Thursday March 6, 2008

Michael Lallo

Wendy Harmer's new TV show complements her frank attitude to life, love and politics. By Michael Lallo.

THERE'S no point in tap-dancing around thorny subjects with Wendy Harmer. The moment she senses a tricky question - and she really can sniff them out before they're asked - she shifts the topic or turns the tape recorder off. Except now, she changes her mind. A week after our first meeting, she rings and says it's time to put a couple of things on record. But more on that later.

The first thing you notice about the 52-year-old comedian, broadcaster, writer and journalist is that she's smart. Very smart. But she doesn't come across as a show-off.

In a cramped, windowless room at ABC's Elsternwick studios, she talks about her latest project. Stuff, a four-part series starting next week, is billed as an examination of "the human life-long love affair with material objects".

Before you roll your eyes, know this: it's probably not what you think.

"The last thing I wanted to do was make one of those finger-wagging shows where they shout, 'We must all stop consuming or we're all going to die!"' Harmer says, shouting and wagging her finger. "They're all the same. They open with a shot of a landfill, then they show a factory with smoke belching out of it, a row of trucks rumbling along a highway and a McMansion."

Of course, Stuff, produced by close friend Laura Waters (We Can Be Heroes, Summer Heights High) isn't a celebration of empty-headed consumerism. It's a more complex and often amusing look at why and how we consume - and what our stuff says about us. Harmer visits suburban homes, a prison and everywhere in between, poking around and asking the inhabitants about their things.

"The conclusion is that rather than trying to curb our desire for stuff, we're better off looking at the way we make things," she says. "There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having a house full of crap. Go hard, have as much crap as you want. But let's make it sustainable. Those people who stand there and say, 'Nah, nah, nah', can bugger off."

It's this sort of frankness that saw Harmer top the ratings for almost 11 years straight as co-host of 2Day FM's breakfast show in Sydney.

There's an unspoken rule that once an employee leaves Austereo, he or she must forevermore attack the network at every opportunity. Harmer's having none of it. Sure, she didn't take too well to being told to "get rid" of her older listeners, which resulted in her sacking in 2003, but she's not about to stick the boot in.

"Austereo were great to work for," she says. "(Chief executive) Brad March was there at the time - he's a legend - and management were really good to me. I had a ball working there."

Yes, the way they got rid of her was "stupid", but that's just the nature of the industry.

"Apparently in radio, people have to be sacked with some kind of great drama," she says. "You can't be told in advance you're going to lose your job. There has to be some sort of vile skullduggery."

But she's not so quick to defend Vega FM. "Look, I'll talk to you until the cows come home with that off," she sighs, pointing at the tape recorder, "but I won't talk to you with it on."

Hence the unexpected phone call. Harmer gets straight to the point. "I've been waking up at four in the morning thinking, 'Why did I turn the tape off?' There was obviously going to be a point in the story where it says, 'Wendy turns the tape off and has this big diatribe and is obviously really bitter. And I'm not bitter at all."

Well, she would say that, wouldn't she? But it seems she's telling the truth. That is not to say she isn't frustrated with the way things were handled.

In 2005, Vega hired her to do a morning music talk show - "a sort of Jon Faine with music" - to be broadcast in Sydney and Melbourne. The hype surrounding the soon-to-be-launched station was huge. Here, at last, was a commercial FM outfit promising intelligent analysis, interesting discussion and an eclectic playlist.

"On that basis, I brought with me Helen Thomas, who was Fran Kelly's producer on Radio National. They also had (senior journalists) Bruce Guthrie and Helen Trinca. There were some real heavy hitters there."

The listeners loved it, Harmer says. Problem was, there weren't enough of them. Despite management's assertions that the boomer target audience would eventually come around, they became nervous.

Interview lengths were cut. The playlist became increasingly mainstream. Program directors requested more listeners on air but no talkback and issued a ban on magazine radio.

"To this day, I still don't know what magazine radio is," Harmer says. "There were a couple of times where I looked at the whiteboard and burst into tears because I had no idea what was required.

"Look, I'll own up to it being clunky in the beginning because I'd never done a show by myself before. I may have even been the wrong person, and I accept that. But the station was ill-prepared. When we got there, there were no station IDs, the phones didn't work properly and they didn't even have a clock in the studio.

"It was a difficult situation. What we'd been hired to do was not what they wanted. It became untenable."

So she left and Vega morphed into the (still low-rating) commercial music station it is today.

"Obviously I had to wear the 'You're a failure' tag, and that wasn't much fun," she says. "But the thing is this: I don't hold any ill will against anybody. I really, truly and honestly don't. What I'm sad about is that there's now this perception that music and talk won't work, and I really do believe that it can. Pretty much everyone in the industry believes that. It's a format that's still up for grabs. I just think the people at DMG did it imperfectly. They let themselves get spooked by newspaper journos and they blinked."

Harmer is now considering a podcast-only show for the ABC. It makes audience interaction virtually impossible, she admits, but she senses a hunger for a new style.

"There's a lot of people who couldn't care less if they don't hear from Mrs 35-Year-Old With Three Kids From Broadmeadows or Mr I'm A Tradesman From Geelong," she says. "They're thinking, 'Life's too short - why would I want to invite these people into my home?' They're after a depth of material."

She wouldn't mind giving the AM blowhards a run for their money, either.

"We're going to have a woman prime minister before we have a woman on talkback radio," she scoffs. "All those blokes on air are pinheads. And this idea that women don't want to hear other women is bollocks."

The political reference is telling. After considering running either as an independent for the NSW Parliament or as a local councillor, her heavy workload forced her to reconsider.

"I think I would have been good," she says. "I know that you can't just blunder on stage and say you're anti-development and block everything. It's obviously a real compromise act and I'm pretty good at that. But maybe it's horses for courses. Stuff was such an absorbing thing to do - maybe I'm better off doing that than standing up and making a pest of myself in Parliament. I can do that on TV."

She describes herself as a "moderate leftie". Her husband, Brendan Donohoe, however, is a "mad leftie". In addition to looking after their two children, aged 8 and 10, he volunteers at a local school, coaches a couple of sports teams and ferries his mother to hospital. But the fact remains he's - gasp! - a man without paid employment.

"People feel the need to say he should go and get a job on a regular basis," Harmer says. "And it's actually none of their business - at all. Our set-up works really well."

She jokes that with her busy schedule - her Pearlie in the Park children's books are about to be turned into a 52-part animated series - there will be plenty more scenes involving her stomping around the house asking where her black bra is.

As a breakfast-radio veteran, she's made a living from these sorts of personal anecdotes. But not everything is comedy fodder.

In 2005, Harmer recounted her experiences of being born with a cleft palate and bilateral cleft lip in Australian Story. Perhaps the most poignant scene is her recollection of coming across a stack of letters the producers of her first television show, The Big Gig, had tried to hide. She was devastated by the extraordinarily cruel comments from viewers about her appearance.

HARMER has never tried to fit the narrow ideals that bedevil women in Australian media, and she's not about to start now.

"I think if I suddenly turned up as a size 10 with a facelift in a fuchsia suit, people would be going, 'Where's Wendy Harmer?"' she laughs. "Even so, I remember looking at some of the people I interviewed for Stuff and thinking, 'Jeez, they look a bit rough.' Then I saw the footage and thought, 'My god, I fit right in!' Oh well, that's life, I guess.

"But that's been a real joy as well. I thought I'd have to be a bloke or a glamourpuss to be allowed to make a series like this; one where I go on a personal journey. But I didn't. I just had to be me."

Stuff begins 8pm Tuesday on ABC1. Critic's View, page 50

© 2008 The Age

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