01 I Decision '87 with Michael Lucas and Emma Freeman

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Evelyn: Listen, darling, there is something you should know. There may be curse words ahead. Oh, and by the way, there are absolutely spoilers ahead. So if you haven't watched the episode yet, be careful. We wouldn't want things to get spoiled now, would we?

 Helen: Good evening, I'm Helen Norville.

 Dale: And I'm Dale Jennings.

 Leigh Sales: I am variety show loving, Tony Bartuccio dance captain, Leigh Sales.

 Lisa Millar: And I've got more shoulder pads than a gridiron team. I'm Lisa Millar. Welcome to the first episode of the Newsreader podcast, the official companion podcast to season two of the ABC TV drama, The Newsreader.

 Leigh: Oh, can we just please dive straight into talking about that opening number.

 Gerry: ♪ I knew you were waiting♪ I knew you were waiting♪ ♪ I knew you were waiting for me ♪

 Leigh: Where Gerry, a new character who's a variety show host does this version of I knew you were waiting for me with the Tony Bartuccio dancers. Now, do you remember the Tony Bartuccio dancers?

 Lisa: No, I do not. I had to go down a rabbit hole of trying to find out whether it was actually true or not. And guess what? It was. And Tony Bartuccio is still doing choreography.

 Leigh: Oh, look, I loved it. It put me so much back in the day, in the 1980s, where I'd be having a sick day from school and I'd be home and at midday, the Mike Walsh show would come on and they had all those kinds of variety numbers and it would be people doing covers of popular songs of the day as Gerry's doing. And they would just be slightly wrong and cringy. And yeah, it was just..

 Lisa: Everything was cringy about it because you know what? I actually did jazz ballet back then and I wore those leotards and it's embarrassing. I don't want to relive this, but anyway, woo woo, let's not go too far along here. I want to explain to people that throughout this podcast series, we are going to be unpacking all of those glorious outfits, yep, and the 80s sets.

 Leigh: But then we'll also get never before heard stories from the creators and the stars. And we'll give you that inside rail on the real life news events that are often underpinning each episode.

 Lisa: Now we've been friends for a long time, right Salesy? So..

 Leigh: Nearly 30 years.

 Lisa: Woo, well, that means we were baby journos in this era. So you're going to get our hot take on what it was like being screamed at. I mean, working in a real newsroom like that.

 Leigh: In this episode, we're going to be joined also by the show's creator, Michael Lucas and the director of episode one, Decision 87, Emma Freeman. Now, before we get deep into this episode, which I'm dying to do, I know that you have basically been a girly swat and had a second watch of season one to refresh your memory.

Lisa: Yes ma'am.

Leigh: I want you to give me just the quick idiots guide. All I pretty much remember from season one is Dale's gone from this sort of junior naive reporter to a presenter. Jeff, the old presenter has got the flick from News at Six and Helen and Dale are now a couple. Anything else major that I'm forgetting?

Lisa: Just a couple of things. I didn't remember that it was Rob who was supposed to get the newsreader job after Jeff got the boot, but he only wanted to do sport. Then he got it on with Noelene, not necessarily in that order. Remember the cameraman, Tim and Dale had the sneaky kiss and Helen asked Dale if he was gay and then she said she was in a mental institution and then they both start crying, Chernobyl's happening, suddenly they don't look like they've been crying and bang, there they are on air together. The golden couple begins.

Leigh: Have you ever been crying and then had to kind of go straight onto the telly?

Lisa: Oh, how many times? Yes.

Leigh: I know, I once was vomiting when I was pregnant. Like it's kind of, when your job is being on live, you just have to suppress a lot of normal human kind of stuff and get out there.

Lisa: I may have vomited too, but I wasn't pregnant. Anyway, enough of that.

Leigh: Okay, so this episode, episode one, it's we're in 1987, which was actually a crazy busy news year, but the event that they're focusing on in this episode, the backdrop to it is the federal election where you've got Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke facing the coalition leader, John Howard, Paul Keating is the federal treasurer, Andrew Peacock is his shadow, big personalities. And then they established pretty quickly, as well as Gerry, the variety show guy that I mentioned, a couple of new characters are coming along. And then one of them that we see is Kay, who's Geoff and Evelyn's daughter. So the tally room where it's election 87, I must say, as soon as you hear the election theme music and you hear the 10, nine, eight.

Dale: And here go. And in 10, nine, eight, seven, six.

Leigh: It gave me a feeling of actual dread. I felt the stress.

Helen: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the national tally room for election night, 1987.

Leigh: That feeling of when the train is pulling out of the station and you are the train driver.

Lisa: And you think, I've got to go to the toilet.

Leigh: And you don't really know where's the train going? When will the train be arriving at the destination? You have got absolutely no idea.

Lisa: Okay, so there's a few fabulous things about that whole scene. A, the fact that it's got a name, Decision 87. And that whole line about how the new character, Chucky, Charles Tate, who's running the network decides that it's a network branding opportunity. So it's not democracy happening, it's network branding.

Lindsay: Backyard barbecue.

Dale: What does that mean?

Lindsay: Dennis?

Dennis: He reckons that networks are like different kinds of food. Okay, so the ABC is like plate of vegetables. But then you have your roast chuck, right? Your Sunday lamb, backyard barbecue.

Lisa: I love that. And the fact that they called the ABC a plate of veggies.

Leigh: So this election night, it doesn't happen today, but this is set in a tally room. Did you do any elections in an actual tally room?

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, I've been in a tally room. So the scrutineers from different booths all around Australia ring into this central room in Canberra. And then someone physically is putting the numbers up on a big wall. And all of the party representatives, plus the media are watching the wall. And, you know, it used to be numbers they put up there, then it'd be an electronic screen. But that was how we did election night.

Leigh: We did. And so all of the networks, we would all do our broadcasts from the actual tally room. And in fact, I was on the last election night broadcast in 2007, the very final time that we used a tally room in Canberra. Because now it's all just done on computers and so forth. So Geoff and Dale, of course, are both in the tally room. Geoff hosting a broadcast for a rival network now that he's been axed from News at Six and Dale and Helen doing the News at Six broadcast. And when they cross paths, there's this absolutely beautiful bit of mind-fuckery that Geoff plants.

Geoff: I gather you'll be delivering the result by 7.45, guaranteed.

Dale: I don't fully understand the computer technology myself.

Geoff: Well, careful what you wish for. Three hours is a very long time to fill.

Leigh: It was so clever on so many levels because Geoff knows, because he's an experienced newsman, unlike Dale, that it's just absolute madness, as the News at Six team has done, to promise that you can deliver an election result by 7.45. It's just complete nonsense. And so when he says, careful what you wish for, three hours is a long time to fill, what he's referring to is, you know, on election night, you're going to be on TV till 11 o'clock at night. And if you call the result at 7.45, what are you going to talk about for the next three hours? You're going to run out of stuff to talk about. A good election night is one where, in my mind, where there's a bit of action, you've got plenty of stuff to talk about and a bit of suspense, and then the result comes in around 10.30, the two leaders speak and I'm home in bed by midnight.

Lisa: What was your longest election night?

Leigh: Oh, geez. That was the very first one I ever hosted. I was on until 1am and it was... and didn't go to the toilet from 5.30. It was pretty horrible.

Lisa: On all sides of that, I would imagine. Thanks, Salesy.

Leigh: Annabel Crabb was asked in an interview later, did Leigh Sales go to the toilet? And her reply was, only Leigh Sales can answer that question. All I can tell you is she never left the desk.

Dale: And, Gerry, if you had to name one highlight from tonight.

Gerry: Well, apart from the biscuits, Dale, I think my highlight was learning a few brand new words. My favourite being scrutineer.

Dale: What, a potential new career for you?

Gerry: Well, look, all I know about it, Dale, is that they scroot. And God knows I've always been partial to a quick scroot. Famously so.

Lisa: So, interestingly, my dad was in federal politics during that time and I remember on election nights that we'd hang out in his electorate office and we would wait for scrutineers to ring in with the results to tell us from each of the booths how things were going. But I was fascinated to see this guy with the computer there.

Dale: You've got one minute, Trevor.

Trevor: Sorry, I presently cannot focus my left eye.

Leigh: I liked where they're pressuring him to call it and he's struggling and he goes, well, this program was built to work off national swings. It reminded me so much of Antony Green, the ABC's election analyst.

Lisa: When was the first time that we actually started having an Antony on a desk? Do you know what?

Leigh: I love Antony and so I texted him and said, would it be all right if I rang you so we can actually ask you? I did, yep. So let's just quickly call him and we can ask him this directly.

Antony Green: Antony Green.

Leigh: Oh, hey, Antony, it's Leigh. How are you doing?

Lisa: And Lisa

Leigh: When did we first start using election analysts on set, crunching the data rather than on computers behind the scenes and then feeding information to the anchors who were on air?

Antony: Channel 9 were the first to develop a really good election computer system. But the problem for a long time was that until 1987, data entry was done from ballot paper slips, tally slips in the tally room or done directly from the tally board. So there was no other information apart from the total. And the best people to understand how the numbers were working in those days used to be politicians who started to get scrutineers from the parties. Before the days when we had computers to do that, the party used to have their officials doing that.

Lisa: I sat on a panel with you once and saw you pull a phone out of the side of the wall because there was so much tension going on. Trevor in the newsreader says that he can't focus his left eye. He's under so much pressure. It does do some weird stuff to your body, doesn't it?

Antony: Oh, yeah. I think you might be talking about the 1998 Queensland election.

Lisa: So you're admitting it, you did.

Leigh: It's burned in his brain.

Antony: You know what happened? We had a new computer system and we could do this modelling of the elections. And what happened, Pauline Hanson's, One Nation came up and all our modelling, which was based on two-party preferred camps, just went out the window as One Nation were polling the highest in all these seats.

Lisa: It was just like the show, Antony. It was just like the show.

Antony: I remember coming off air that night and just crying.

Leigh: Oh! (LAUGHTER) You poor thing. Mate, thank you very much for letting us pick your brains. Appreciate it.

Antony: Thanks very much. (MUSIC)

Leigh: So what Antony indicated there, when he was explaining the way that people used to pull together results in this era, what you see Geoff do on the show, where he looks at some papers and then he says to the producer, I'm narrowing my focus to these following eight seats, that is what old-school election analysts are able to do. And I've seen people do that as well, where they just know from experience that if the numbers are going a certain way, you can look at certain things and then you can make a very accurate prediction.

Lisa: What about the scene where they realise they don't have Keating live on their panel?

Noelene: He was always scheduled to spend the day in Bankstown then head to Canberra in the afternoon. It can't have been live footage.

Dennis: It was live footage, Noelene, because it was dark.

Lisa: And Helen is driving herself to Old Parliament House with Noelene holding a map. A real street directory.

Leigh: That was about as triggering as the election music because we've all had those moments where somebody who you think is going to show up doesn't show up. That reminds me as well. So, Evelyn's at the house watching...

Lisa: Oh, yeah, let's get on to Evelyn.

Leigh: Yeah. So, Evelyn's at the house watching Geoff's first election night broadcast for this other network and their daughter, Kay, comes around. Now, we've met Kay in one earlier scene where the family's having a photo taken to publicise Geoff's new gig.

Reporter 1: What about you, Kay? Any childhood memories of watching Dad on election night?

Kay: I remember always loving it.

Lisa: And there's something odd going on straight away, don't you think?

Leigh: Yep, she's uncomfortable with that and with the family, so there's something going on. But then when she comes to the house to... Kay comes and meets Evelyn to watch the show, what was the significance of the sausages and chips? And why was Evelyn going on so passively, aggressively about, well, I have to make you the sausages and the chips? Like, what was the big deal about that?

Kay: So, one night, Mum let me eat sausages and chips for dinner.

Reporter 1: Ah. And will there be sausages this Saturday?

Evelyn: Oh, of course, with Kay back from London. I'll be doing all the favourites.

Lisa: Do you a problem with sausages and chips?

Leigh: No, but I just wondered why Evelyn was going on about it when Kay said she didn't want them.

Lisa: Well, I thought that it was this trying to take her back to her childhood, trying to mollycoddle her. You know, she'd bought her the election night dress and she'd said, oh, you could keep that dress for the photo shoot. And she went, oh, yeah, it's so 87 fashion or something like that. So, I thought it was just that trying to keep the power on her and make her her little child again, when clearly as she's hoofing into the bottle of vodka, there's something going on here. You know, she confesses that she can't pay the rent. She's downing the vodka like nobody's business. Problem, problem.

Leigh: I missed what she took out of the drawer. I initially thought it was Mummy's Valium or some money or something. What did she actually take out of the drawer?

Lisa: She nicked the ring. She nicked the ring.

Leigh: Oh, a piece of jewellery, right. So, what do we think's going on with her? I mean, could be drugs, but they've also mentioned that boyfriend. It made me wonder, is she being blackmailed by the boyfriend?

Lisa: Yeah, Scott, Scott, the boyfriend. It was over last week, she said. And then Evelyn pretended that she liked Scott and they had a bit of a thing there.

Leigh: But there's clearly a history with Kay flogging stuff, because as soon as she left, Evelyn went straight to that drawer.

Lisa: Oh, I didn't think she'd had a history, because we'd also seen Geoff giving her the wads of $50 notes at the car. So, I thought it was just that Geoff's always kind of treated her like a little princess and given her whatever she needed. And Evelyn's always the one kind of picking up the mess afterwards.

Leigh: Because Evelyn's sticky baking through the curtains at Geoff giving that money. And you see her kind of, you know, tut disapprovingly. But no, it was just the fact that she went straight away. She was a bit suspicious why Kay had been out of the room. And then as soon as Kay left, she went off to see, to have a look in the drawer. So, I thought, oh, there must be some history here with Kay taking stuff.

Lisa: Can we just quickly talk about the beautiful Rob and Noelene and their relationship and how on election night they were going to have the per diems, the money that was given to them in cash in the little brown envelope. Do you remember that?

Leigh: Yes.

Lisa: I remember getting per diems and Jean, the secretary, is basically telling them how to rort the system. So, put the room service on your bill for the hotel and then you cash it. And then gorgeous Noelene says..

Noelene: How about when I get back, I pick you up and we use all my taxi vouchers and per diems and I take you to Sizzler.

Leigh: Do you reckon Noelene is so nervous about people knowing she's with Rob? Do you reckon that's a legit fear? Like, does she need to be worried about it?

Lisa: I mean, you think about the era. The woman always loses out in relationships in an office situation like that. If it doesn't work out. I know that's a big call. Big call, yeah. But that's what Noelene as the junior producer is probably worrying about. And we also we haven't talked about Chucky, who, you know, has the election night party. And so we're introduced to this really strong character who's come in to run the network and he is making it clear that he's demanding a whole lot more from them.

Charlie: People say I'm a bit like Keating, actually, you know, not physically, of course, it's just a sort of a certain gravitas or something.

Leigh: I loved that character's arrival. He gives me a bit of energy like the Billy Crudup character in Morning Wars. There's just something about him. He I'm really looking forward to seeing how his character unfolds. The thing that I find interesting, too, in this episode, I mean, I've always liked Geoff and Evelyn as characters, particularly Evelyn. But, you know, Geoff, he represents you get the sense of it, particularly on election night. He represents this old school model of newsreader. I mean, it's funny looking at it with modern eyes because you think, geez, why was that so pervasive? Like why did we used to think there was only one way to represent gravitas and authority? And that was an older white man with a very deep, gravelly, posh voice.

Lisa: Well, because that's the way it was when I was a kid and I was a five year old running around with my tape recorder pretending to interview people in my family. I would always drop my voice and go, I'm Lisa Millar, because I thought that's how everyone talked and that you had to be a bloke to be on television saying anything. I mean, they were our role models. Although come the 80s, we started seeing some awesome role models, especially like Jana Wendt, Tracey Grimshaw. There were people there that we could look up to.

Leigh: Yeah, Liz Hayes and people like that. I mean, it's interesting because Evelyn also, I think, is a woman of her era. And I think, you know, perhaps a very smart, strategic woman who was born at the wrong time, who then couldn't have a big, powerful job. And so she puts all of her ambition into the status of her husband, because that's the only way she has status is, you know, other than her kids and her appearance is that she's Mrs. Geoff Walters. And so she's very invested in brand Geoff.

Lisa: Oh,yeah. But you'd want her on your support crew, wouldn't you?

Leigh: Oh, hell yeah. I'd love to be married to an Evelyn. She'd be great.

Lisa: OK, what about the scene that just takes the cake in that episode one? And that is when Helen and Dale are sitting in the hotel room together. Dale has just been propositioned by Gerry.

Helen: He would be a logical option.

Dale: I don't want that option. Do you?

Helen: No. No, I don't. I want. I want just us. I want just. Just you and me.

Leigh: I thought that it was a very moving scene and it was a very vulnerable conversation, and it shows the respect and the care between them.

Lisa: Hey, just to wrap up, though, I just think also made me feel sick in the stomach right at the end. They've nailed it with the ratings. They've won. Helen has been brilliant. And so what does Charles do? Gets on the phone and suggests maybe that she's been too dominant, too aggressive, and her time is limited.

Leigh: And that brings me to the last thing I wanted to say at this point, which is Lindsay, the news director, is back. Oh, God, he is a great character. And William McInnes, I feel like I can smell him. I can smell the staleness. I just I know that smell. It's this kind of a mixture of red wine breath, tobacco. And he would definitely have dandruff on his shoulders. It is just visceral.

Lindsay: Paul fucking Keating live has come undone...

Lisa: The line that he says to Noelene, and poor Noelene, you know, cops a hard phone call or two from Lindsay.

Lindsay: Listen, you, I've got some notes for Helen and Dale. You get a pen and a shitload of paper.

Leigh: Lindsay's general vibe and his level of aggression, of course, creates some of the tension when you're watching the show. But this episode generally was really tense and very fast paced. And the person on a film crew who's probably more responsible for creating that mood and that momentum than anyone else is the director. Now, Emma Freeman is the director of all of the episodes. And unless you're somebody who pays religious attention to the credits of TV shows, you probably don't know her name, but you have definitely watched stuff that she has directed. Puberty Blues, Love My Way, Glitch, Stateless, a squillion other things. Emma, congratulations. This was just an absolutely fantastic episode. And it really had me on the edge of my seat a lot of the time. What are the tools as a director that you use to create that?

Emma Freeman: To be honest, when I read episode one, I could have killed Michael Lucas because I was like, this is a whole episode set in a tally room. And how can I make this interesting? And how can I infuse the tension and the stakes and the movement that, you know, I really wanted? I mean, obviously, if I was going to shoot a desk for half an hour and the camera wasn't moving and we didn't have that energy, it wouldn't be the most compelling piece of television. So it became a real challenge for me of how we could construct shot choice to infuse the energy and also link importantly to the energy of Helen and Dale who really take us through this journey. So it was a lot of fun. So you'll see, you know, a lot of steadicam shots, a lot of moving camera. You know, the camera is flying all over the place. So it was really a technical challenge.

Lisa: But then you've got people moving really fast, but then you slow it down and you make us sit there. Yes. And it's awful.

Emma: And awkward. And that, you know, that excruciating sequence at our CEO, Charlie Tate's mansion, which would have to go down in history as one of the most awkward moments in television. But it just, yeah, it's a really exciting project, The Newsreader, because you just want to be in the energy of the characters. And often in television, we really often restrict the movement of our cast. And Newsreader, you just let everyone run. And then when you earn those moments of sitting, you can really feel that contrast.

Leigh: You mentioned using fast-moving cameras to create that sense of excitement. Do you have to create tension in the shooting process or is it something that you can then do in post-production in the way that it's edited and with the addition of music and so on?

Emma: I truly believe that the energy exists on set. If you're trying to construct that in the edit, it's always really forced. And I, Newsreader is such a special project in the sense that the cast and I are so aligned and there's a lot of work on the set to achieve that energy. I like to leave a day knowing that I captured that energy and then you're finessing in the cut. So then you're not sort of like, it's not a terribly cutty show. And that's really important to me. And you really want to preserve the kind of natural energy of, in particular, Helen and Dale.

Lisa: Give us a sense of what it's like being. Give us a sense of what it's like you there. How much interaction do you have with everyone?

Emma: A lot. Newsreader is, it's a once in a lifetime project. That's why we all keep coming back to make this show. It's incredibly collaborative. We have the script, we land on set. Anna and Sam are very involved in the development of that script, even on the floor. We often join five or six scenes together so we can have a sense of what it's like in that space. For instance, in the office space, we'll never just shoot one scene. We might block five scenes, which will run 10 minutes. The Steadicam will move room to room with the actors so they have flexibility where to move and where to go. And we'll just follow them. So it's almost like a sort of a documentary approach to filmmaking, but obviously the style of it is a lot more structured and cinematic.

Leigh: Emma, tell us about the challenges of cutting in old archival material with the show. For example, when we see Helen interviewing Keating in Bankstown, because the issue presumably is stuff shot in the 1980s on 1980s cameras looks grainy, but you try to match it with the stuff you're shooting now.

Emma: Yes. That's such a fun part of this show. We have an on-set technician where we use equipment from the 80s. All of that footage, that intercutting between Keating and Helen, Helen's coverage is actually shot on a 1980s camera. So we use old technology so it cuts perfectly with the footage from the past. There's a lot of layers in the show that we're using archival, we're shooting our own footage on old cameras, and obviously we're shooting the production drama as well. So technically there's a lot to the show.

Lisa: The other thing that struck me were the sounds that we were hearing. And I'm talking not just about the awesome music, but the tape machine whirring inside a room, the, you know, the rolodex being flicked through, a lot of it was so important. So what are you thinking at that point?

Emma: Well, I just want it to be real. I mean, I want it to, you know, it's the greatest honour that you both enjoy the show and respond to it, because I want people in news to feel our love and respect for news. And I just want audiences to connect with it in a really honest way. So I've become just an 80s enthusiast. Like I just love everything about the80s.

Lisa: Right. You've got leotards, have you?

Emma: Yeah, well, I wish. If there's a series three, maybe there'll be an opportunity for a cameo.

Leigh: I think there's an opportunity for some merch, some newsreader leotards and leg warmers.

Emma: I should have got myself in there for the Tony Bartuccio dancers.

Lisa: I can't believe you missed that opportunity, Emma.

Emma: I think the other producer, Jo Werner, she was like, she used to do a little bit of dancing in her past. And I was like, come on, Jo, get on the gold leotard. It's time.

Leigh: Emma, it has been super fun having you come in. Thank you so much for making time and congratulations again.

Emma: Oh, pleasure. Thank you so much.

Lisa: I'm getting you a leotard, Emma. Bring it on.

(music)

Lisa: Hey, Leigh, let's chat to the amazing creative mind behind Lindsay and Helen and Noelene and Dale, the man who wrote the newsreader, Michael Lucas. And we have so many questions.

Leigh: We always do. Michael, hello. Hello. We met for coffee quite a few years ago now when the newsreader was just a glint in your eye and you were picking my brains about the world of TV news. So tell us a bit more about that process. What fascinated you about this era and this world and what made you think it would make a drama?

Michael: Well, I've always been a bit obsessed with news and obviously I was a child of the 80s. So, you know, the news in the 80s was a source of considerable excitement. And there was a bit of my father appeared on the news in the 80s quite a lot in the middle of the 80s because he was an HIV specialist. And I just remember, I think news had a bigger budget back then. And there was just one particular point when the eyewitness news helicopter came and landed on the Oval to pick him up and take him straight for a live interview. I'll never forget seeing that helicopter land and then running to the TV and then like an hour later seeing him on air answering questions. And it just seemed so exciting and was like magic to me. And then I, you know, I did my high school work experience in the ABC Melbourne newsroom. I was always obsessed with that. And then when it came time, you know, to write this, I knew I was writing an 80s set project. And I found it so fascinating to go back and reread newspapers and rewatch news bulletins, archive news bulletins through a modern, you know, through a modern lens and see them in a completely new light. Obviously the passage of time, but also what I remembered as a child versus what I understand now.

Lisa: How did you decide then, Michael, who the characters were going to be? Who you were basing them on?

Michael: Well, I sort of took a bit of a collage approach that I was pretty careful to not make it too direct. I mean, I know people, there's always a bit of a sense of, oh, is Helen Jana? But I basically, I was like this little bowerbird going and picking just good little morsels and building characters around them. Dale, I think, came from an urge in me to sort of tell a bit of a story about a guy who doesn't really fit into a conventional masculine, you know, model. And then Helen was sort of the inverse of that. She had sort of the kind of qualities that would be celebrated in a man, but they were punished in a woman. So those two were set. And then everything else came from the stories, pretty much. I definitely remember from that conversation with Leigh, she really captured two things that really stood out and led to characters being built. One was terror. I remember that.

Leigh: Oh, I'm still terrified.

Michael: Oh no, it was just... how appropriate. I remember you painted a real picture of you lived in fear of screwing up and you were going to get yelled at. And you told these really vivid stories of working the autocue and just panicked that you would cause a mistake.

Leigh: Yeah.

Michael: And that sort of led partially to Michelle Lim Davidson's character. And the other bit I remember you told great stories about sort of crew playing practical jokes on reporter, but in a kind of very brotherly way.

Leigh: I actually, when you mentioned the Noelene character, you know, when I see how she is in the newsroom, that is exactly, as I'm sure Lisa will say, what it is like when you're a junior in the newsroom, which you are. There's always people in the newsroom who are highly competent and they are working so hard. And it's kind of taken for granted how hard they work. And they live in terror of getting the sack because they get one tiny thing wrong. And that happens, you know, poor Noelene in this episode, because Paul Keating hasn't shown up where he was meant to show up.

Lisa: Hey, did Paul Keating know that you were going to do this? Did you talk to him about it?

Michael: No, it's a different, it's sort of a different set of considerations with every single person. In the case of Paul Keating, because he became the Prime Minister and was the Treasurer at the time, was such a public figure that there's Four Corners footage, that interview, and they owned it. And there was a lot of deliberation, but the ultimate judgment was that because it's essentially a very sort of loving tribute to him and flattering and not a distortion of what he was doing or anything like that, that it wasn't required. And of course they owned all the footage. So no, I mean, I hope that he, that he receives it in the way that it's intended, which is a bit of a tribute.

Leigh: If he doesn't, you will hear about it.

Michael: Well, if he doesn't, I hope he just gives us a really, really lacerating insult. I know he has it in him.

Leigh: Now, Season 2 opens in 1987 and you've started this episode with the federal election, which is why Keating comes up. 1987 was a really busy news year. So why was the election what you wanted to make the backdrop of Episode 1?

Michael: It became apparent in first season that big live events work well, the way that the director, Emma, films them and everything. She runs them like a play and it's all this kinetic energy. So I thought we'd try and start with our biggest live sequence that we possibly could.

Lisa: I've got to ask you about this whole 7.45pm promise, which just fills me with horror, but apparently that was a real life inspiration.

Michael: Yeah. I know. It blew me away. I found it in a newspaper. It was the ad for Eyewitness News. One of the first things they said was thanks to their DataMax technology, they were able to deliver the result at 7.45pm. And of course, you know, anyone that's watched elections this century knows that. So, you know, you've got, I mean, as you both well know, you could be waiting literal weeks for the result. And I thought it was almost charming in a way that back then they had so much confidence in this new technology that they really thought that they could put at the top of the ad, we will deliver the results first and give you a time. And also, I thought it was probably quite a successful ploy because, you know, I mean, if a network assured me that they had the technology to give it early, I'd switch over to them.

Leigh: That was the thing in the episode when Geoff's upset later and he's like, well, our ratings just went off a cliff at 7.45 and they never recovered. And that's, you know, really one of the lessons I remember from my years in commercial television, which was very brief at the start of my career, was you over-promise in the promo because that's what gets people to watch. And then, you know, people, once they switch on, they're reluctant to switch off.

Lisa: Now she's given away the secrets.

Leigh: Yeah, that's right. You're getting what goes into the sausage. How paranoid have people been that particular characters are based on them? Because every person I speak to in the media has a theory about who's who.

Michael: I love that that's the case. We've had people write into the production company, sort of directly asking, was this based on me? A weird thing that, not so much with the on-camera talent in the show, but with the behind the scenes, the Lindsays and everything, I go through hell trying to name them because always I'll name them and then I'll send them to my sort of newsroom experts or, you know, just other people that are reading the script and they say, oh no, you can't call him that. That was a chief of staff back in the eighties. That was his name. And even this time with the CEO, I love the name Warwick. I just thought that's such a great eighties name. And then everyone went, oh no, Warwick, Fairfax. Yeah, no, exactly. So I keep having these problems that I'm forever naming characters. I think with Lindsay, I went through about three or four names before I ended with Lindsay, just because there were people that worked at newsrooms. And in that case, it probably was going to be quite, you know, not a parallel that people would take kindly to.

Leigh: Surely there'd be a lot of unhappy eighties makeup artists called Cheryl.

Michael: I love Cheryl though. I think she's got good style.

Lisa: Michael, how much of a backstory do you have, even if it's just in your mind of all the characters? Because I wondered to myself, is Kay an only child? You know, what else is in Dale and Helen's lives?

Michael: I do for myself, but then I don't share it with the actors unless they specifically ask for it. Because for a lot of actors, part of their process is to sort of build their own one, just based off the script. So yeah, with Kay, I did imagine her as an only child. It felt to me like, yeah, she was their only child and potentially they wanted a bigger family, but it didn't happen. And so all of the expectation was sort of foisted upon her. She had to be particularly perfect and it was quite lonely. I see a lot of loneliness in her. Childhood. With Dale, I absolutely had the whole saga and actually Dale and Helen in my mind had a really long backstory that led up to where they are and that we're sort of drip feeding. But then Anna and Sam and Emma, the director, have added to it so much or to heighten bits of it or added more details.

Leigh: Michael, why are people so obsessed with this show?

Michael: There's something about this one that sometimes there's questions unanswered in it or there's the characters that you could believe two different things about the one character or there's just this general repression and yearning. And I do notice online that seems to create a sort of aura around the show. I'm certainly aware that there's fan fiction of the show and everything like that. And I feel like it comes from you have these sort of complicated, sort of repressed characters wandering around. I don't know whether that's part of it or whether people just like the hairstyles and the shoulder pads, but whatever it is, I'm grateful.

Leigh: Funny you mentioned the fan fiction, Michael, and I nearly forgot about this, but I actually did do because I'm a serious journalist. I did do a deep dive in my research and so I went deep into the fan fiction for the newsreader that exists online. Well, I've brought a little something to read aloud to you both.

Lisa: Oh no. This is a surprise to me as well, Michael, don't you worry.

Leigh: Okay. So this is a bit of erotic fan fiction. There's just something about young Dale that makes her blood a little warmer. And it's not exclusively caused by the way he keeps gazing at her as if she was every bit as incredible as he claimed her to be. She's used to men gawking at her, a lot of them doing nothing to hide it. It feels different with Dale though. It could be purely professional admiration, remembering the proverbial stars that had sparkled in his eyes while she delivered that special breaking news update yesterday. But he'd looked at it just the same hours later on the threshold of her home as he was about to leave, clearly exhausted from the insane day they'd had and the reading practice she'd insisted upon at 11pm.

Lisa: People are out there writing this stuff.

Michael: There's so much detail there.

Leigh: And that was tame. That was tame. There was a lot of that about Dale and Tim as well.

Michael: There's just so much care in there and they're really living in the moment. So I mean, I don't know. I think it's just absolute honour to the show and the performances. And that just kind of blows my mind. It really does.

Lisa: Michael Lucas, this is only the end of episode one. So do you promise to come back and talk to us when we get to the finale?

Michael: Absolutely. Absolutely, I do.

Leigh: Well, that is it for the first episode of the Newsreader podcast. It's been a heap of fun.

Lisa: Oh, it sure has. And guess what? Let's do it all again next week. We can do the debrief of episode two.

Leigh: Well, I'm assuming that might include, well, I'm hoping we get a bit more kind of revelation about what the deal is with Kay and what's going on there.

Lisa: Yeah, and Evelyn is turning into a really interesting character. So I'm wondering what this secret is that she's alluded to.

Leigh: So there's only one way to find that out, really. And that's make sure you watch the Newsreader on ABC TV on Sunday nights. Set a reminder if you have to.

Lisa: You can also catch up with the series on ABC iview. Watch it anytime, anywhere. Then head straight to the ABC Listen app and take it all apart with us in the Newsreader podcast. It drops every week straight after the TV show.

Leigh: And so I guess if you've got a mate who loves the Newsreader, or even if they don't, just tell them about it. Make sure you word them up about this podcast.

Lindsay: Yeah, give them the Lindsay version. You bloody well will listen. We'll catch you next time.

Leigh: Catch you next time.

Lisa: This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Leigh: Thanks to our producer, Michele Weekes.

Lisa: And our executive producer, Alex Lollback.

Leigh: Sound engineer is Angela Grant and the manager of ABC podcasts is Monique Bowley.

Dale: I'm Dale Jennings. This has been News at Six. Good night, Australia.

Floor manager: And we're out!

Farz Edraki: Hi, I'm Farz Edraki. And if you like stories about people getting into trouble, taking risks, falling in love, making mistakes, getting out of trouble, then you should come listen to days like these. We've got stories of crime and redemption, near-death experiences, and a kid who just wants to swim really fast.

Karni Lidell: Sat my parents down in a very official type meeting at the age of eight. I told my parents wearing this blue ribbon, I've decided I'm going to be an Olympic swimmer. That's what I'm going to do with my life. Because it's obvious, you know, pointing to my blue ribbon, I'm good at swimming.

Farz Edraki: That's days like these. And you can listen right here or on the ABC Listen app.