Once a bullied under-achiever living on the wrong side of the tracks, Lisa Wilkinson is now at the top of her game as a TV host, adoring wife and hard-working mother – and her own harshest critic.
It’s 4am on a Friday and Lisa is sitting in a make-up chair backstage at the Today show dressed to the nines (no pun intended) in an acid yellow jacket, wide-legged black pants and black patent leather shoes with killer 10cm heels. You could cut a little bit of slack in the fashion stakes for a mother of three who gets up at 3am every weekday – thongs under the desk perhaps, which is what Hollywood gossip columnist Richard Reid turns up in on the show that day.
Yet Lisa Wilkinson is a self-confessed perfectionist whose 30-year career in the media has culminated in what she calls “the best job in television” and she’s not going to let a little thing like the wrong shoes or a bad lip gloss colour incite a flurry of critical reader emails or, more importantly, undercut her hard fought for confidence in front of the cameras.
With her indefatigable smile and the ease with which she moves from a combative interview with a union boss to fluffy chit-chat about actress Susan Sarandon, confidence and belief in herself is something Lisa has in spades. While she will argue that this comes from decades of experience as a magazine editor and “media personality” on radio, TV talk shows and as a public speaker, there’s no doubt that Lisa’s success in the chair at Today has burnished that smile and given her the glow of being the golden girl of the moment.
When Lisa took over the role of co-host with Karl Stefanovic, who had been with the program since 2005, Today was in trouble, being kicked around each morning by the competition, the Seven Network’s Sunrise with David Koch and Melissa Doyle, after a series of failed attempts to find the right woman to pair with the 35-year-old Karl. Now, the high-heeled shoe is on the other foot, with Today’s viewer numbers having risen by 24 per cent since 2006, while Sunrise’s have fallen by 17.5 per cent. In Melbourne, Today has clawed its way ahead of Sunrise in viewer numbers for the second successive year.
Your say: What do you think of Lisa Wilkinson? Do you watch the Today Show? Do you think she is inspirational? Share your thoughts below…
What is unprecedented about Lisa’s success is that she was offered the job in her late 40s, a time when many women in television, except for the most tenacious, are either winding down their careers or have been forcibly “retired”. A few weeks ago, she passed a significant milestone, her 50th birthday. Age has never been the issue it was with Tracy Grimshaw, 49, who some journalists unkindly referred to as Karl’s “mother” when she sat beside him in 2005. On screen, Lisa and Karl are playful, affectionate.
“We’re like brother and sister. We just get each other,” Lisa says. “It’s incredible how we can feel the way our bodies move, the way we draw breath, just a little sigh that the viewer can’t hear.”
Lisa is, in some way, the beneficiary of a growing acceptance by audiences of older women in key roles in TV news and current affairs, even though it’s “a slow-burning thing”, she says. She points to Liz Hayes, Tracy Grimshaw, Chris Bath, Kay McGrath and Heather Ford.
“There are lots of women in their 40s and 50s, and you know people trust them. They’ve earned their stripes and they deserve to be there.”
… On being bullied
As Lisa tells it, a new girl arrived at school at the beginning of Year 9. “My dad always taught me that if somebody new arrives, you always go and look after them, and make sure they’re okay. I did with this girl, but suddenly, after about a month, she just turned on me. Her boyfriend decided he liked me, although I had no idea who he was. Bullies rarely have a very good reason for doing what they do. They pick on others to feel better about themselves.”
By Year 10, several of her girlfriends had left school, so without a good support base, she was left further exposed to the bullying. The dynamics of the schoolyard changed. “There were a couple of occasions where I was the girl in the centre, with every other kid in the playground calling out, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ ”
On one occasion, she went to a Sherbet concert and a girl punched her “fair and square with a right hook”. She came home from the concert with a “massive” black eye. “I didn’t know how to stand up for myself,” Lisa says, regretfully. “I just wanted to disappear.”
Lisa, who had always been a good student, lost focus. “You don’t want to be the first one to put your hand up when you know the answer to the question in class, you don’t want to stand out, you don’t want to shine because that can be threatening to the class bully, so I just pulled back in every area,” she says.
As a consequence, she managed to complete her Higher School Certificate, but it was an “okay pass that wasn’t anything to write home about”, she admits.
In many ways, it was the “okay pass”, rather than the bullying, that has driven Lisa’s adult life. “I was whipping myself that I hadn’t tried harder. And I think there was a part of me that said, right, I’ve got to make up for it.”
Lisa had decided she wanted to get into the media and that television was her first love, inspired by Brian Henderson reading the six o’clock news and Mike Willesee’s A Current Affair.
On becoming a journalist, Lisa says, she decided she had to make up for the fact that she didn’t have a great HSC. “I wanted to get into the media, but I lived way out in Campbelltown, I didn’t go to private school, so I didn’t have any old school tie to fall back on and I had no contacts anywhere. So I thought I’m going to have to make up for that in sheer hard work. I put my head down and my bum up, and worked hard.”
After a stint on a secretarial course, she won a coveted job as Girl Friday on Dolly magazine. Two years later, she was appointed the editor at age 21. You could say she made up for it in record time.
Read more about Lisa Wilkinson in the February issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly out now.
Your say: What do you think of Lisa Wilkinson? Do you watch the Today Show? Do you think she is inspirational? Share your thoughts below…
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