Around September last year, the Australian TV rumour mill was in overdrive. Headlines speculated that Tracy Grimshaw was headed back to TV – and not even a year after she walked away from A Current Affair.
At the time, the veteran journalist was quick to shut it all down, but just months later, those whispers would prove to be true – sort of.
It was confirmed Tracy would be heading back to the Nine Network, but instead of returning to helm A Current Affair, hosted by Ally Langdon since 2023, she’d be co-hosting a surprising new project that definitely wasn’t on our 2024 bingo cards. Nor was it on hers.
“It was a slightly left-field suggestion,” Tracy tells TV WEEK of the new show, Do You Want To Live Forever?, which she says was pitched to her by Michael Healy, Director of Television for the Nine Network, last August.
“Through COVID, Michael knew that I was a bit of a medical nerd – I’d spent the pandemic poring over all the research papers trying to figure out what would happen next. So he said, ‘I’ve got a medical show we thought you might like to have a think about.’”
Do You Want To Live Forever? is a fascinating four-part docuseries that sees four pairs of participants, varying in age and health, undergo radical practices to try to achieve the impossible: cheating death.
In the first episode, the participants – including The Block stars Eliza and Liberty Paschke, and Olympic swimmer Duncan Armstrong and his son Tom Bruce – undergo a series of tests. They’re then told their biological ages, some of them a staggering 10 years more than their birth ages.
Tracy says it’s a sobering reality that many Australians need to pay more attention to. It certainly made her alter her outlook on her own mortality.
“I’m definitely not taking my good health for granted anymore,” she says. “I haven’t disappeared down the longevity rabbit hole some of the extreme biohackers have been drawn into, but I have realised our bodies do pay a price for our bad choices.
“We all want to stay healthy, mobile, independent and sharp for as long as possible, whether you’re aiming for 150 years old, 100 years old or a solid 85.”
For Tracy, who turned 64 earlier this month, ageing has never been something she’s “obsessed” over, saying she’s “notorious” among her friends for never being able to pick people’s ages.
“I don’t have an ageist bone in my body, and it’s always a surprise to me each year when I have a birthday and realise how old I am, because it seems to have happened while I wasn’t paying attention!”
However, as filming of Do You Want To Love Forever? progressed, Tracy began to truly “contemplate what old age might look like”. There’s something in particular that scares her.
“Dementia worries me the most,” she reveals, “because there’s no real cure and it leaves you so vulnerable. Plus, I like my mind and I’d feel really betrayed if it went missing. So I’m paying more attention to things that are risk factors for dementia, such as inflammation.”
The show also highlights how stress accelerates ageing – a factor Tracy says she doesn’t have to worry about as much now she’s out of the news cycle.
After leaving A Current Affair in 2022, Tracy took a year off work to travel and renovate her home. And while she admits “there’s been plenty to do” since returning to network TV, she has nowhere near the workload she had to shoulder earlier on.
“The biggest change is not being committed to a daily routine, which A Current Affair required for 17 years, and Today needed for nearly 10 years before that,” she says.
“Most of my 43 years in television have been on shows that required set hours.”
That’s not to say that Tracy doesn’t miss the thrill of it all.
“News and current affairs give you a box seat to watch history happen, to talk to people the whole world is talking about, to find out first what everyone wants to know,” she explains.
“I think back on rolling coverage of bushfires, where we could tell people where the fire front was moving… it’s such a privilege, really – and a responsibility.”
Looking back on her decorated career, the Walkley Award-winning journalist says there are a few stories that have stayed with her.
“Announcing the death of Princess Diana [in 1997], the Beaconsfield miners [their dramatic rescue in 2006], and the Queen’s death [in 2022],” she lists, before acknowledging how “moving” it was, in 2012, to take Lindy Chamberlain and both her sons back to Uluru, where her baby daughter Azaria was taken by a dingo 32 years earlier.
Tracy adds that while she may miss “the people – and occasionally the buzz” of shows such as A Current Affair, we shouldn’t expect to see her back behind the desk anytime soon.
“I definitely want more flexibility these days,” she explains. “I don’t miss driving home in the dark every night either.”
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