Denise Drysdale certainly didn’t stop to consider the impact that a brussels sprout could have when she tossed one towards Australian media icon Ita Buttrose late last year in a Christmas lunch gag.
“We were supposed to tape the Christmas song for Studio 10,” Denise says in the May issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. “I had to get up at four in the morning to get there because I had to fly down from where I live in Queensland.”
“We’d been out at a skating rink to film a segment and then we went to this beautiful pub where they put on a lunch, the full roast turkey and the whole catastrophe”, she tells The Weekly. “There we were, singing along with the song – and I had a couple of champagnes. I didn’t have to drive. I was in a jovial sort of mood and I threw a brussels sprout at Ita. I lobbed it up and over the table at her and it hit her on the chest.”
The former cast of Studio Ten.
From left to right: Sarah Harris, Joe Hildebrand, Denise Drysdale, Jessica Rowe and Ita Buttrose.
“The upshot is that she thought I disrespected her but I didn’t and I don’t. I am so sorry I did it. If I’d known it was going to cause so much trouble I wouldn’t have done it. I just didn’t think. But that’s me all over. It’s nothing that I haven’t done before. That’s why people like me. They look at me and think, “She’s a bit of whacker’. And I am. I’m a bit of a ratbag.”
And while Ita politely walked away from the show four months after the brussels sprout fiasco, Denise is still happy co-hosting Studio 10. After all, it was on the set of the morning program that she met one of her close friends – journalist and self-dubbed Crap Housewife Jessica Rowe.
“My dear Jess, lovely Jess”, the 69-year-old two-time Gold Logie winner says. “I didn’t know Jess when I started at Studio 10. I didn’t know any of her background or what she’d done. I only knew that there had been some kind of kerfuffle at Channel Nine. They got me to sit next to her at the desk and within a couple of days we were chatting away, and then within a couple of weeks we were getting into trouble because we were talking during the breaks, looking at cat photos.”
“And now we have become these really lovely friends and for me, at my age, that is a real gift.”
The Australian Women’s Weekly had a candid chat with Denise Drysdale at her home in this month’s issue.
So you can just imagine how disappointed she was when Jessica announced she was leaving Studio 10 after six years.
“Well, I will miss sitting beside her, I can tell you that, but we plan to work on podcasts together,” Denise says. “It’s one thin lady and one fat lady. We have already done one session and it all flowed so smoothly. We’ve worked it out. I could have been her mother if I had her at 21.”
To read more about Denise Drysdale, pick up your copy of the May issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly out now.
