Fisk fans around Australia cheered when Kitty Flanagan won the TV WEEK Logie for Most Popular Actress this year. But Kitty wasn’t watching. She’d switched off her television before the winner of the award was announced.
“I said, ‘I’ll feel stupid when I’m disappointed, so let’s just not watch it,'” Kitty tells TV WEEK. “I turned it off. And then I turned my phone over and went, ‘Oh no, I think I might have won!’ because I had about 20 text messages. So then, of course, I turned on the television. It was too late. I’d missed it.”
Kitty was surprised to learn she’d won Most Popular Actress at the 2022 TV WEEK Logies.
(Image: Supplied)On the night of the Logies, Kitty was in Melbourne in the middle of filming season two of Fisk. She’d organised for comedian Sam Pang, who had a tiny role in her sitcom’s first season, to accept her award if she won.
“He said, ‘There’s no way you’re going to win,’ and I went, ‘I know,’ so he said, ‘Yeah, all right, so I’ll do it.'”
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She says she felt “surprised, a little embarrassed but also delighted” that playing brown-suited probate lawyer Helen Tudor-Fisk won her the Logie ahead of acclaimed actresses such as Deborah Mailman in Total Control and Anna Torv in The Newsreader.
“I like to remind them that it was Most Popular Actress, it wasn’t Best Actress, so it wasn’t a slight on their acting abilities,” she says.
Kitty plays probate lawyer Helen in Fisk.
(Image: ABC)Kitty’s first Logie was a long time coming. TV audiences got to know her on Full Frontal in the mid-1990s before she moved to the UK, where she featured on The Sketch Show. Since returning to Australia, she’s been a hit on Utopia, The Project and Have You Been Paying Attention?, but all the time, dreaming of her own series.
“It feels like I’ve been pitching ideas for sitcoms for decades!” she says. “The first-ever iteration of Helen, she wasn’t called Helen, she was ‘Joan’. And I distinctly remember in the script it said ‘Joan, brackets, 33’. By the time we got to ‘Helen, brackets’, it was up to ’48’ or ’47’. The next one was going to have to be Helen in the retirement home in order to keep up with me.”
WATCH: Have You Been Paying Attention?’s funniest moments. Article continues after video
One of the problems Kitty had when trying to pitch Fisk was that people felt Helen wasn’t likeable enough.
“No-one ever has a problem with the man being slightly unlikeable,” she says. “But with a woman, it’s always, ‘Oh, I don’t know, is she a bit spiky; is she a bit this?’ So it was just so gratifying that people really took to her.”
Also really gratifying for Kitty is that her younger sister Penny gets to share in the success of Fisk. Penny, who originally found fame as a singer, is credited as co-writing the scripts. Kitty says she and Penny started putting on shows together when they were kids.
“We used to use my mum’s walk-in wardrobe as the off-stage area,” she remembers. “I don’t think we had an audience, though. We just did it for ourselves. What a pair of idiots! Putting on shows for nobody.”
Kitty with her sister and co-writer Penny.
(Image: Instagram)Kitty says Penny has always helped her with her comedy and calls her the “unsung hero” of her stand-up routines.
“She’s the only one who can give me that really honest feedback of, ‘That’s not funny enough yet,’ or ‘Now it’s good enough.’ The same with when I was writing spots on The Project. I wouldn’t really have a career without her. It’s nice she’s getting her name on stuff now.”
It might have taken Kitty – and Penny – decades to have a hit sitcom, but there’s a positive side to that.
“By the time we got there, I really knew what I wanted,” she says. “To all those people who are starting out – hang in there!”
The new season of Fisk premieres on Wednesday, 9pm, ABC
