An Australian media institution is over. A 16-year, 4500ish-episode long experiment in News Delivered Differently has come to an end. And a whole bunch of my friends are suddenly unemployed. So first, to them, I’m so sorry to hear. I know how much a part of your life The Project has become. It’s been an epic run.
Like many others, I’m sad that Australia is losing a long-running home for talent of all stripes, both on- and off-screen. It could never last forever, but its loss will be felt across the media and entertainment industries at a time when jobs in those fields are particularly precarious. It was a rare beast on commercial TV and I doubt we’ll see its like again.
I was there for just over half of its lifespan, writing words for the hosts, but it was the hosts themselves who have put it so well that it feels that, this time, they write for me. I can’t really top the words of the woman who spearheaded the show for the first thirteen years, Carrie Bickmore.
“I’ve made so many friends on that show, and I’m thinking of them all today. Many of them are still there and had to hear the news yesterday that they don’t have a job anymore. If you are looking for people to employ in this industry, they are some of the most talented people you will find. Their ability to pivot and cover light and shade and be on top of the news, finding a completely different angle is a certain suite of skill sets not a lot of people have. They’re just bloody awesome people.”
Behind the desk
Being such an unusual show, this news / comedy / entertainment / documentary hybrid brought together a lot of people from different backgrounds with widely varying skillsets.
Over the years, hundreds of people have occupied The Project’s offices and they were the best types of folks. Having to conjure 44 minutes of TV-worthy material together each day, you had to throw yourself into it. Fortunately, you were backed by a machine honed to output a format which, after an initial evolution, remained remarkably resiliant to change.
Each day was a clean slate. Yesterday’s problems, with a few longer-term exceptions, were wiped. As the day progressed, the show assembled itself like clockwork, adapting to the news itself on the fly. From Prime Ministerial overthrows to unexpected prison releases, the team never knew when entirely new segments would be required. Footage found. Graphics re-animated. The clockwork cranked to triple speed.
The 2016 US election is seared into my memory, as the entire mood of the newsroom flipped. In the morning, Hillary Clinton was going to win. By the time of broadcast, it was the crowning of Trump. In The Project office it was like a tornado had hit, as the bulk of an episode had to be torn up and rewritten from scratch.
Sometimes the call was coming from inside the building, the live show falling victim to inevitable technological mishaps. One time when we couldn’t get any video footage off the server, the co-hosts mimed the news that Carrie was reading. It was something that could only ever happen on The Project.
There was a continual stream of doing weird shit. Everyone made cameo appearances in stock footage, that have remained on file in perpetuity. Maybe in the next fortnight I’ll make one last appearance as Person Pretending To Sneeze #4 or Suspicious Co-worker Peering Over Monitor.
Sometimes there were more involved assignments. One day I spent half an hour as the Pope, stuck in the 10 lift.
Unlike the lift the actual Pope was stuck in, this one wasn’t shut down. Project and Ten employees just got in at their floor to find a papal figure banging on the doors, or sitting on the floor bouncing a ball against the wall.
Or there was that time when Dr Wally Daly, with his stuck-on moustache half-dropped-off, followed up quite publicly on my sensitive groinal medical condition in a segment about whether to register for My Health Record.
News delivered differently.
The writers’ room
I was initially employed as the Web Producer, meaning I was running The Project website. But that role was ensconsed within the writers’ room, bridging my previous jobs of TV comedy writer and website builder. From the start, I ensured I also got to write some gags.
There were two types of writer on The Project: producers and writers. Producers typically wrote the scripts for their segments and produced them that day, usually from germ of an idea to fully finished 2-3 minutes, frequently while tracking down interview subjects and drafting questions. Incredible. Rather than segments or stories, they were called “bumpers”, a thoroughly entrenched piece of Project lingo, a rebranding of a term used on other programs for short video content on either side of ad breaks. For The Project, alongside news headlines and interviews, bumpers made up the meat of the show, fuelled by razor-sharp editing and the best motion graphics in the country.
For the writers in the room of that name, our job was primarily to add comedy. We wrote gags for the hosts, to be hand-delivered an hour before air time for them to spot a line that they could pull out and drop into what was otherwise quite a natural, unscripted conversation – in Project-speak: “chat”. The 4-6 members of the writers’ room, drawn from standup stages or the world of comedy writing, would write jokes for the half-dozen-ish chats in your standard episode, and any bumpers that were deemed jokeworthy.
But the writers’ room was far beyond a mere joke-generating machine. On a rostered basis each writer had a shift which involved other tasks, for instance:
- News: finding, pitching and assembling briefs for the chats, briefing the writers with their first rundown of the show
- Script: writing and revising all the scripted elements for the autocue, including making changes from the control room during rehearsal and taping
- Web: running the website including writing and publishing a couple of articles based on the night’s stories
- Socials: being the voice of the show online and the first line of defense when, as happened fairly regularly, something really blew up
- Feedback: harvesting and collating feedback from social media and email for possible use on air
- Funnies: collaborating with tonight’s host sitting in the Funnies chair on scripting intros and tags to the Funnies, which were whatever potentially amusing clips the Funnies team (a separate team of sharp comic brains, despite what you might think was the handicap of being called “Funnies”) had dug out of trawling through as much televisual media as they could humanly consume.
You usually had to snatch an hour or so to scribble down a couple of dozen gags among the other duties and meetings. If you wrote them too early in the day, there was always a chance a chat might have to change. Perhaps we couldn’t verify it had happened, or it turned out it’s three-year-old news. Sometimes it had to make room for news that broke during the day, or a headline that the hosts really wanted to chat about.
Of course, being a writers’ room, whiteboards were essential. Where else were we going to memorialise our quotes?
The control room
The script shift was a role only entrusted to the most experienced writers. For the last two or so hours of the day you’d be embedded in the control room, updating the autocue script with the newsroom and the hosts through pre-recorded interviews, rehearsal and during the show. This was usually a long way from comedy writing, but it still required perfect timing, and knowing which of the myriad voices in your ear needed a response.
David Knox in his in-depth behind the scenes article for TV Tonight captured this shot from the script chair, with the script monitor itself turned sideways. Those four little lights on the upper row of that black box in the foreground represent the channels from the writer to the four hosts.
I might not need to do much on a night where everything was in order, but when the news was shifting, I was swept up in a flurry of clicking, typing, coordinating with the control room, the news room, the floor crew and the hosts, ensuring latest changes were communicated and read through in advance – while trying not to get in anyone’s way.
I watch The Project today and the ad breaks feel interminable. In the control room, they sometimes felt like a flash as we workshopped a new intro to a bumper.
On only one occasion I can remember, the host came out of the studio and took my chair to rewrite his own intro, leaving me with hands free.
Celeb encounters
As you can see, I was uncool around celebrity, and though it often did feel like brushes with fame were literally just around the corner, I limited my exposure. One time I asked the social media manager if I could take the photo of childhood hero of mine Neil Finn, but that was not a mistake I’d make twice, as it wasn’t until I’d returned to the lift that I realised the photo I’d actually intended to take for The Project’s socials was so out of focus, that I needed to go back to take another. Eric Idle, Bill Oddie and Peter Capaldi were the only other times I dared meet the guests.
There was already more than enough celebrity in my life sitting in on meetings and working with the hosts. It was a privilege to see them discuss each story for the first time, bring their own insights to what the producer had put together, suggesting new angles and questions for guests, or where they anticipated a chat might go.
Because this entire machine fed through the hosts to the audience, and everything came out with their imprint on it. Despite what you might think, a show needn’t be categorised as scripted or unscripted, it can be both, and no show better illustrated that than The Project.
Different hosts brought different dynamics. For me, perhaps because it coincided with the era when I was often in their ears, there was a special alchemy about the Bickmore / Aly / Helliar frontline, especially with someone like Rachel Corbett as “the fourth”.
What Project?
The Project. It’s an enigmatic name. The original name of The 7pm Project made sense, even if it felt to me only a slight step from Placeholder Name Please Delete. But once the show moved to 6:30, some time before I got there, the timeslot nomenclature had to go, it became this mysterious title. What is The Purpose of The Project?
I feel it’s a show that has made a difference. It has boosted and even launched charities, most notably Carrie’s Beanies For Brain Cancer. Segments like Waleed’s Something We Should Talk About shifted the Overton Window on a number of important topics, often going viral. It walked a delicate line but tried to speak to the heart of Australia.
I think that’s one reason why it’s a show people of all different stripes love to hate on. News of its demise has been greeted by an outpouring of malicious glee from both sides of the ideological spectrum. Despite those prominent critical voices, the show was a survivor. It was remarkable how many people I met, from all walks of life, who said it was theirs, or their partner’s, or their parents’, favourite show.
I feel it was at its best with hosts who brought their authentic, considered responses. Gags were great, but I came to learn that they often worked best when embedded in a genuine conversation. The Project was never limited to just finding the funny side of the news. Through allowing the panel to laugh it opened up a space for them to show their feelings, and brought a heart rarely seen on commercial TV.
Ending on a high
My final year there was 2020. The first year of COVID. I was frequently the only writer on site, the bustling writers’ room boiled down to a single isolated desk. The writers’ room became a writers’ Zoom. I spoke with the floor and the control room via a comms panel bussed in from last century.
While The Project’s ratings generally declined over the years, 2020 was an exception. Sometimes over 800,000 people were watching, figures we hadn’t seen for almost a decade. When the news was a pandemic and lockdowns, it seemed people wanted it delivered differently. Being I think the only daily show coming out of Melbourne, The Project was also able to reflect what it was really like during those long COVID-Zero lockdowns, rather than having Sydneysiders tell us what we should be feeling.
With most of the world trapped in their homes, Pete launched the Life In Lockdown segment, a compilation of Funnies pulled from social media. (Often the burgeoning new platform TikTok, embracing the online culture that in the long run was a significant contributor to the lingering death of TV.)
The studio audiences were missing, so Pete started to play more to his fellow hosts, especially Waleed and Carrie, trying to get a laugh out of them. And one time I came across a TikTok from a music teacher trying to express the mixed emotions around online teaching.
I think Waleed laughed for most of the ad break. The pure joy that this clip brings me is how I like to remember The Project. A slick, professional news program with room for mates to make each other pack up laughing.
Another personal favourite moment was another surreal Pete and Waleed exchange that I got to direct, thanks in part to the kindness of someone who’d sent us cushion covers with our hosts’ faces on them.
RIP The Project. I am so grateful I got to work on this show, it made me a better person. To all the alumni, all the best for the future – you guys rock.
