Mark Dapin

A HANDLE ON GRETEL

I am supposed to meet Gretel Killeen for lunch at the beautiful people's bistro at Bondi Icebergs Club, Sydney, but it is closed for a fashion shoot, so I wait for her in the craggy old fellas' bar next door. This is a problem for the former Big Brother host and Twitter-battered Logies presenter, because the bar is downstairs, and her bum is so big she finds navigating steps almost impossible.
There is a chairlift to help disabled people make their way to the pokies, but it would have to be much larger to accommodate the vast expanse of Killeen's posterior. Eventually, two huge bouncers, their muscles conditioned by daily workouts with 100-kilogram barbells, hoist her on their shoulders and carry her to my table, where the bar manager insists she take two chairs, one for each mountainous buttock, for "health and safety reasons".
Recent weeks have not been kind to Killeen, and she wears all the stress in her enormous bottom. Or so the 46-year-old author of the "gleefully exaggerated memoir" The Night My Bum Dropped would like you to think. In fact, she is perfectly slim, not gossip-magazine "dangerously thin", but trim and healthy looking, with sparkling white teeth and a bum like a bodybuilder's flexed biceps.
Killeen smiles continually, even while she expresses sadness or frustration, to show that she is not embittered or angry. She says she doesn't resent the people who have been unkind to her. She doesn't think about them. She doesn't even remember them. But there is sometimes a kind of brittle wistfulness about her. In her life, she says, she took risks, learned from her mistakes and moved on. "I was always pushing myself to the next thing, wondering if the next thing is going to be the answer," she says. "Now I realise there isn't going to be the perfect thing."
After the Logies night on May 3, when Killeen was abused in real time by Twitterers such as the comedian Wil Anderson, who said she "looks like a Lego person", and later on the radio by broadcasters who generally agreed with Triple M Sydney host Ugly Phil that she was "a bit flat, a bit rubbish", Killeen barely defended herself in the media. She hardly ever does.
She seldom gives serious interviews. Very little personal information can be gathered from The Night My Bum Dropped (which is out on Monday), a sort of extended comic monologue about an unemployed TV presenter with two children and a problematic relationship with her glutes. She says she has been burned by the media too many times. "There was a thing that appeared in the paper the other day that suggested I'd been staying in my house in Bondi, hiding from the Logies. And there was a photo that was allegedly me coming out. Well, I haven't lived in Bondi for six months. And during the 10 days they were referring to, I'd appeared on two radio shows, two television shows, written two magazine articles and written my book."
She wants to explain herself, to have people know what it's like to be Gretel Killeen, author, comedian, TV host and divorced mother of two. She would like them to understand that she is not a Lego person, that her career has been exhilarating but, at times, incredibly difficult. "I don't want to be portrayed in any way as whingeing about any of this stuff," she says, "because I don't see life negatively. I don't want to see it that way. I want to see the hope and opportunity in all of these things." As a writer, she says, living through a hard time "helps you with every character you create. It helps you with every person you meet. There are things that I have felt, as a result of my experiences, that I wouldn't wish on anyone. But I don't think they're a disadvantage to me."
Killeen was born in Sydney. her father is a management consultant, and her mother raised four girls and is "one of those people who does uncelebrated charity work ... meals on wheels, washing hair in hospitals, cooking meals at Legacy". Her surname is Irish, but the family left Ireland long ago. She grew up in Turramurra, in Sydney's north, where she says she felt like an alien, never comfortable, living in the wrong place. She would have liked to have been nearer more people, and closer to the sea.
She attended the Uniting Church's Ravenswood School for Girls in nearby Gordon, winning a scholarship from year 7 until graduation. She says she was good academically, not particularly competitive at sports, and only pretended to play the flute in the school orchestra, but was elected school captain. She is thankful for Ravenswood's academic focus, but says, "Catching the train from Turramurra to Gordon, meeting the boys at the train station - that was a highlight."
Her family are Methodists, and she stresses that she doesn't want to criticise their religion, but says, "It was kind of an austere upbringing. Methodists have a very strong work ethic. There's nothing wrong with a work ethic, but they could probably alter the work-ethic-to-fun ratio a little. Because there's just no joy in austerity: 'Gee, congratulations, you've made the room look bare and barren!' I don't think God put us here to be joyless.
"You grew up with a kind of a burden that there was something wrong with you, that anything you were about to do was wrong. And I don't think that just impacts on your physical actions; it also can tend to make you feel like your thoughts are wrong, your personality is wrong, your pursuits are wrong. From the age of three, I just wanted more than to take the gamble that you behave yourself in a repressed manner on earth in the hope you'll be rewarded in a kind of Methodist way when you die. I always wanted more."
When she left school, she lived in inner-city Darlinghurst with a "bikie" flatmate. She went to the University of NSW, hoping to find like-minded people, but left her commerce/law course after six weeks, without meeting any. She travelled around Europe, then returned to Australia and enrolled in communications at the then NSW Institute of Technology for two years. She was living with her boyfriend when the two of them were involved in a car accident - neither of them was driving - and the boy died. In grief, she abandoned her studies and headed off to Europe again. "I just kind of wanted to be rescued," she says. "It's just that no one wanted to rescue me."
There was a storm of comic creativity when Killeen returned to Sydney in the 1980s, with edgy, shambolic shows staged in squats, warehouses and empty factories across the inner suburbs. The city's biggest stand-up comedy venue was the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe. Andrew Denton used to appear there; Robin Williams, over from the US, once dropped in to perform an impromptu 90-minute set. Killeen, who had begun performing while still a student, liked it so much she married the owner. She met Mark Morgan, whose family ran the hotel, after a gig, and they were wed 13 weeks later. Killeen was 24.
She says stand-up was a challenge, even when her confidence had grown, because "you're not meant to make yourself the centre of attention in ... certain philosophies, so it was strange to be doing that, I can assure you". But it was joyous because when the audience laughed, she felt she had found people who understood her.
For two years, Morgan and Killeen lived above the pub, then moved to Whale Beach on Sydney's northern beaches when she became pregnant with their son, Ezekiel. The marriage lasted five years. When Killeen and Morgan split up, she took Ezekiel and his younger sister, Epiphany, to live in a house in Darlinghurst; Morgan eventually moved to the US.
Killeen began doing advertising voiceover work, imitating old ladies and young children, a pair of swinging doors or a speaking chair. She describes the 1980s in advertising as "a time of great indulgence, great camaraderie and rampant sexual harassment. What you would get relentlessly, everywhere you worked, was if you bent over to pick something up, the line, 'While you're down there ...' "
But it was a great job for a single mother because she could work in her own time and the children could come with her to the studio. In fact, both kids ended up working in voiceover themselves, just as they provided illustrations for some of the children's books she wrote in the same period. She then moved into television with appearances on Ray Martin's Midday show and Beauty and the Beast with the late Stan Zemanek. "I keep wanting to raise the stakes," she says. "I was always pushing myself to the next thing."
When killeen was first contacted to audition as the host for Big Brother in 2001, she turned down the offer. She suspected that, since she wasn't young, blonde and un-opinionated, she was just being called in to make up the numbers. "I couldn't understand why they'd be interested in me," she says.
She already had a very busy life, with her TV, radio and writing work. "It was so hard," she says. "I was so exhausted I was on the edge of crying every day just to exist, let alone not having somebody to share the responsibilities with, to share the decisions with. There's the physical exhaustion, the emotional exhaustion and the mental exhaustion, and on top of that you go out and you've got to be creative, so it really, really was hard. Sometimes when people threw their slings and arrows, I used to think, 'Walk in my shoes for one day. Know what this life is really like, and then we'll see.' "
Killeen eventually agreed to try out for the show when she was told the producers wanted somebody who "could ask tough questions but also empathise ... who could mother people, in a way, but was edgy as well". The format of the first season was simply that 12 young people from different backgrounds should try to live together in isolation from the rest of the world, and see how well they could get on before they were voted off. Killeen looks back on those early days as an age of innocence, when everything was new, exciting and pure, without all the stunts and gimmicks that characterised the following seasons.
"As time progressed," she says, "we needed drama, drama, drama, and that's what we've created in our society, too. You can see that in women's magazines now, and in much of the news coverage - simple information is not enough. It has to be coloured in and exaggerated and sometimes completely fabricated, because we live in this hyper-real situation. It's created an appetite where normality is not enough, and I'll be interested to see how it plays out, because I don't think that's an eternally expanding notion. You can't continue to inflate things. One day, it's got to pop."
Big Brother became one of the most popular shows in Australian TV history, renewed and revitalised year after year. As each new group of housemates came and went, Killeen was the only constant, interviewing every surprised and bewildered suburban kid who emerged blinking from the compound into the light. Online columnist and commentator Tim Brunero, who was a Big Brother contestant in 2005, says that during his time in the house, when the housemates talked about what they were looking forward to when they got out, "it wasn't a holiday or a car or the instant fame ... it was getting to go on stage with Gretel. All these kids in the house saw her as their defender, their friend, and almost as a de-facto mother."
While the housemates were in their enclave, the production team were in theirs. "We were in a parallel universe to the world that the rest of society was experiencing," says Killeen. "I used to go up [to the Gold Coast] on a Saturday, maybe come back on a Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on how many shows there were. I'd look after my children, give them the extra nurturing they hadn't had for those couple of days, do all the meetings and styling and writing, then fly back up. There were times when I wouldn't eat a meal that wasn't on a plane. We'd finish doing a season of Big Brother and everyone would get sick. We were so physically and mentally worn out. Everyone would miss each other ... There was such a sense of community, because it was so intense."
As the public face of the producers, Killeen began to draw more attention and more criticism, and she was also attacked personally for her relationship with the former housemate Daniel "Saxon" Small. After the 2006 "turkey slapping" episode, in particular, in which one male housemate held down a laughing female while another rubbed his penis in her face, the show became the focus for wider doubts about reality TV and new media. Even the then PM, John Howard, called on Channel Ten to "get this stupid program off the air".
"It was like progress and the past came into conflict," says Killeen, "and people became scared: scared of teenagers, scared of society." For the first few years, she adds, there was an extraordinary energy and excitement around the show, but then "something happened, and I don't know what it was, but 'hysteria' became the word ..." The show, she says, offered an opportunity "for people to learn what others thought, to look into different lifestyles and to understand each other better. And I was astounded that while many people did do that, other people chose to deepen the walls they built around themselves, and I don't really know what that achieved. But I do know there was one night when we put on a show where we had to toe the line very, very strictly on what we could say, and a show that appeared on another channel straight after us was about a woman who had been sexually violated and her head was found in a bag, and that was okay. We have a different level of censorship about things that are said by real people and things that occur in dramas."
Brunero says: "Gretel as the host became a focus for a lot of the ire, but it wasn't like she was creating the show herself. It was an army of producers who made the content. This was a show that aired every day, sometimes for two or three hours. She couldn't possibly be responsible for it."
Kris Noble, Big Brother's executive producer from the fourth season to the seventh, says, "She always put herself out there. She felt responsible for everything that happened, so she was taking the blame - sometimes when she needn't have, because it was the producer who had done something. When things did go wrong, Gretel and I would be hunkered down in a room, trying to work out our next move, because it impacted on the show, it impacted on the network, on the production company, and on Gretel personally ... She wasn't just the host, she was the face of the show, and she was the one who answered the questions when there was a problem."
Killeen left the show at the end of the 2007 season. in time-honoured TV fashion, she insists the split was "mutual". Suddenly, she was the "former Big Brother host", carrying a different kind of baggage. "People talk about the psychological effect of being in a confined space in a fishbowl on the Gold Coast for 3 1/2 months," says Brunero, "but few people talk about the effects it must have on the host. It was one of the most high-profile jobs on television, on a massively successful but unruly brand, and she will forever be stapled to the brand, and nine years after it started not everyone has the most positive view of that brand."
Since then, Killeen has travelled to Iraq to entertain the troops and made advertisements about unexploded munitions in Laos, but she came under the heaviest fire when she presented the Logies in Melbourne. She was criticised for her hair, her dress, her jokes, her script, her timing and her delivery. In the opening skit, she was shot dead - and it's never a good idea to die on stage. As the show progressed, she actually went to heaven, although Wil Anderson twittered from the audience, "We are in hell." She will not speak directly about the Logies other than to say the response to her performance was "entirely disproportionate. Anyone who couldn't see that it was inflated and an over-reaction is not going to have their minds changed by my words."
But, she says, "One of the things that has happened in our society is we've created a culture that some refer to as tall poppy but I think could also be referred to as bullying. We're so concerned with bullying within schools, without an awareness of the bullying that we hear on breakfast radio shows and in the magazines and so many newspapers, which is about making someone the butt of a joke. And the logical consequence of that is it tells people it's okay to treat other people like that.
"I've had seven years of practice at being a target, and I'm reasonably strong, but I fear one day the lies and the fabrications and the elaborations will hurt someone irreparably ... There are no limits on this. There aren't people stopping it. It's only when you've felt it that you know what it's like."
Killeen is still single. She says she is looking for "those hand-picked individuals that adjoin your life, that stop you feeling like you're the only one". "You want to avoid feeling lonely," she says. "You're looking and looking for those people you can identify with. Life would've been much simpler if I could've fallen in love with one of those boys on the train, and got married and stayed there. I wouldn't necessarily have had a life that was as exciting, but it might've had as much contentment. Mine is a life of searching, rather than everything actually being there."