Larry Emdur: ‘There are so many a******s in this business’ but Gold means the world

Larry Emdur has taken home the Gold Logie for the Most Popularity Personality on Australian Television, saying he survived in an industry where “there are so many a******s.”

Accepting the well-earned media recognition, Emdur said: “Forty years I’ve been in this business, 40 years. For 25, maybe 30 times I’ve sat in this room and thought, ‘I wonder what it’s like sitting on this fancy table down here.’

“I asked my dad, when I went in for my first day on the job in the seven newsroom, I asked what I did and he said, ‘Just be nice to everyone’.”

“And after a few days, he asked me how it’s going and I said, ‘Dad, I’m trying but there are so many a******s in this business.’ Like, so many.” Emdur said to rapturous laughter from the audience.

Larry Emdur says he would be useless on a pub trivia team. He might host quiz show The Chase but that doesn’t mean he now has a library of facts at his disposal.

He can’t name the years of Constantine II’s reign or the atomic number of polonium. But then again, how many can?

“The fun fact that I’ve learnt is that I have no memory retention at all,” Emdur tells The Nightly. “I get home, and my wife would say, ‘What did you learn today’ and I’m like, ‘I have no idea’.”

His friends eager to have him on their trivia team had to be put straight — “I’m not getting smarter here, it’s not happening!” he told them.

That self-deprecating sense of humour is classic Emdur. So, when he says he was “embarrassed” by his Gold Logie nomination this year, it makes sense.

And when he called the campaign “a bit silly” and “not my thing”, it’s because he’s not comfortable with the competitiveness of the race. However, his win showed how much the award truly meant.

A mainstay of Australian TV for four decades, it’s bewildering to think that Emdur’s nomination this year was the first time he’s been in the hunt, ever. There were no Logie nods for his work on The Price is Right, and nothing previously for The Morning Show.

At 59 years old, he’s now hosting both The Morning Show and The Chase. “I’ve never been busier, and I’ve never been happier,” he says.

But the Logie thing? “I’ve never been comfortable doing anything like that, I’m just playing my own game, having fun with it, taking the mickey out of it. Anyone who follows me or knows me would think, ‘Of course, Larry is going to take the piss out of this’.

“That’s where I’m comfortable with it. But as for standing up with signs that say, ‘Go vote for me now’, I can’t really do that. But The Morning Show is right behind (the campaign) and The Chase is behind it so they can have fun and do the heavy lifting.”

It might come off as false modesty, but Emdur sincerely believed he was not going to win. He thought that he didn’t “jump out of the format” like his fellow nominees who he argued are bigger than the shows on which they appear.

“I live in the format, that’s my happy place,” he says.

“I don’t know if that’s Gold-worthy. It’s In Memoriam-worthy.” Well, Larry, Australia says it is Gold-worthy.

Emdur’s easy-going energy is in some ways in conflict with the other side of him, the side that is thoughtful, and whose longevity in a notoriously fickle industry comes from both going with the flow and also making considered decisions.

Emdur was 25 years old when he realised that when opportunities came calling, he should say yes — and it was saying no that taught him that valuable lesson.

“They asked me to do a show and I went, ‘No, that’s silly, and then someone else did it and it went well’.”

After that, he set himself a goal of saying yes to whatever came along before he turned 30. “I was not going to say no to anything,” he recalls. Before he closed out his third decade, The Price is Right came along. He said yes.

But if he realised at a young age that you have to jump when you can, he also understood early on that he couldn’t control what happened to him.

Friends outside of the industry knew how their career trajectories would go. You worked at one level and then you were promoted, there was a clear ladder. Not in TV. Even when he had an idea of what the next five years might look like, the axe could swing at any given moment.

When he was doing The Price is Right and everything was going well, he saw another major show get canned and after that, he started to put in the yards outside of TV, in property investment. So, when the axing happened to him not long after, he had a backup.

“I’ve done shows that have gone for two episodes,” he says. “I had a mortgage and two kids at school, and you sign on for six months and they go, ‘Oh, it’s not working, here’s your payout for three extra episodes’, and that’s that.

“Then you go, ‘OK, now my name’s s**t in the business, where do I go from here?’. You fill in some bits and we had to lean on the property investments, and you get around and feed your family.”

For many TV personalities, they get one big show and when it’s over, it’s over. But not for Emdur, who has jumped from Channel 10 to Channel 7 to Channel 9 and back again and back again.

It’s not just that he’s an affable presence on TV who engenders goodwill with the audience. He also has a long-held reputation for being a genuinely nice guy. He blushes when he hears this and explains that when he was a junior TV reporter, one of the things he did was celebrity interviews for Good Morning Australia.

“I must’ve had a run of them where they were arseholes,” he recalls. “There was something in me that went, ‘If I ever get to do anything other than just be a little reporter, I will never be like that’. They were divas, wankers and arseholes.

“Now, my late dad always said to me, ‘Just be nice to everyone, it’s easier than anything else you’ll ever do’. That’s stuck with me, and sometimes it’s hard in this business, there can be conflict and disagreements, but I like to think that with most people that I’ve interacted with and know in this business, that I’ve been a reasonable person.

“And there are people in this business who aren’t nice people.”

Three years ago, when he was approached to host The Chase, the last thing he was thinking about was taking on more work. He was approaching 60 and thought it was time to slow down.

“I saw myself retired now,” he says.

“I love the industry and I’ve had the best run, I’ve been so lucky in this business. My mates who are 60, 61 or 62 are retiring or thinking about retiring.”

But like in moments past, it became a matter of how often these opportunities come along.

“My wife and I concluded, just one more big hit, one more ride because who knows how it finishes, so may as well,” he says.

And some of those friends who have turned in their timesheets and went golfing, they’ve hated the past 40 years. But not Emdur, “I love it, if you’ve watched The Morning Show, it’s just fun, it’s not like a job”.

There’s no doubt TV has changed since he first started and he admits that his kids, 25 and 30, have not watched free-to-air TV in a decade. But he’s grateful for The Morning Show and The Chase’s devoted audiences and, at least right now, he can’t think of anything worse than retirement.

“But I need to look ahead, we all do in our lives,” he says.

“We all have to understand what’s next if you’re going to go another three, five or 10 years. In 10 years, I won’t be here, five years, I don’t know.

“It’s a frightening concept to consider because I was a kid when I started here, and I would look around at old people like me and go, ‘Geez, they’re old!’ and now I’m that guy.

“I’ve got to come to terms with the fact that I’m the old guy. I was fine while Kochie was here. He was the oldest, now Kochie’s gone, and I’m screwed!” he says with a laugh — a self-deprecating one.