Charlie Pickering reveals surprising secret from The Project's early days
Former The Project host Charlie Pickering has opened up about the show's origins in a new interview with news.com.au – and revealed that he and Carrie Bickmore were never originally intended to take on hosting roles on the show.
Pickering speaks to news.com.au's Andrew Bucklow for Monday's episode of the From the Newsroom podcast, reflecting on his time on The Project after news last week that the show will be axed later this month after 16 years on-air.
Back when it debuted in 2009, the show was called The 7pm Project and teamed Pickering, Bickmore and comedian Dave Hughes as joint co-hosts. At the time, Hughes was by far the most well-known of the three.
'One thing I remember very clearly about this show: Carrie and I were never meant to host it. It was an accident of showbiz that that happened,' Pickering revealed on From The Newsroom.
Pickering said that Bickmore, who back then had a regular gig as a newsreader on Rove Live, was earmarked for a similar role on The Project, expected to sit at the end of the desk and offer occasional news headlines.
Pickering, then an up-and-coming comedian, would sit at the other end of the desk to offer light relief and be a 'regular correspondent' for the show, delivering a couple of stories per week.
With the pair locked in as satellite panellists, the search was on for actual hosts – and Pickering and Bickmore were enlisted to help with the audition process.
The pair were on hand as the audition process ran 'for two or three days straight,' sitting on either end of the panel as pairs of more famous hosts were brought in to bounce off them during mock episodes.
'I think it was Good Morning Australia – they'd finish recording in the morning in the studio, then we'd move in a desk [and audition hosts],' he said.
Pickering said that to keep the auditions consistent, they used the same stories with each auditionee: 'Carrie would do the headline, then I'd chip in and have an opinion … and I got bored doing the same thing all the time, so I'd change my opinion on each story, try to think of different jokes. I was sitting there for two, three days, just trying to make as many jokes and have as many different opinions on the same stories as I could.'
Bickmore, too, started to go off-script as the auditions wore on.
'She got bored of reading the same headlines over and over, so she started to get more involved in the conversations [with the panel],' he said.
Pickering said that at the end of their final day of auditions, they'd made it through every auditionee and there was still '15 minutes' left before they had to vacate the studio.
One of the producers tasked with casting the show suggested they use their final 15 minutes doing a take with just Pickering and Bickmore on the panel.
'This was my Eminem, ' If you only had one shot …' moment,' he said. 'I put the [host's] earpiece in – and I'd never really had to use one before, had never read an autocue before. But I had an advantage: I'd watched every audition, and I knew what had worked and what didn't. I sat in one host's chair, Carrie in the other host's chair … and it just clicked straight away.
'For me personally, it felt like the most natural thing I've ever done. Hosting, hitting the autocue, guiding the conversation. And Carrie was more experienced than I was on TV, so she was really comfortable and we both just had fun,' he said.
Once they'd finished, Pickering went home and thought of it as a 'fun' exercise in gaining some technical experience: 'Now I know what it's like to read an autocue,' he remembered thinking.
An hour or so later, he received a call from his manager: The show's producers wanted to continue the audition process with he and Bickmore, this time with just one more host: Dave Hughes.
He said that one new directive made him realise he was being considered for a more central role than end-of-desk funnyman.
'They said, 'we've gotta get you to wardrobe, because you can't wear what you're wearing,'' he recalled.
'All of a sudden, I was not visually presentable for the job that they now wanted me for.'
The Project debuted on July 20 2009, with Pickering, Hughes and Bickmore remaining the show's central trio until Hughes left at the end of 2013. Pickering exited a year later, with Bickmore eventually becoming the longest-running host in The Project' s history, staying with the show until 2022, a year in which Peter Helliar, Tommy Little and Lisa Wilkinson all also left.
Pickering, who now hosts The Weekly on the ABC, said it was a 'real shame' that The Project will come to an end on June 27, bringing its 16-year run to an end.
'In my five years, I think I hosted something like 1300 or 1400 hours of television. It was the best place to learn how to make TV.'
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