This was published 7 years ago
Eddie McGuire calls past media scandals 'storms in a teacup'
By Rob Moran
Discussing the joys of hosting Nine's Millionaire Hot Seat, the daily quiz show he's fronted in various formats since 1999, Eddie McGuire opens a can of worms.
"People are just looking to sit down with their family after school, maybe have dinner or sit around after a long day and have a bit of fun.
"They know there's not going to be anything that shocks or appals or anything like that."
It's a loaded statement from a guy who's been in the spotlight as much for his sound-bite controversies as his media gigs, from "boning" newsreader Jessica Rowe, to racially ridiculing Adam Goodes, to threatening to drown The Age footy journalist Caroline Wilson.
Eddie McGuire hosts the new hour-long Millionaire Hot Seat.Credit: Martin Philbey
Last July, he opened up on the scandals in an interview with GQ, implying contrition and saying the Goodes saga, for example, "burns me to the core". Now, he's whistling a more familiar tune.
"Ah, they're storms in a teacup really," he says about the headlines.
"You know, you're in the media. These days everything's over-dramatised and when you sit back and look at things they are very much overplayed and by a long way at times.
"Of course, in celebrity culture, if you're anywhere known at all, it gets exacerbated even further.
Last year's Hot Seat millionaire, Edwin Daly.Credit: Nine
"The great thing is that on a daily basis you have the opportunity to make somebody's life a bit more fun; it's a great privilege to have."
For McGuire, that privilege involves handing bags of money to strangers on Hot Seat, like 67-year-old Vietnam vet Edwin Daly who walked home with a million bucks last year.
"That was the ultimate," he says, going on a "not to sound twee" side-rant about helping some dude who was struggling during the GFC or some woman who "felt like a loser her whole life" until she got a question right on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.
"We genuinely give away a lot of money. I think we're up to nearly $40 million in the last eight years. From a contestant's point of view, it really is life-changing."
For many, they're just a couple of afternoon quiz shows for couch-ridden seniors. For Nine and Seven, Hot Seat and The Chase are the latest battlefront in an ever bitter ratings war.
Since debuting last September, Andrew O'Keefe's The Chase has steadily chipped away at Hot Seat's viewership numbers; more recently, the two shows have been wrestling back-and-forth in the ratings.
It's all fuelled speculation that a set of newly-announced changes to the latter – most notably, turning it into an hour-long thing starting at 5pm and reintroducing segments from its first incarnation as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, including lifelines – were a feverish reaction to Seven's encroachment on its audience, and that all-important lead-in to the evening's primetime news.
"Yeah, of course it is," McGuire says.
"[The time-slot] is massively important. It sets the tone, it has done forever. You can go back to the days when I worked at Channel 10 with Perfect Match; that was a huge lead-in to what was a great news service.
"You want that first strike in getting people to stay on your channel and watching the 6 o'clock news, which of course flows into the rest of your evening."
Relations between Nine and Seven have been fiery of late, the two networks notoriously locking horns in a ratings feud that even saw them battling in court over their rival breakfast shows last October.
"It's as intense as it's ever been, it hasn't changed since the day I walked into a television studio," McGuire says about the networks' rivalry.
"But that's the game you play. It's a combat sport in the media, whether it's free-to-air, pay TV, newspapers - the pressure's on every day."
The new Millionaire Hot Seat airs on Nine on weekdays at 5pm.