Returning: Shrink Rap

Psychologist Dr. Pamela Connolly – better known as Pamela Stephenson – returns next month to get inside the heads of famous people in a new season of Shrink Rap.

In this series Pamela talks to comedienne Joan Rivers, legendry rocker Gene Simmons, actors Tony Curtis and Kathleen Turner, and controversial author Salman Rushdie.

Joan Rivers is the world’s highest-paid and most outrageous female comic. In this in-depth conversation we find out what’s behind this funny lady’s façade. Why she hates her body and hence her many plastic surgeries; and what she’s really like when the jokes stop.

Rivers tells of how she was betrayed by fellow chat show host Johnny Carson; about her struggle with bulimia; and about her enduring anger with her producer husband, Edgar, who killed himself 18 years ago after her TV show was cancelled – leaving her financially ruined.

In the wake of his death, when their daughter refused to talk to her for a year, Rivers admits that she contemplated suicide. But alone in her California home, gun at the ready, her Yorkshire terrier jumped in her lap. “I thought, ‘Somebody loves you’”, she says. “He truly saved my life.”

It airs 9:25pm Wednesday Dec 2nd on ABC2.