Celebrity Apprentice films alternate endings

Julia Morris has ‘won’ Celebrity Apprentice.

And so has Jesinta Campbell, Shane Crawford and Jason Coleman. All four have filmed alternate endings in which they each win the Nine Reality series in a bid to stop the real answer from leaking out.

“They shot 4 different endings because of Twitter and Facebook and they can’t control it. So everybody won and everybody lost. It’s so ‘Who Shot JR!’” Morris told TV Tonight.

“The cast don’t know, the crew don’t know. The only people who know are Channel Nine and FremantleMedia and even then I think it is locked down to an absolute skeleton staff.

“Everybody has been booked for the same amount of publicity on Monday and Tuesday.”

Tonight Morris will be sitting down with friends and family to learn her fate.

“I will be stabbing people if they’re talking in my home. I am absolutely beside myself with excitement,” she says.

Morris and Campbell are the only participants never to face boss Mark Bouris in a final Board Room elimination. Since joining the series her “brand”, a term she freely admits she had never used before, has risen.

“Every single network has been on the phone, and I’m like ‘When did mummy come back into fashion?’ You could barely get a bloody raised eyebrow (before),” she laughs.

“I told Channel Nine I’ll host everything next year –the News, A Current Affair, everything!”

Comedian Morris has spent the last two years taking Drama classes in LA where she has been based with her family, flying to Australia for regular gigs to help pay the bills. When she was invited to join the series she leapt at the chance despite never having seen an episode of tseries erosion headed by Donald Trump.

“I always get excited when I’m invited to work, because I haven’t worked properly since 1976. I thought ‘I’m going to do that it sounds like heaps of fun!’

“I hadn’t seen the show so I watched it on the plane and nearly died,'” she admits.

“I thought ‘I’m in really big trouble here.’ But I just thought I would be out early in the piece because I don’t have the showbiz contacts to ask people for money. I ended up getting my mum and dad down for some of the challenges. And that was my inheritance they were spending.”

She joined without knowing who would make up the final cast, a group she wryly dubs ‘The ship of fools.’

“It’s generally not long after meeting people that I fall in love with them, no matter who they are or what they do,” she says.

“I adore Lisa Curry, I’m deeply in love with Jason Coleman, so at least I knew I would have someone to giggle with or turn to at the end of the day and say ‘Can you believe this insanity?’

“Everybody else I got to know through the challenges and what can only be described as a mental health facility. They were 17 hour days and we were just Weekend at Bernie’s by the end of it. They were wheeling us out to the next location. We could have died the week before but nobody noticed.”

Since working with so many overt personalities she has been forced to re-think her perception of several.

“Not a single opinion changed for worse which is awesome. You can’t spend that much time with people and not find their nice qualities. Of course everyone is going to be a pest, even the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with can be a pest on occasions and you love them deeply.

“Jesinta Campbell …I couldn’t be more filled with envy that she’s so amazing at only 20.

“As ‘oldies’ we just couldn’t stop talking about it. I said ‘I think I need to meet your mum’ because when someone is that amazing at that age it generally comes from their mum. And she told me her mum is beyond amazing and they have a fantastic relationship so it all starts to make sense.”

Then there was Pauline Hanson. Morris was living overseas during most of One Nation’s political blitz but even from a distance felt ashamed by the stance of her divisive views.

“I probably have about 10 straight friends and everybody else in my world is gay so her really destructive take on the gay community I personally took as incredibly offensive.

“But unfortunately she turned out to be an extremely pleasant woman in the flesh so I found that very confronting, because I wanted to dislike her. For the most part she was great fun and very warm and I don’t think I was expecting that. I wanted her to remain the poster girl that I disliked. Unfortunately she is one of many Australians who feel that way, which makes me sad, but there’s nothing I can do about that, and I tried in vain to change her mind about different things but it’s never going to happen,” she says.

“I know she was really disappointed that I was making smart arse comments into the camera afterwards, so I don’t think she’s very happy with me. I don’t know if she said I was two-faced or a bit of a bitch, which of course I’m both.”

She affectionately describes Shane Crawford as ‘distracting.’

“He would be giving instructions while he was Project Manager and all I would be hearing is “Wa wa wa wa wa wa’ and looking into those blue eyes, thinking ‘How on earth are you not kissing me by now?’

“Max I thought was going to be the devil but I found a lovely, warm side to him which I wasn’t expecting,” she concedes.

“Warwick Capper invited us up to his room for a private screening of his home-made porn film and I was like, ‘Warwick if I hadn’t committed to the hotel that I was going to clean the skirting boards tonight, I would love to see that.’

“With Warwick what you see, is what you get.”

She also defends Deni Hines against a furious audience backlash.

“What you saw on the television is not that way she was most of the time, or maybe I’m having a convenient memory loss because she was never like that to me. She was only ever warm and loving,” she insists.

“The backlash has been beyond confronting. It’s actually been quite frightening for her. The accusations of being a bully has been met with practically a lynch mob. The nastiness that has come back to her has been about 80-fold compared with anything she managed to say on the show.

“At least she’s an honest girl. If she doesn’t like you, you know it. If she likes you, you (also) know it. You get the full brunt of her passion either way.”

Morris says the nature of the programme has dictated the way Hines’ personality was portrayed on the screen.

“She’s not a nasty girl but she just doesn’t have a great editing booth in her head to think, ‘You know what, that might hurt someone’s feelings so I better not say it.’”

The furore reached fever pitch last week after Hines was brought back to the show alongside Max Markson, Didier Cohen and Polly Porter. It was an episode in which the finalists were upstaged by Hines and the editing of her tirades.

“It didn’t become about the 4 people who had made it through the show. We worked hard, we made it through, we caught the attention of Mr. Bouris to make it through the show. But it did make it incredibly watchable TV and the ratings speak for themselves,” she says.

“It’s frustrating, but what a shock that Reality TV is like that.”

Some personalities cracked under the weight of a punishing schedule and the glare of the cameras. On top of being in the make-up chair at 5am on some days and working until 9pm at night, there was the added pressure of soliciting friends to assist.

“Some mornings I was sending emails at 4 in the morning to my buddies pleading ‘Please, please come down even if it’s just for $20 bucks.’

“We were pumping on 4 and 5 hours’ sleep for six weeks, so it is going to bring out your tricky side.

“There was a lot of deep-breathing just to not get the shits with everything, and some people did. But having had 2 kids in your 40’s, there’s not that much that rattles me anymore,” she says.

“But you can’t fight for what you did without sounding like ‘I did this, I did that!’ That’s why on lots of occasions the perception of Jason is ‘Me, me me.’ But if you didn’t fight for what you did, you were gone. I didn’t have to do that because I didn’t get in that final Board Room.

“And if you didn’t one of those other ship-of-fools would take the glory for it and say ‘That was my idea!’ It happened a number of times.

“There were so many egos on one ship, as if it wasn’t going to sink….”

Morris also admits to insecurities that the series might not flatter her, that some may think she was mucking around and not working enough, or that her comedic personality may get on some people’s nerves. But she won challenges for her her charity.

“I think I’ve raised $110,000 for the National Breast Cancer Foundation and they are just open-mouthed. Woman’s Day approached me last week and said they would give them $10,000 if I got in a bikini. If it’s for charity I couldn’t care, I’ll be in a loincloth. And then on the day they said, ‘Wow these look like cover shots!’ And I thought ‘Someone tell the photographer to put on the Doris Day lens please,'” she jokes.

“But none of us are suffering from the diseases that we were promoting, so the wonderful thing about a show like this is that no matter how many there are on the ship of fools it’s giving a wonderful start to charities that people otherwise might never have heard of or be interested in.

“Mr. Bouris said to us on Day One, be willing to do anything for charity, that’s the secret.”

She is full of compliments for Bouris who barely needed a second take during the whole series.

“I guess it comes from his own Board Room and running a successful company for so long. Confidence doesn’t mean you’re going to be great at television but he barely tripped on his words. All of us who have been around for years were saying ‘That’s hard to do without take after take,’ which made us all love him more,” she says.

“I’ve got this weird ‘sexy-police’ relationship with him where I want to do something naughty so he’ll punish me.”

With her success in the series, Morris intends to remain in Australia for the next 12 months with her family, to capitalise on her new-found success. Most of her recent television gigs have required her to deliver punchlines, but Celebrity Apprentice has helped her showcase other aspects of her personality.

“It’s been such a wave of change with people telling me ‘I never really liked you but now I reckon you rock,'” she concedes.

“This was completely different to any other television I’d done before because it showed the person that my friends know.

“I don’t know what the next move will be but surely it will be better than commuting back and forth to LA.”

If she wins tonight her ‘brand’ may rise even higher. But first she has to defeat her competition: Jesinta Campbell, Shane Crawford and Jason Coleman.

Morris as always, has the last laugh.

“Whaddya mean Deni Hines won?”

Celebrity Apprentice finale airs 7:00pm tonight on Nine.
NB: TV Tonight blogging live results AEDT.