More Parkinson than Don Lane, Fran Kelly is ready for a new challenge.

EXCLUSIVE: 

There’s a couch for guests, a resident house band and a space for performances on the brand new set of ABC’s Frankly, but host Fran Kelly insists the show will be interview in style, and not emulating late night variety shows.

“We are definitely more Parkinson than Don Lane!” she tells TV Tonight.

“People keep saying, ‘More like Graham Norton?’ I’m not a comedian but I am a hopefully a warm, friendly and witty person and hopefully that will be on display.

“It’s an interview show. So there’s a band which is a reflection of my interest in music. We want to make it an ‘up’ show for people on a Friday night.

“There’ll be three interviews who join me, one by one, on the couch. By the end of it, there’ll be the three interviewees on the couch with myself.

“That’s where the magic happens, because you can’t script those things”

“In amongst that, hopefully we get connections. Norton does it, and does it well. That’s where the magic happens, because you can’t script those things.”

It’s Kelly’s first foray into hosting a show of this kind on television, having previously been a political correspondent for The 7:30 Report, Europe correspondent for ABC News, presenter of The Howard Years documentary and two 3 month stints as Insiders host.

Yet Kelly had 16 years as host of RN Breakfast which in its final daily hour devoted considerable airtime to conversations with performers, writers, scientists and achievers.

“That’s the genesis for this show -basically all the interviews I used to do in Breakfast across those years, except for the politicians. I was very sad to lose that palette, so that’s where the idea came from.”

She’s also under no illusions that Television requires different skills to Radio hosting.

“Of course it does. But that’s the challenge: to do something new and different. What I want to bring to it is some of the skills and the strengths that I built up on Breakfast,” she insists.

“Hopefully I can get some warm, smart and entertaining interviews and chat on the couch.”

The house band is known as the Fanatics.

“It’s a rock and roll band. It’s all the bits of me, I suppose,” she continues.

“The set is beautiful. It’s classy. It’s not shiny floor. It’s more living room, I suppose. But it’s pretty stylized and stylish.

“Lighting is going to be really key to change the feel of it. We’ve got a stage to the left where the band is and we will be having live performances so we’ve got a stage for that as well.”

After a recent pilot episode, the first episode records in Sydney this Wednesday with guests Shaun Micallef, anaesthetist and Thai cave rescuer Dr Richard Harris, astrophysicist and science communicator Kirsten Banks and music from Charlie Collins.

“I suspect there’ll be a very big crossover with my RN Breakfast audience because Friday night at home is a pretty loyal ABC following and that’s really who I had on RN as well,” she explains.

“It’s following Gardening Australia, which we know has a big audience. So I’m pretty excited about that. And it’s primetime.

“I want to bring in a new audience, if I can”

“I guess it’s an over-50s audience by and large. We’ll be working hard for the ideal audience, obviously, and there are going to be some surprising people in the line-up. I hope there’ll be some sort of edgy people in the line-up too. So we’ll be doing our best to stretch that Reach through social media and iview as well. I want to bring in a new audience, if I can. Which is really everything I tried to do on RN Breakfast.”

Yet the announcement of her show also led to some press questioning why Kelly was given the hosting job over new and younger talent? That’s despite other ABC shows being fronted by names such as Alex Lee, Jan Fran, Marc Fennell and recently, 160 episodes of Tonightly with Tom Ballard.

“Look, I understand that, if we’re making a new show, why don’t we give someone new a go?” she replies.

“Except it’s not the kind of show. This is a show in my view, for an experienced interviewer. This is a show for someone with my breadth of experience across a range of formats. I had a life in music and theatre and a whole lot of things before I was a political journalist. So I’m going to bring all that breadth of experience to this couch. That’s what this show is designed around. There’s plenty of other shows that can and will be done, I’m sure. But that’s not the show.

“I also, quite frankly, have spent a lot of my life in times when women were fighting to be heard and seen. I’m thankful for the chance to be able to have a voice and for that voice to be able to be heard and seen on the ABC. I feel like I’ve earned that chance and I’m really looking forward to it.

“It’s a long time since we’ve a show like this at all, let alone one fronted by a woman”

“It’s a long time since we’ve had a show like this at all, let alone one fronted by a woman….. Wendy Harmer and The Big Gig? That was a very different show to this.”

I ask if there were any early elements of the show’s development which were discarded? Was there ever any talk of having a sidekick, for instance?

“No, never a sidekick. In fact, it was a really good start,” she explains.

“We wanted to try and get that camaraderie on the couch”

“I put the idea forward. They said yes to the idea…. they said yes to a band….yes to a live audience. So you know, it’s all been on the upside, really. We decided early on that we would have people on the couch. That was important, because, obviously a lot of people you’d love to talk to you for a show like this are working in New York or Hollywood. The temptation was to have the big screen, especially after a couple of years of COVID we all got used to that. But we decided we wanted to try and get that camaraderie on the couch. That was the signature of this show.”

With rehearsals done and just days to go, Kelly is ready to unveil her new baby of 8 episodes with a mix of excitement and nerves.

“Once the band starts playing, I am alone on that big shiny set. So there’s that!”

Frankly screens 8:30pm Fridays on ABC.