Vale: Pat Lavelle

Producer Pat Lavelle, who worked on The Mike Walsh Show, Beauty & the Beast and This is Your Life, has died aged 95.

She worked at Channel Nine in Sydney from 1975 – 1996 as well as two years at 10 from 1982 – 1984.

The Mike Walsh Show office in 1977:
Writer Bill Wallace writer Segment Producer Pat Lavelle, Host Mike Walsh, Producer John Chapman, Segment Producer David Mitchell, and Executive Producer David Price.

Former Mike Walsh Show producer David Mitchell told TV Tonight, “I first met Pat Lavelle, who left us on Friday evening at the grand age of ninety five, fifty years ago when she was appointed as a new segment producer for The Mike Walsh Show at Channel 10. She had worked for Radio 2GB as a Programme Assistant and sometime voice-over announcer. She then worked for Grace Brothers in Promotions but the MWS was her first television job.

“David Price and Mike Walsh insisted that, even though she was a decade older than babies like me and David Lyle, it was advantageous to employ a person of the same age as our target demographic.

“However they didn’t get what they had bargained for in Pat. She was a fiercely intelligent woman. A perfect producer to oversee a transmogrification in the Australian housewife from 1975, when working mothers were jeered from the studio audience, to 1981 where diversity and feminism were beginning to be cheered by the same cohort.

“When Mike Walsh moved on, Pat found a soulmate in the show’s new host, Ray Martin and her keynote determination had a new champion.

“As producer on Beauty and the Beast and, This is Your Life, Pat continued to make her indelible mark.

“A moniker that I will always treasure is ‘AYPL.’ It was conferred upon Pat by the Melbourne Truth newspaper at a time she was commissioned to do typical Mike Walsh Show story in which she was told to offer herself as a willing sex worker for a series of Melbourne houses of ‘ill repute.’

“The Truth breathlessly reported that, ‘Attractive Young Pat Lavelle’, had been offered several lucrative positions (which, I assure you were positions she never took up).

“In any case, the acronym ‘AYPL’ stuck.

“Vale, Pat.”