Myf Warhurst, 38, says life gets better with age. Picture: Manuela Cifra Source: Herald Sun
Myf Warhurst is hoping to travel after Spicks and Specks. Picture: Manuela Cifra Source: Herald Sun
MYF Warhurst is unemployed, and you can't help feeling happy for her.
At 38, when many of her mates are juggling kids, meetings and mortgages, the TV star is financially stable, footloose and fancy-free – and excited by what the blank page of her future holds.
Her big break was as a regular on ABC-TV’s hit music quiz Spicks and Specks, which is finishing this month after seven seasons.
It’s going out on a high while audiences "still like the show and don’t hate us", Warhurst says. "I’ve been sacked from other jobs before, so it’s nice to go, ‘I choose to leave now’." she is, of course, referring to her ill-fated stint on commercial radio, but we’ll get to that.
Comedian Adam Hills was living in London when he got the call to host Spicks and Specks. With Alan Brough installed as one of the team captains, a female counterpart was needed. Hills’ housemate suggested Warhurst, whom he’d heard on Triple J. "I went to an audition and had a job in about three days," Warhurst says. "I remember Mum saying, ‘You’d better tape the first few episodes just in case’."
She needn’t have worried. The show has since generated an average weekly audience of 1.3 million for ABC1, spawned DVDs and board games and won both an AFI and a Logie. and as a last hurrah after the final episode airs on November 23, Warhurst and the gang hit the road for a national tour with a stage version of the show, Spicks and Speck-tacular – The Finale.
As well as the odd celebrity interview for Channel 10’s The Project, Warhurst has just finished filming a six-part documentary for Aunty called Myf Warhurst’s Nice. The series, which looks at everyday cultural icons such as the Chiko Roll, is due to air next year. but apart from that?
"I’m not sure what comes next," Warhurst says with her trademark grin. "my options are open, but I’m quite happy with that. It’s exciting because I’m not ready to settle down. I’ve got itchy feet at the moment. me and my partner (her beau of two years, musician Mike Noga, who plays drums in The Drones) are thinking of maybe heading overseas a bit next year. We’ll see what happens.
"Life gets better with age," she adds. "Less insecurities, less worries and I don’t have kids to add to those, so it’s a really good time in my life. my friends have big stresses with families and that kind of thing and I’m a bit selfish, but it’s a nice position to be in. I could travel if I wanted to, and for the first time in my life I can afford to do that kind of stuff. Life’s actually pretty good. Can’t complain."
Warhurst was born in 1973 in Portland in Victoria’s southwest, and raised in Donald in central Victoria. The family settled in Red Cliffs, 16km out of Mildura, when she was eight. for several years, they also owned a citrus farm just over the NSW border, and come harvest time they’d live in a converted W-class tram bought for $500. ("It’s still there," Warhurst exclaims, showing me a pic of it on her iPhone, taken during a recent expedition to the bush to find her former home.)
Her full name is Myfanwy. She’s not named after anyone; her parents Nancye and Ed, both high-school teachers, just liked the name. "They were into giving their kids weird names before that was the done thing. (Oldest brother) Shaun got the normal name, then they lost their minds after that. my other brothers, Kit and Andre, then me."
Being the only girl, she was a tomboy. "Not that I knew what that was even ’til I got older. We’d laugh all the time. I thought it was excellent (having brothers), and meeting all their friends as I was growing up was even better."
Her brothers are all musical (Kit was in Aussie band Rocket Science), and Warhurst studied piano for 10 years but hated the performance aspect of it.
At 17, she moved to the big smoke to study music education and arts at the University of Melbourne. After graduation, she was working at The Vegie Bar in Fitzroy and doing gig reviews for Inpress when she landed the job of music editor of the street mag. she went on to become editor-in-chief, and during this time her radio career was launched with weekly entertainment segments on Merrick and Rosso’s drive show on Triple J.
Warhurst knew Tim "Rosso" Ross through her brother Kit from their uni days. The slot led to permanent work on the ABC youth broadcaster, where she hosted the Net 50 request program on Saturday nights; five years on the lunch shift followed, and a year in Sydney doing breakfast. from 2005 she juggled radio with Spicks and Specks.
In late 2007 Warhurst left Triple J to co-host a new breakfast show on Triple M in Melbourne with comedian Peter Helliar. some fans were less than impressed with her defection to commercial radio, and the move prompted a Facebook page called "Myf Warhurst is going to hell", which billed itself as "a group for anybody who is distraught over Myf’s traitorous act".
Warhurst is at peace with the perceived sellout. "Going into the commercial world annoys some people, but I was 34 and I had to go somewhere. You can’t stay at Triple J forever … You have to leave to make room for other people. It’s a youth network and I was starting to feel a bit old."
Warhurst moved back from Sydney to Melbourne to take up the Triple M post, but 18 months into their two-year contract and amid poor ratings, she and Helliar were fired and replaced with Eddie McGuire’s The Hot Breakfast.
"Everyone gets sacked from something at some point in their life," she says. "The only thing was that it was so public … I don’t think I’d work in commercial radio ever again. The people who do it are amazing, coping with the pressures and demands of the sales department and management. It wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m happy to be honest about that.
"There’s plenty of casualties out there, but we all wanted to try it. You’re not saying, ‘Poor me’, but whether or not it suits you or you can stand it."
Television has also put Warhurst in the spotlight in a way with which she’s never really been comfortable, and she does feel pressure to look a certain way. in October 2009 she wrote in her then newspaper column her feelings about MasterChef’s Matt Preston naming one of his cravats after her because it was "short and slightly wide".
"I’m not making excuses for my weight," she wrote, "but I am the height of Kylie Minogue (five foot nothing) … some people assume that because you’re on TV, you must like being photographed, or think you look good in that dress. Nope … I work in TV because I love my job, not because I think I’m hot. I could drop a dress size. Or I could just get on with life and not live in constant fear of fat content."
Having also been named a worst-dressed contender at the 2009 Logies (and burning the offending one-sleeved dress, albeit as part of a stunt for Triple M), she admits the jibes hurt.
"but then you think, ‘Who cares?’ Your friends love you, your partner loves you, your parents think you’re great, so who cares if someone thinks you’re a bit chubby or you’re really short or you wear a bad dress? whatever."
Like many of us, Warhurst has a love-hate relationship with exercise. she pounds the pavement around the Brunswick terrace she shares with her cats Terry and Steve, and completed a half-marathon several years ago even though she was still running when the road-closure equipment was being packed up. "Exercise is good for your head, but I don’t enjoy it. It’s not fun. You enjoy it after," she says.
She’s similarly philosophical about having kids and gets annoyed when celebs of a certain age such as Megan Gale or Jennifer Aniston are targeted by women’s magazines for their (usually non-existent) "baby bumps".
"Poor Jennifer Aniston," she says. "Imagine getting a new boyfriend and there’s always speculation that she’s going to get knocked up in a second. I should be (clucky) at my age, but no. I used to be, but the older I’ve gotten, the less inclined I am. All my girlfriends have got babies, and my family, and it looks like really tough work. Very rewarding, obviously."
One of the reasons Spicks and Specks has been such a good vehicle for Warhurst is the fact she gets to be herself – whether famously forgetting the name of Nirvana’s most famous track Smells Like Teen Spirit and gracefully enduring the endless mocking, or being genuinely starstruck over guests such as Meat Loaf, Dame Edna Everage and Brian Mannix.
"so many times I’ve sat there thinking, ‘If only I could’ve told my 13-year-old self that I’d be one day sitting next to this person’," she says like a true fan.
Away from the camera, she loves watching trashy TV, listening to anything from Kanye West to Ryan Adams, and has a TV show on the boil about "mid-century modern architecture – those beautiful ’50s and ’60s flat-roof houses" with the tentative title Not so Grand Designs.
Unemployment might see Warhurst travel the globe for the while, but our favourite girl from the country will always know where her roots are.
The final episode of Spicks and Specks airs on ABC1 on Wednesday, November 23, at 8.30pm; Spicks and Speck-tacular – The Finale is at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on January 12-14.Ph: 13 28 49, thefinale.com.au