by KRISTIN DEVITT
It’s still one of my old gags, “I got out of television before they had to put Vaseline on the lens”.
But there is more than a little truth to the fact that as a woman on television, you get that sense that your time may be up at a certain age. That there’s a shelf life. I should add I made the leap over to PR before I hit 30!
After quick stints doing the graveyard (midnight to dawn) shift at one Brisbane newsroom while finishing my uni degree, and a whistle-stop three months reporting in Rockhampton, I landed a Brisbane reporting and weekend newsreading role at the tender age of 21 in the early 1990s. I covered many news rounds over the ensuing nine years from courts to police, parliament and the arts.
Looking back now, there is a part of me that wishes I had ignored that one news director who declared I “didn’t have the x-factor” after nearly ten years on air. The same one whose wife took great issue with me wearing pink lipstick reading the news. Still not sure if it was fuschia or fuschia on me that was the problem. Who doesn’t love hot pink? Reminds me of another of my quotable quotes: “x-factor, sex factor, couldn’t give a max factor”.
But at the time, and certainly I know it is still the case for many young women on tv, the pressure to be slim, to be forever young, was great.
I take great joy in seeing women newsreaders in Australia continue to deliver our tv news into their 40s, 50s and beyond. Travelling regularly overseas as I do, this is something I have seen as the norm rather than the exception in Europe and the US. It’s okay to catch up.