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‘I’ve been in people’s lounge rooms for so long’: How did it take this long for Larry Emdur to get a Gold Logie nom?
Larry Emdur started on television as a 17-year-old, the youngest national newsreader in the country, and has since helmed over a dozen network shows. So, why has it taken until 2024 for Emdur to get a Gold Logie nomination?
“It’s not my comfortable place, I’ve got to tell you” Larry Emdur admits of having to hit the self-promotional trail and canvas for votes. “But I guess you’ve got to do it.”
Emdur has been a familiar face of Australian television since the early ’90s, steering iterations of Wheel of Fortune, The Price Is Right, It Takes Two, and Good Morning Australia, to name but a few of his TV credits.
He currently appears at both ends of the working day, hosting The Morning Show daily at 9am, and The Chase at 5pm, with this 17.5 hours of screen time each week finally enough to land Emdur his very first Gold Logie nomination, which he admits “was a real surprise and it a nice feeling”.
“I’m very flattered by all the attention.”
Although The Morning Show allows viewers to get to know Emdur over a lazy two-and-a-half hour sprawl, its the ratings success of The Chase that has propelled Emdur into the living rooms of Australians this time around, with the daily show routinely pulling 1.3 million viewers across that all-important pre-news timeslot.
For Emdur, the show’s appeal is simple: “You can do it from your lounge room, and really play along, and really get involved. There are a lot of questions and a lot of great questions, and I think for you to be able to sit there in your lounge room for an hour and get probably a hundred or more questions, that’s pretty cool running.
“If you’re into your quizzing or your trivial pursuits or you just want a break from the stresses of the day, I think any great game show has got that playability and the ‘play along at home’ factor, and The Chase has that in spades.”
While The Chase is heavily formatted, The Morning Show has a looser, also radio-like structure.
Emdur says he and co-host Kylie Gillies rely heavily on each other to keep the momentum up. “Once we get going, we can just fall into that space,” he said. “And I think a lot of the times we have to remind ourselves that, hey, we’re on TV. Sometimes we just think we’re two great mates just having a coffee and having a yarn.
“That helps the time fly. We both love live TV, I think. I love working with Kylie. I think she doesn’t mind working with me,” he jokes. “We’re not like digging holes,” he admits – “although we dig holes for each other sometimes on the show. It’s great fun. Every single day is different.
“We both bring different things to the table and we get to kick those around. It’s not like, ‘I’ve got to be on TV for another two-and-a-half-hours’. It’s like, ‘let’s go!'”
Although Emdur is on screen for three-and-a-half hours a day, he is still stopped in the street daily to discuss The Price Is Right, which he hosted three different versions of, across two networks. Would he go back for a fourth?
“Look, I’d love to do that show,” he says. “There’s great love for that show. There’s great love for nostalgia at the moment. I get the strangest comments from people, from young people and then older people and then old, old people. Everyone’s got memories of that show. It’s quite bizarre really.
“Would I do it? I don’t think my body could stand up to it anymore because I’ve got people running and jumping on me and rolling around on the studio floor and picking people up and being thrown around like a rag doll.
“I’m not sure my old body could handle that anymore, but she was a great show, and lots of fond memories there for me. It was a very special part of my life.”
Seemingly, it still is.
“Every day, every single day of my life, people are referencing Price is Right,” he confirms. “And I love that. I love it that that played a part in people’s lives and I love it that people can remember shows that I’ve long forgotten. That’s very special.”
Emdur features in many Australian memory banks, not always in the ideal way. “A lot of people joke to me about Celebrity Dog School or Celebrity Splash, they will think they’re kind of funny”, he says, of two of his less-successful outings. “Oh, I’ve lots of cancelled shows in my career,” he laughs.
The Main Event, a show he did in 1991 — “a big show in its time, up against 60 Minutes on Sunday night. We were winning the ratings there for a while, up against 60 minutes, so it was a big deal” — is also brought up fondly and regularly with Emdur, as was his cameo appearance in Australian classic The Castle.
“People still watch it,” he said of the 1997 film, “and I’ll just get these random DMs going, ‘I saw you on The Castle.’
Emdur admits he “didn’t realise the importance of that [appearance] until much later.
“Of all the shows they chose, of all the shows they could have been involved with to highlight the pop culture of TV at the time and what was on TV at the time, to be chosen for that, that was quite a thrill.
“People still quote me those lines today — so it’s a nice feeling.”
The Logies will screen on Seven this Sunday, August 18. Vote for the Gold Logie here.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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