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Secrets to the success of Australian media’s hit-maker Marc Fennell
Everything Marc Fennell touches seems to turn to gold, whether it's an oddball podcast about the race to breed the world's hottest chili, an expose of all the stuff the British stole during colonisation, or a gripping and deeply personal look at troubled megachurch Hillsong. This is how the so-called 'accidental journalist' does it.
It begins with a spark inside his brain that feels a little like an electric shock.
It could be an off-the-cuff remark. It might be a slither of an anecdote or a whiff of something interesting. The small beginnings of an idea mentioned in passing that the ordinary observer might overlook.
But in an instant, award-winning journalist and broadcaster Marc Fennell latches on to that little glimmer of a story and his mind begins racing. There’s no stopping it.
“It’s like I can instantly visualise how the story is going to unfold,” Fennell explained.
“My brain immediately tips over the edge and it’s on. It’s like ‘you could do this’ or ‘you can talk to this person’ and ‘actually the bigger theme here is…’. The snowball starts rolling and gets bigger and bigger. That’s how it all starts.”
A few years ago, Fennell found himself having a conversation with a priest – “don’t ask me why – it’s a long story” – when the holy man uttered a few seemingly innocuous words.
“It was like a spark going off. Bang. I cleared three hours of my afternoon and went down this vortex, immersing myself in as much of the idea as I could. I smashed out a three-page description of what I thought this thing could be, a bit of an overview, and sent it to Audible.”
That podcast, whatever it might be, will premiere on the Amazon-owned audio platform later this year.
It will probably be something quirky. Fennell is notorious and now widely celebrated for finding an unusual hook that grabs the attention of viewers or listeners to explore a broader topic.
It will be thoroughly researched, expertly put-together, and beautifully edited.
And if the dozen or so recent projects Fennell as produced and hosted are anything to go by, it will be a smash hit.
The accidental journalist
Fennell’s extraordinary success was the last thing the kid from southern Sydney, who had no clue what he wanted to be and dropped out of an arts degree after just eight weeks, might have expected.
“There’s something to be said for the fact that I’m an accidental journalist,” Fennell quipped when talking about how he finds stories.
“I’ve always felt a bit like an outsider in most of the spaces where I find myself. But I think being an outsider is a good thing. It cames with a sense of curiosity – a whole lot of questions that need to be answered.”
During the summer school break when he was 13 or 14, Fennell and a mate decided to see every movie up for the next year’s Best Picture Oscar. Sitting there in a dark cinema watching one of them, he was struck by a moment of clarity: “‘Right, this is it. This is what I’m going to do.”
The Australian Film Institute ran a competition for young budding film critics and Fennell won it. It propelled him onto a path that would eventually wind its way to storytelling via a movie show on community radio, then Triple J, and then SBS.
He hosted youth-focused news and current affairs show The Feed, there was a three-season stint on Andrew Denton’s Hungry Beast, and there have been countless appearances on shows like Dateline and Q&A.
“Oh, I absolutely still have imposter syndrome,” Fennell laughed.
“It’s a big world and I’m acutely aware of what I don’t know. My job is to be professionally curious though, and it’s in that uncomfortable space where a lot of ideas are born.”
The ideas sometimes come from thin air.
His first Audible Originals podcast was It Burns, about the scandalous goings-on behind the race to breed the world’s hottest chilli. That came from eating chillis with a mate, wondering what the hottest one might be, and then discovering a three-way war between growers in Australia, the US and the UK.
“I had a conversation with this one guy, and he started going off about all this cheating and some falsified lab reports and dirty tricks. It wasn’t what he was saying that got my interest – it was how personally aggrieved he was about it all.”
Its critical acclaim earned Fennell a second series at Audible, Nut Jobs, about perhaps the world’s strangest heist – a quirky masterpiece of storytelling that bagged two New York Festival gold medals.
Stuff The British Stole, a podcast about cultural artefacts pillaged by colonialists and held in museums across the United Kingdom, was an accident. Fennell recorded it while on a trip to the UK, when he was meant to be enjoying a bit of downtime between projects. It was such a smash hit that it was adapted for the screen.
Then there was The School That Tried To End Racism – a ground-breaking documentary produced in partnership with the ABC. In his spare time, he also hosts the gameshow Mastermind.
Among his long list of accolades are a Walkley Award, five New York Festival gongs, two nominations from the prestigious Rose d’Or, and a coveted Hames Beard, to name just the highlights.
“I’ve made quite a lot of documentaries and podcasts over the past couple of years. Somehow, I’ve arrived at a point where I don’t rely on external validation to determine if something is good or not. Don’t get me wrong – I like when things rate well or win awards. But internally, I have to have a sense of when something is good – and good enough.”
But his latest work feels different. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t have a decent read on how this might land with audiences.
“I’m genuinely not sure. It’s kind of an uncomfortable sensation.”
A big reason for that is just how much of Fennell himself is in this one. A Fennell that even some of his closest colleagues didn’t know about. A part of his history that he thought he’d left behind.
“When The Feed ended, we made a decision at SBS to have a core team of people to make two either feature-length or feature series-length docos each year,” he explained.
The first was FRAMED, delving into the disappearance of Weeping Woman by Pablo Picasso from the National Gallery of Victoria in the mid-1980s. It was a headline sensation, especially when the thief began taunting authorities via a series of odd ransom notes. As the teaser for the series says: “That’s only the beginning.”
When the team was workshopping ideas for their next project, one topic kept coming up. Hillsong.
Uncharted territory
The Pentecostal Christian megachurch that had its humble beginnings on a pig farm in the Hills district of Sydney has been the subject of countless documentaries, especially in recent years as the controversies pile up.
“It started off as something like a fishing expedition – that’s not normally how I like to work,” Fennell said. “I really like having a plan. But we just went out and started talking to people to see what came up. While I was doing these interviews, talking to people who’d emerged from within that world, I was reacting in a very personal way. The team was like, what’s going on with Marc?”
On Christmas Eve last year, they confronted him with questions. He casually mentioned that he’d grown up in this world before leaving the church in his late teens.
“I’d never spoken about my childhood,” he said.
“I agreed to tell them all about my upbringing but only if we did it on camera, just in case there was something usable.
“We sat in a room – that’s where the main interview comes from. It’s real. The team didn’t understand my childhood and where I sat with Hillsong. Part of the power of it is that it’s not a straight-forward story. I don’t have a clear-cut narrative. My relationship with it is much more complicated because there was a time in my life where it really helped me. Then there was a time when it all fell apart.”
The Kingdom comes at the issue from a fresh perspective – one of someone who was inside it and is now not. With a tone that’s not mocking or judging. And, unlike all the others, one that will hopefully be seen by those who remain devoted to Hillsong.
“What I know from growing up in that world is Hillsong people don’t watch those documentaries that expose its scandals or point at it and laugh. They view those stories as an attack by the enemy. They don’t engage with it.
“If they’re not watching, what’s the point?
“I’m in a weird position where I know what this world is like on the inside, but at the same time this story is most important for the people it affects.”
While he’s happy with the end product, which was “pulled apart and put back together from scratch more than once” by the team, this is uncharted territory in many ways.
“On a personal level, I haven’t been this open and vulnerable on camera ever.
“There was a tiny moment in The School That Tried to End Racism where you can see I’m on the verge of tears and I’ve beat myself up about it ever since.”
Being ‘aggressively himself’
One thing Fennell is widely known and highly regarded for are his celebrity interviews.
While at The Feed, he carved himself out a niche of scoring one-on-one time with some of the biggest stars in the world. It merged his love of film with his deep fascination with humans.
When the show was shuttered last year, Fennell received a stack of archive tapes of those dozens of sit-downs and began watching it. It was a bittersweet walk down memory line – a reminder of something he deeply loved and dearly misses. He began cutting highlights and sharing them on TikTok.
“I wasn’t on TikTok and needed something interesting to try to appeal to that very unique audience,” he said.
“Some of them have had hundreds of thousands of views. Some have had millions. It’s a new generation and it’s a lot of people from overseas, so they don’t know me. They’re encountering me for the very first time.
“It’s fascinating and also a little bit weird. I had someone come up to me on the street recently and ask, ‘Aren’t you that guy from TikTok?’ and I was like, ‘No…’”
Celebrity interviews are no easy feat. These subjects have been probed hundreds, if not thousands of times. They’ve been asked just about every question imaginable. Most would rather be just about anywhere else than sitting in front of a journalist.
“It’s such a challenge. There’s something really elegant about a one-on-one interview with someone who’s done it a million times before. Great celebrity profiling all comes down to time. You don’t get much time in the room, so you’ve got to make the best use of your time out of the room to know your shit.
“I’d spend hours watching every other interview I could find. I’d look for gaps or the things that weren’t expanded on. You don’t have time to fish for something. You have to have a sense of where something interesting might lie.
“The trick to interviewing celebrities is to recognise that fame is only part of their story – not the entirety of it. If you treat them like a normal person, a normal person is who they’ll become. Most of the time. There are some notable exceptions.”
He had a few tricks. Insisting that his crew use their own cameras, not the ones put in place by the publicists representing the star and running the press junket. That way, we’d set up in a room somewhere else.
“The act of getting up and leaving one space where they’ve been all day and entering a new one was almost like a ‘reset’. Like, oh, this is new. Who are these guys? Those were my rules – own the room and own the cameras. And negotiate for 15 minutes – not 10 minutes.”
One of the best pieces of advice came from his old boss, Denton. As one of the most revered and respected interviewers in modern Australian broadcast history, he had more than a few golden tips.
“There’s no time to build rapport so get in there and don’t waste time. Be genuine or be ‘aggressively you’ as Andrew Denton would say.”
And the big one – don’t forget that it’s not really a one-on-one interview.
“There’s a third party, which is the audience, so they have to come with you. You can’t ever forget about them.”
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