Celebrity Interview – Tony Squires

By Dan Hutton on October 27, 2010 in People

During the month The Beast caught up with the former host of ABC’s ‘The Fat’ and the current Seven News sports anchor, Clovelly resident Tony Squires (and his dog, Skipper)…

Where are you originally from?
I was born in Sydney, but in western Sydney, and then travelled around all of NSW. My old man was a copper so we got transferred a lot but I did my main growing up in Newcastle.

Where in the western suburbs were you born?
I was born in Liverpool Hospital and I learnt to walk in Lansvale in a one-bedroom fibro house, but as soon as I came back to Sydney I came to live in Bondi and basically haven’t moved from the Eastern Suburbs. I still follow St George though, which has been terrific in recent times living in the heart of Roosters territory.

What was it like growing up in Newcastle?
The idea of it was scary. I’d moved from Lismore on the north coast to Newcastle and the whole idea was that Newcastle was an industrial city, you’d put the clothes out on the line and they’d get dirtier because of the pollution – that was the perception of Newcastle. When we got there it was in fact a really beautiful place. There are beautiful beaches, everywhere is so close, it’s not crowded and it’s one of those working class places that also has a really great artistic core as well. It’s a great part of the world.

Where are you living these days in the east?
I live at Clovelly and I’ve been a Clovelly resident for years. I’ve had a couple of shifts around but for the most part in Sydney it’s been Clovelly. I’m just drawn to it, and that may well be the Newcastle thing as well. There’s kind of a – village may be the wrong word – but certainly a community feel. I love living in the big city but I love the idea of being at the edge of that big city so when you’ve taken advantage of all those great things the huge city has to offer you can actually stare out at a bit of space and you can feel like you’re in a smaller town, and Clovelly does that beautifully.

So you didn’t just move to Clovelly so you could get closer to Greig Pickhaver (HG Nelson) and convince his producer to produce ‘The Fat’?
Look, there was a bit of Greig Pickhaver stalking, no doubt about it. I did pinch his producer from Roy and HG, Damian Davis – well, I think Damian Davis actually dumped them because he thought he needed a younger guy and that’s where ‘The Fat’ was born. But certainly living next door and seeing Greig wander past my place, either with Juddy the dog (named after Chris Judd) or his little boogie board, was inspiring.

What do you love about living in the Eastern Suburbs?
In summer I love just going down and falling in the water and doing a bit of snorkelling, either at Cloey or at Gordon’s Bay, chasing gropers around, all those sorts of classic things that you do in Clovelly and people drive a lot of kilometres to do. And even hanging around at my house with the windows open and having a bit of a drink and a laugh. I even love winter, and just wandering around to Bronte with the stupid smooth fox terrier.

What’s your dog’s name again?
Skipper. He’s got a very long nose and he’s very cool, obviously. It’s weird, Skipper is more recognised in Clovelly than I am, which is a little bit sad. There are people I’ve never met and we walk past and they go, “Hey, Skipper” and I’m like, “How the hell do you know my dog?”

Is there anything you don’t like about the Eastern Beaches?
Look, no, I would hate to be insular and say late night visitors from ‘other planets’ or suburbs sometimes get my goat, but that sounds a bit curmudgeonly old fogey, which perhaps I’m getting to be. By and large I reckon it’s almost perfect.

Will you be wearing a mo this Movember or will Channel 7 prevent that?
I’m hoping Channel 7 will prevent it so that I’ve got an excuse. My father’s always had a mo so I’ve always not had a mo because I look a bit like him. I see the photographs of what he looked like at my age and I’m not sure it’s a good look. For a long time I couldn’t actually grow a mo. I realise now I probably could do it. My wife is a little bit younger than me and she quite likes the stubble look so I’ve been trying to effect that occasionally. Now I’m at Channel 7 though I have to shave every day, so I would think that Channel 7 would say no to the mo, though in reality they probably wouldn’t even notice.

How did you get started in TV?
I started a newspaper journalist in Newcastle and then in Sydney at the Sydney Morning Herald I used to edit The Guide and write a TV column for years. It’s one of those things where if you pretend to know enough about something people think you are an expert and so I pretended to know a lot about television and people assumed I was an expert. John Doyle, who was Roy Slaven, had a radio program on 702 and I used to go on and talk about TV with him. Then there was a show called ‘Race Around the World’ on ABC TV and I was one of the judges. Then I picked up a gig talking about TV again when Foxtel started, on Arena. After that, because I was a mate of HG’s I made a speech at his 50th birthday years ago and his producer came up to me that night and said, “Do you want to play around and come up with another TV show?” That was Damian Davis and that’s where ‘The Fat’ was born.

And then it’s all gone on from there?
Yeah, it’s all gone uphill, downhill – it’s been all over the place.

You were involved in a ‘Big Brother’ supplementary show, ‘Big Brother Big Mouth’; was that a career highlight?
Absolutely. Well look, any chance to kill the ‘Big Brother’ franchise, you know. I think that’s what I did. It was probably a wrong decision to say yes to that gig, mainly because I had never actually watched the show and never had any great interest in it and I found myself not liking anybody on the show. So the idea of talking about them at no matter what level was fairly dull.

Do you prefer television or radio?
I love both. I love radio; the medium itself is so brilliant because of the immediacy of it, especially if you’re in a group of people who you like. It is basically like being at a pub and not having alcohol, although with Mikey Robbins there probably was alcohol sometimes, for all of us. It’s a great thing where you’ve got a lot of space to fill so you actually have to push yourself to talk about everything, and for long periods of time. And you get instant feedback from your audience because the phone rings and you talk to them. Television is more of a construction really. There’s a lot more thought that goes into what happens. But I’ve always loved television and even though the job I’m doing now isn’t the performer thing, there’s a great performance level about TV. Standing up in front of a camera is like standing up in front of an audience. There is a buzz about it. It’s an incredibly exciting medium.

Are you a big researcher or do you just wing it?
I have been known as an over preparer, certainly in a radio. Doing breakfast radio, because it is that 3-hour churn of stuff, after a while you just read the paper and trust yourself that you’re across things. Most of the jobs I’ve done I’ve kind of driven the bus and other people have hung their arses out the window and in that regard you’ve got to know the road rules and have a little bit of a sense of direction, and that’s what I like to do. I like to have a basic idea of where we’re going.

Nice bus driving analogy there, it just kept on going. I was waiting to hear what you’d come up with next…
Yeah, me too. Tickets please!

These days you’re the sports presenter on Seven News; do you feel any pressure to outperform the likes of Rob Canning, Brad McEwan and Kenny Sutcliffe?
Kenny Sutcliffe has been doing it for such a long time.

He’s the Ron Burgundy of Australian sporting news…
He is the Ron Burgundy. Sadly, no matter what you do these days, every day there will be a ratings figure so there is a notion of an expectation of performance and of what you’ve got to do. Sport is so important to so many people in this country it’s ridiculous. That said, it’s important to me and ridiculously. My wife cannot believe how intense my passion is for the sports that I love so I understand that completely.

Did you model your presenting style on any sports presenter in particular?
No, I probably haven’t modelled myself on anybody. I was speaking to Andrew Denton about it the other day and I said – and he scoffed at me – it’s actually been bit of a learning curve for me. It seems a weird thing to do, when most of your life you are coming up with your own ideas and flying by the seat of your pants, to be reading an autocue and thinking that’s a learning curve. But in terms of getting a presentation style right it is.

Do you think they will ever bring back ‘The Fat’?
Well, if it’s coming back as ‘The Fat’ then it has to be an ABC product because sadly I don’t own the name ‘The Fat’.

What if you spelt it P-H-A-T?
Yeah, I thought about that as well. That show started so long ago and it’s been off the air for a long time but if you go to a sporting event people still say, “Bring back ‘The Fat’!” There’s a lot of love for it. It wasn’t a revolutionary program though. The idea of a sports show that has a sense of humour has been around for a long time.

Do you have a career highlight thus far?
I guess, probably because of my love of sport, it would be meeting some of those heroes. The first time I saw Steve Waugh walking down the corridor towards me to be introduced before going on ‘The Fat’ was pretty bloody exciting for me. I absolute love cricket and I just love Steve Waugh and to think that I was just going to be having a chat with him on telly was absolutely brilliant. And from a television point of view, interviewing Michael Parkinson was pretty astonishing; just to show him how bad I was at what he is so good at. And then he finished the interview and rather than going back stage and leaving his wife who was sitting in the front row in the studio, he went and sat next to her for the rest of the show. So I was looking past the camera watching Michael Parkinson watching me. It was like surreal.

Being a sports presenter, do you have a pair of lucky undies or any superstitions similar to the sports stars?
I’m a little bit of a left shoe on first kind of guy, that’s the only thing. I’m not really superstitious but I do love the whole superstition thing and I love it in sports people, just the weirdness of it. I wish I did have some lucky underpants that I could use. I’m sure that most of those things come about in sport when something happens, like they score 100 and realise that their hanky is in their right pocket, so that’s what they’ve got to have for the rest of their career. I sadly haven’t had that highlight yet to force me into superstition.

Can you rattle off a sentence of multiple sporting clichés for us?
No, I can’t.

Do you have a favourite?
Obviously ‘taking it one game at a time’ is my favourite, one groin strain injury at a time, and ‘all credit to the boys’ is also.

What about 110%?
We decided to go with the 110% for the show but of course I didn’t want ‘110% Tony Squires’. It wasn’t until I got in the studio and saw it there that I realised we’d be using that. The idea was that every week we’d find an example of the 110% cliché being used and I thought we’d run out four weeks in but we could have used three or four every week.

Do you feel guilty about living in the east and supporting the Dragons?
No, you can’t feel guilty about your tribe. It’s a birth thing. My father was a Dragons supporter. I was passionate about that team so it didn’t matter where I lived I was always going for the Dragons. I’m not usually a football jumper wearing kind of person but this year I did. I wore it and the scarf and a hat and at the end of the game we went to Roosters heartland, to the Sheaf, and in we walked. I’ve been unpopular before and will be again but gee, I enjoyed my unpopularity that night. I was a breath away from getting my face punched in. It was brilliant.

Do you have any advice for youngsters looking to get into journalism?
Yeah, don’t do it for about ten years until I’m gone because I see young people as a threat. I’m easily intimidated and there are a lot of young kids out there who are great. My daughter is a journalist, and I never thought that would happen, and she’s done front-page stories for the Sunday Telegraph, which I view with a mixture of absolute pride and deep resentment because she’s succeeded in journalism more than I did.

She hasn’t had a show with her name up in lights yet though…
No, well she hasn’t been axed yet either.

In an ideal world what does the future hold for Tony Squires?
I’m loving the job I’m doing at the moment and I would love to do that for the next, I don’t know how many years. I would like to kind of embellish that role by having some kind of little sporting show on the network as well, but that’s just me putting it out there. I guess the trick is to do what you love and are incredibly interested in and that is where you will end up. No matter what I try to do I tend to fall back to sports stuff. So I guess in my perfect world the straight up and down news presenting seat and another more swively chair look at sport will somehow collide and that will be perfect.

Will we ever see you on ‘Dancing With the Stars’?
Never.