'it Does More Good Than Harm. It ... Stopped People Being Isolated'

Sun Herald

Sunday August 17, 2008

Steve Dow

The man who brought Big Brother to Australia is making amends by giving away millions to the arts, writes Steve Dow.

The day Neil Balnaves's pelvis exploded, it spelled the end of a stellar television career. He remembers throwing his hands in the air, his body taking the impact, the searing pain and being winched by a helicopter.

After his high-powered "stink boat" collided with another in Surfers Paradise in 2002, the diminutive, grey-haired man who imported reality TV into Australia via Big Brother faced a heightened reality.

Spending three weeks on life support, and a total of seven weeks in hospital on high morphine doses, Balnaves hallucinated he was a handcuffed surgical practice patient. It could have been an out-take from Water Rats, Police Rescue, Blue Heelers or Blue Murder - dramas his company, Southern Star, brought to our television screens.

Balnaves recalls insisting to Diane, his wife and mother of his three adult children, that people they knew had died. The family's holiday home on Queensland's Hope Island was turned into a 24-hour hospital ward.

He took nine months to learn to walk again.

"The surgeons said if I ever fell again, they didn't think they'd be able to put it all together, like Humpty Dumpty," the 64-year-old says, sitting in the palatial four-year-old family home in Mosman.

"When you explode a pelvis," he explains, "you can't put slithers of bone together to reconstitute it, so you have to plate the bigger chunks to metal. It took a long time to stand and deal with that pain."

Naturally, Balnaves then went out and bought his own helicopter.

"An AgustaWestland," he says, with an impish grin. "It's the real Ferrari of helicopters; very, very fast." He flies between Hope Island and Mosman, sometimes popping in at Coffs Harbour to see his two grandchildren, Caillean, 8, and Leith, 4. "I love seeing Australia at 500 feet."

The former TV baron's personal fortune was estimated by the Business Review Weekly rich list at $60 million in 1997, a year after Southern Star was floated on the Australian Stock Exchange. The figure was revised down to $42.4 million a decade later in 2007, although Balnaves dismisses the list's estimates as "totally spurious".

He will admit to spending more than $1 million pursuing both the driver and the owner of the other boat in the accident for damages, seeking more than $2.3 million in a continuing Brisbane Supreme Court case. "This is a little bit of Neil," he says, looking quite serious.

"I will fight causes, what I consider social injustice, because I've got the funding to do it. I'm a great believer in not letting insurance companies off the hook. They think I'll throw the towel in."

Likewise, look out anyone who runs up a bad debt with any of his business interests, because "I will go you".

Dressed in a homely green jumper and brown pants, Balnaves breaks the interview to give instructions to one of the gardeners, Jeremy. The manicured lawn and horizon swimming pool outside the lounge window join an uninterrupted 180-degree view of the harbour at North Head. There's a tall Robert Klippel sculpture of geometric shapes on the lawn.

"I was probably anti-art," Balnaves says. He would "bitch and moan" when Diane "dragged" him to galleries. His art appreciation gradually blossomed thanks to friends with collections and publishing artists' books. Now he's got his own modest collection.

He married Diane, who had been training to be a bookseller, in 1971. "She puts up with a very complicated husband," he says.

"I'm not the easiest guy to live with; I'm always chasing after this or that. We got back from Europe six weeks ago; I'm going to the US tomorrow to play golf. I'm not fading out slowly. I'm terrified of standing still. "

Balnaves was born in Adelaide in 1944 and grew up in Tusmore, the middle son of three boys to small-time family retailers Sydney and Jean.

At age seven, in 1952, he contracted polio a year before the advent of the Salk vaccine, and spent 12 months lying in bed for 22 hours out of 24 with his right arm bandaged to a frame. "I'm probably a little scared of being alone," he admits.

An "academic disaster", he left school, the rarefied King's College in Adelaide, at 15 -"I always thought I wasn't that bright; therefore I had to work twice as hard" - and by age 18, in 1962, was public relations manager for Rigby publishers.

He then joined publisher Paul Hamlyn's new company, which went on in 1974 to buy half the Australian division of US animation company Hanna-Barbera, before being bought out in 1978 by James Hardie Industries, which made him managing director of the renamed company, Taft Hardie.

In 1988, Balnaves led eight senior executives in a management buy-out and changed the company name again, to Southern Star, and after a rough first year a halcyon decade of producing TV drama began.

By 1999, however, Southern Star was trading near record lows and about $21million in debt when Balnaves snapped up Big Brother from Britain and sold it to Channel Ten, dramatically reversing the company's fortunes.

Is he quite sure no one was harmed in the show that brought us the turkey slap? "It does more good than harm," he says. "It gave people windows into other people's lives and stopped people being isolated.

"The turkey slapping never went to air as a broadcast episode. It was an online piece of footage that got out and should have been stopped by the webcam casting."

The 2002 boating accident was the beginning of the end for Balnaves's work with Southern Star. His health meant he only stayed on for a year as executive chairman after a separate company, Southern Cross Broadcasting, bought Southern Star in 2004.

This year, Big Brother was axed in Australia. What does he think went wrong? Balnaves says young audiences were migrating to the internet for viewing on demand, but he also thinks swapping host Gretel Killeen for Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O was a "really bad mistake".

"Gretel was a much more accomplished host," he says. "I don't think the current hosts would have had a snowball's chance in hell of solving some of the issues and emergencies on air.

"Bringing in two radio jerks - not jocks - and then putting them in the position of trying to deal with grandmas as contestants, it was silly, I don't know what it was trying to achieve."

Celebrities such as Sandilands are a "passing phase", he says, "and they won't have left a whole lot of good behind them. They won't have set a high watermark in radio broadcasting, that's for sure."

The Balnaves story is far from written on the Australian cultural scene. In 2006, he and Diane established the Balnaves Foundation, which gives away more than $2 million a year on arts and health projects.

By the time he dies, Balnaves hopes the foundation will be giving away $5million a year. His three adult children - Alexandra, 35, and Hamish, 32, both teachers, and Victoria, 29, a publicist - have all been made foundation trustees with their own projects, part of their father's plan to teach but not spoil them.

"If you make good money and just hand it to your kids, you deprive them of their own decision making and the satisfaction of doing their own thing. It could be rags to riches to rags again."

© 2008 Sun Herald

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