Australian TV duo demoted over love affair

SYDNEY - The demise of two high-profile Australian television presenters this week has highlighted once again that - President Bill Clinton apart - office affairs can harm your career.

Channel Seven current affairs host Stan Grant and designated Olympic Games anchorwoman Tracey Holmes face an uncertain professional future after the fallout from their relationship.

Their case has also raised questions about privacy and whether morality or simply ratings was responsible for their fall.

The pair's romance apparently blossomed when they were assigned to cover the lighting of the Olympic torch in Greece in May. It became public only two weeks ago, when it was revealed that Grant, 36, had left his wife and three young children to move in with Holmes, 34.

Grant fronts the Today Tonight show that immediately follows Seven's primetime news bulletin. The problem for him and Seven, which has the most mainstream audience of the three commercial networks, is that Grant had been promoted as a rugged family man.

Any extramarital controversy now, therefore, would smack of gross hypocrisy. Furthermore, he has form, having previously left his wife briefly for another woman before returning home.

As soon as the affair was made public, Today Tonight's ratings dived, by about 12 per cent in a week.

That was enough, sources said, to convince Seven's boss, Kerry Stokes, that the affair was commercially damaging. Grant was taken off air.

His final show, ironically, was last Monday when he reported on location on the progress of the Olympic torch through New South Wales while Holmes was a relay runner.

Grant was due to run a leg in the Blue Mountains on September 3 - Father's Day - but has been withdrawn from that as well.

On Tuesday, when fill-in host Melissa Doyle fronted Today Tonight, ratings recovered. The following day, after a meeting between Stokes and Grant and Holmes, the network issued two terse statements saying the pair's roles would be reviewed.

For Holmes, it meant being removed as a "Face of the Olympics" for the network, and threw Seven's Olympics coverage plans into disarray just a month before the opening ceremony.

Seven bought the Australian broadcast rights for $US45 million ($100.55 million) and had groomed Holmes for the past two years to be one of their three Games anchors.

As part of the buildup, her face appeared on the side of 2500 city buses. "She is one of the three major hosts of the 27th Olympiad," a Seven source said.

"Then there is the logistics, all the television guides that have gone out, all the magazines printed and the publicity photos taken of her."

Other insiders said the problem was not so much the liaison but that it had become public. At first the story appeared mainly in the tabloid press. But the broadsheets followed, with even the weighty national daily The Australian joining in.

The newspaper's Sydney chief of staff, Janet Fife-Yeomans, told how she popped into a local supermarket for milk and bumped into the couple. Was she to ignore them, or try to get a photo to match one she knew another paper would publish the next day? She grabbed a $A22 disposable camera from the shelves.

"I took a couple of pictures, then introduced myself and apologised for doing it, thinking they might understand that we're all in the same business and they'd say, 'Oh well, you've got your picture, that's fine.'

"But Stan became abusive and accused me of invading their privacy."

Late last week, Grant and Holmes remained defiant. Sources said they had not been sacked but had quit Seven in anger at being offered lesser roles, and had hired a lawyer.

But Grant has his backers, including fellow Aboriginal and boxer Anthony Mundine. "He's done nothing wrong by his own culture," Mundine said.

"I mean, polygamy. Aboriginal men are allowed to have more than one wife."

- NZPA

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