Johanna Griggs shudders when the topic of her short stint as an actor on Home And Away is brought up.
“I knew they were going to bring it up because we were doing everyone’s earliest TV thing,” she tells Woman’s Day of the segment on Seven’s 7NEWS Spotlight Presents: 70 Years Of Seven, where snippets of her playing cameo character Inga from Sweden on the long-running drama in 1993 were dredged up from the archives.
“As soon as I saw the vision come up, I just roared with laughter,” she admits.
The former Olympic swimmer says it was part of her negotiations back when she started with the network that she could “own every copy of the tape” of her on Home And Away, and while the years went by with her thinking it had been “dead and buried”, footage of her on Summer Bay emerged in 2014.
“I started hyperventilating. I was like, ‘Oh no!’ And I remember everyone at Better Homes And Gardens were just p***ing themselves laughing.”
Joh says things only got worse the next day when The Daily Telegraph ran the headline on the front page, ‘Joh’s lost soapie tape’. “I then reposted that on Twitter and wrote, ‘Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been a sex tape!’ I actually got in so much trouble for putting that up.”
Despite her hilarious start, Joh, 52, has gone on to become one of Seven’s most respected faces on TV, with Olympic Games coverage in front of millions of viewers and then her foray into hosting the beloved BHG, which celebrated its 30-year anniversary last year.
“I’m so grateful more than anything,” she says, reflecting on her career. “I’ve been so lucky to have hit the absolute sweet spot where I’ve worked on things that I’ve loved. “Everything I do is so positive and encouraging and uplifting. So I never actually feel like it’s work, because it’s an absolute privilege to do the stuff that I get to do.”
Reality check
And while Joh’s become somewhat of a jack of all trades, there’s one genre of TV you probably won’t catch her at ever again – reality TV.
“I pretty much slag off reality TV ever since House Rules because I really wanted to get the message out about how manipulated, fake and awful it all is.
“It really does impact people’s lives. I’m certain there are a lot of people who work in reality TV who have a little voodoo doll of me that they love to put pins in because I talk about it every opportunity I get.”
Rumour mill
Her strong stance makes recent rumours she was set to replace Natalie Gruzlewski as host on Farmer Wants A Wife all the more perplexing to her.
“I did see a couple of articles and I contacted Nat, because we’ve done a couple of stories over the years with her, and she’s such a sweetheart. And I just said to her, ‘Look, I would never be the person who would go and take someone’s job without having a conversation or finding out if that’s what you want. I’m so sorry. No one has spoken to me about this. It’s absolutely made up,’” she says.
“And I just got this message back from her saying, ‘Oh my god, thank you so much. You have no idea what this means to me.’
“And at the Logies she came up and gave me a hug, and said, ‘I really needed to hear that,’ and I said, ‘I thought you might have.’ So no. I’m definitely not doing Farmer.”
Georgie Parker: ‘Hollywood… I couldn’t think of anything worse’
Hollywood might be the dream for a lot of Australian actors, but Georgie Parker “couldn’t imagine anything worse”.
“There was an opportunity when I was about 30, and while I was flattered, it was a big ‘No,’” she tells Woman’s Day. “I love Australia. I love my family. I was not interested in pursuing something in another country.”
The TV veteran, 61, says her decision to focus on Australian stories began as a little girl when she first started to watch TV with her family.
“When they started making Australian dramas like Rush and Ben Hall, I found that really exciting. Not only seeing English or American productions, but seeing our own.
“And hearing our own accent on the TV was really cool and I think that played into my idea of what I might be able to achieve,” she adds.
In 7NEWS Spotlight Presents: 70 Years Of Seven, Georgie revisited one of her first roles, in Seven’s Rafferty’s Rules, before touching on her most iconic roles in seminal dramas such as A Country Practice, All Saints and Home And Away, all of which made it into TV WEEK’s Top 70 Australian Shows of All Time!
“I couldn’t believe that,” she says. “I am just ridiculously fortunate. But it’s me being a part of something bigger.
“Actors get singled out all the time, but it’s never just the actors. It’s the whole cast and crew making something good.”
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