Annabel Crabb is not a big fan of watching herself on Kitchen Cabinet.
“I hate listening to the sound of my own voice,” she admits to TV WEEK. “I hate the wandering way that I ask questions sometimes. I’m like, ‘Annabel, just bloody be more Leigh Sales about this!’”
Over the past seven seasons of Kitchen Cabinet, Annabel, 53, has visited the homes of politicians from Tony Abbott to Clive Palmer to Lidia Thorpe, sitting down to a home-cooked meal with them and bringing along a homemade dessert.
“Every season there’s somebody I interview that people are upset I’ve platformed. [Some viewers will be] saying, ‘Oh, why are you platforming this fascist?’ And I just think, oh my God, really?” she says.
“I’m never too fussed by it. It’s much more interesting to learn about people who have different views from you.”
The eighth season kicks off with Annabel visiting The Lodge, where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese cooks pasta for her. That’s followed by a visit to Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s farm near Goulburn.
Annabel says pasta was a “strategic” choice by the PM – “he didn’t get himself all flustered with a billion pans going at once” – and, while he was preparing the meal, she asked him about his childhood.
“I think everybody in Australia knows that this is a guy who grew up in public housing,” she says. “But I don’t think people necessarily understand that, because his mum was so sick, that actually involved him being home alone from the age of about 12, sometimes for months at a time. I think it’s worth understanding that because it has made him into the person he is.”
With Angus, Annabel said she learnt something that she didn’t know when she walked into the interview.
“He had a really serious accident as a young man, shortly after losing his mother, which changed the course of his life. I found that really fascinating.”
As well as being attacked for the politicians she chooses to feature on Kitchen Cabinet, Annabel finds she gets the same “weird sort of gendered” criticisms that a lot of women in the media get, including people telling her she’s a “stupid airhead”.
“And I think, what? I really am not! This job is quite a specialised, difficult thing to do, and I’m good at it.”
While the online world generally is getting nastier, it’s a very different story inside the community that has grown up around Chat 10 Looks 3, the podcast Annabel and her good friend Leigh Sales have been recording together since 2014.
“We are both quite different people, but we love each other very much and we trust each other,” Annabel says of the Australian Story host. “It’s so funny because people say: ‘Oh, you two are best friends.’ And Leigh’s like, ‘No, my best friend is Lisa Millar.’”
Annabel says the Chat 10 community has, at tough times for both her and Leigh, “restored our faith in humanity”.
“The people who listen to the podcast look after each other and look after us,” she says. “That is such a lovely thing to think… That something you’ve made, which is basically just yapping to your mate, who’s interesting to yap to, has actually played a role in making somebody feel a bit less lonely.”
Late last year Annabel opened up about feeling “massively burnt out”, having just finished making her series about politics, Annabel Crabb’s Civic Duty. She said she was looking forward to taking a break from work – but she ended up making a podcast called History Or Hoarding?, set in the State Library of NSW, instead.
“I just found I’m not very good at doing nothing,” she admits. “If I’m burnt out, the way that I find joy is usually to dive into something that I find fascinating. And, honestly, making that library podcast was just so lovely, learning all these things I had no idea about. And so I felt very refreshed after that.
“I’m fortunate to have a lot of different things that I do. I love my job.”
Catch Kitchen Cabinet on Tuesdays at 8.30pm on ABC or ABC iview.
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