When Big Brother viewers had the chance earlier this week to decide the 13th housemate to go into the house, either Jane or Mitch, they didn’t hesitate. They went for the 67-year-old bikini-wearing single-and-ready-to-mingle retiree over the 36-year-old loudmouth larrikin and nostalgia dealer. And why not? Jane sounded like she’d be a load of fun.
Coming hot on the heels of The Golden Bachelor, where Australians fell in love with Bear’s quality selection of smart, interesting, beautiful fifty- and sixty-something women (some of whom even had visible wrinkles), it proves a really important point. Older women on TV are so hot right now.
Sure, over recent years we’ve been getting used to seeing more and more women in their forties, fifties and older on our screens, but 2025 was the year where they totally dominated. And about time too.
This year’s Logies was a triumphant night for the mature ladies. The TV WEEK Gold Logie for the most popular personality on Australian TV was won by 72-year-old Lynne McGranger.
Her fellow nominees included Sonia Kruger, 60, Julia Morris, 57, Lisa Millar, 56, Poh Ling Yeow, 51, and Ally Langdon, 46. (Hamish Blake, a youthful 43, was the token bloke.)
The other big winners on Logies night were Kitty Flanagan, whose comedy Fisk scooped up five awards, and Magda Szubanski, who was very deservedly inducted into the Hall Of Fame.
Things have come a long way since 1968, when the Logie for Most Popular Female In Television was awarded to… NOBODY… because, as host Bert Newton was awkwardly forced to explain, “it appears no one was deemed worthy enough to receive it”. Ouch!
In 2016, when Noni Hazlehurst was inducted into the Hall Of Fame, 27 men had received the honour before her and just one woman: Ruth Cracknell. The male-to-female ratio in the Hall has improved a bit since then, with Kerri-Anne Kennerley and Rebecca Gibney now there along with Ruth, Noni and Magda.
Want more proof that things have changed? TV game shows used to be almost invariably hosted by men, often with attractive younger women as their sidekicks to laugh at their jokes and show off prizes. (It was a big deal when the wonderful, terrifying Cornelia Frances was made host of The Weakest Link in 2001, and she was most probably given the opportunity because TV execs had seen a tough-talking redheaded woman, Anne Robinson, successfully hosting the show in the UK.)
In 2025, female game show hosts have become so common that no one bats an eyelid over them. The hilarious Anne Edmonds nabbed Shaun Micallef’s job on Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Gen, Claire Hooper got her name in the title of a show when the British hit Richard Osman’s House Of Games was remade as Claire Hooper’s House Of Games, and Rebecca Gibney was announced as the person who’d be filling Eddie McGuire’s shiny shoes in the revival of Millionaire Hot Seat. Lock it in, Bec!
In fact, that whole older man/younger woman dynamic is starting to feel a bit passé.
Right now we’ve got the once-unthinkable older woman/younger man dynamic happening on shows like I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!, with Julia Morris and Robert Irwin, and Dancing With The Stars, with Sonia Kruger and Dr Chris Brown, and we’re loving it.
(Although… is Sonia Kruger really 60? She’s never looked a day over 21, and I feel convinced she has a scientist who has discovered the secret to eternal youth tied up in her basement.)
And then there’s scripted shows. So many brilliant dramas and comedies of recent years have featured older women as the stars. Think characters like Claudia Karvan’s Angie Davis in Bump, Kitty Flanagan’s Helen Tudor-Fisk in Fisk and Marta Dusseldorp’s Stella Heikkinen in Bay Of Fires.
The reason we’ve had these fantastic characters – fierce, flawed, funny, relatable – is because these super-talented women have created the shows themselves. And sometimes they’ve had to fight to get them on the screen.
Kitty talks about having first pitched the idea of Fisk as being a comedy about a 33-year-old lawyer. She kept pitching the idea, just changing the age of the lawyer (“Helen, 48”), till it finally got picked up, and went on to become a worldwide smash. (Next year we’re getting Kitty and Anne Edmonds starring together in a new comedy series, Bad Company, and I cannot wait.)
Claudia Karvan talks about how, when she was in her twenties, she “downloaded this belief” that she was “peaking”. Even as late as the 1990s and into the 2000s, women on TV expected that they would disappear from screens as they got older. Happily, that doesn’t seem to be happening the way it used to. Women at the top of their game can now reasonably expect to stick around and keep doing what they do so well (oh hi, Sandra Sully!).
Whether wearing bikinis in the Big Brother house, cracking jokes on game shows or starring in drama series they’ve created, older women are ruling our screens in 2025 and they’re not going anywhere. Thankfully.
