After two years of gardening leave to the tune of $1.7million a year, Lisa Wilkinson‘s time at Channel Ten ended with a whimper over the Christmas holidays.
Her multi-year contract lapsed on New Year’s Eve and wasn’t renewed.
Wilkinson had joined the network in 2018 after an infamous pay dispute at Nine when she discovered her Today co-host Karl Stefanovic was earning significantly more than her.
Everything was going well when she signed a new deal with Ten in 2021. But just a year later, she stepped down as host of The Project – her sole on-air role – citing the toll of ‘relentless, targeted’ media coverage.
In the two years since vanishing from our screens, she continued to collect a monthly paycheck from Ten, commercial TV’s forgotten child, despite industry-wide cutbacks.
Her contentious departure from Nine and the messy circumstances of her exit from Ten – what with the Lehrmann defamation saga – inspired pretty much every media commentator to write off her chances of a television comeback.
But here at Inside Mail, we’re not so sure.
There’s no denying Wilkinson remains one of the country’s most recognisable faces and a major drawcard among certain demographics, so we reckon it won’t be long until she pops up somewhere new.
While it seems every other media commentator has written off Lisa Wilkinson’s chances of a television comeback, we’re not so sure here at Inside Mail
Lisa publicly scorched former Nine boss Hugh Marks (pictured) after leaving the network in 2017 amid a gender pay gap row, but we hear time heals all wounds and Marks, now the inbound managing director of the ABC, could be her way into a job at the public broadcaster
Although she did have a falling-out with former Nine boss Hugh Marks in 2017 when she publicly scorched him over gender pay parity, that was more than seven years ago and we hear the two professional pragmatists no longer hold any grudges.
And now that Marks is inbound as managing director at the ABC, it might just be an opportunity for Wilkinson – who has already collected the full set of commercial networks – to take on a role with the public broadcaster.
Indeed, Aunty insiders tell me she could be in exactly the right place at the right time as newly minted ABC chair and commercial media veteran Kim Williams carries out his cultural revolution.
Will we see Wilkinson popping up on Q+A or Backroads anytime soon? You never know.
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