Do we like Bert Newton?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decades of colleagues describing him as generous, one badly aged Logies gag he apologised for, and no sign of him pushing harm against anyone.
Bert Newton was born in Melbourne in 1938 and was on radio as a teenager. He became the straight man to Graham Kennedy on In Melbourne Tonight, the show that made them both household names. Later he was the sidekick on The Don Lane Show, where he copped the nickname Moonface.
The career was far from a smooth ride. He resigned on air from HSV7 in 1959 and was dropped soon after, and Nine sacked him in 1985 after 26 years. He bounced back with a long run on Network Ten's morning show and a return to Nine for Family Feud and 20 to 1. He won four Gold Logies and hosted the Logies a record 20 times.
The big stoush came in July 2018 at the Logies. Presenting the Graham Kennedy Award, he joked that if you went to Kennedy's dressing room, the door was locked and he was inside doing some mentoring. Social media lit up, with commentators reading it as tone-deaf in the #MeToo era, and one TV commentator tipped it as his last Logies appearance.
Newton said he meant nothing improper and that people take offence at everything now. A day or so later he went further, saying he never set out to offend anybody and apologising if he had. He also defended calling himself an old poof, saying it was never meant in any sexual way. The apology came with a shrug: he said he couldn't promise he wouldn't do it again.
On the harm test, that Logies speech is the only real black mark we found. We found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ or trans people, nothing on vaccines, climate or migrants, and no run of dodgy collaborators. The Conversation's obituary says some of his old sketches on race and gender have aged poorly, which fits a comedian from that era, but that's a long way from a pattern.
On how he treated people, the picture is warm. Colleagues described a generous performer who backed even the smallest names, and the Conversation obituary quotes Dan Ilic saying so. A New Daily report said he once gave away a Gold Logie to a dying man. In 2019 Maggie Kirkpatrick wrote in her memoir that his offstage attitude during a musical was inappropriate, with no details, and he declined to comment on the record. That is thin and secondhand, so we're not hanging a verdict on it.