From Wendy Harmer and Peter Moon to Kyle and Jackie O, SCA’s new Head of Content, Hit Network, Gemma Fordham has EP’d the best. She’s also been the PA to an international movie star and headed up content for New Zealand’s largest broadcast network. Now she’s taken on a challenge that has, so far, defeated some of the brightest on and off-air talent in Australia.
Peter Saxon caught up with her to find out how she plans to return 2Day-FM to its former glory and also to discover the fascinating journey that brought her to this point.
Like secret agents and circus clowns, radio people tend to have interesting back stories. Happily for Gemma Fordham, her career path has been more Daniel Craig than George Lazenby.
She had developed an intense love for radio at an early age. Her dad, a software designer volunteered at a community station on Sydney’s North Shore, 2NSB. “It was something on his bucket list that he did for fun,” says Gemma. “He used to take me with him when I was eight. I loved it and would always ask to come.”
By age 14, she’d landed a job at 2Day-FM. “I used to come in to the radio station in my school uniform every day and just, basically, annoy them because I wanted to do work experience. Eventually they caved in. I actually started working straight away but I didn’t start getting paid until I was 14 and nine months because you couldn’t get paid (by law) until then. But I was excited just to work studio phones with Keith Williams and Ron E. Sparks,” Gemma recalls.
She eventually became EP on the Wendy Harmer show with Peter Moon and the morning crew. “I was there for a good few years before I went to London to EP the Jonathan Coleman show. Did that for a few years and then bounced back here (to Australia) and worked at Channel V for a very brief stint.
“Then I left radio altogether. After doing it for at least ten years, I felt like I needed to go outside the bubble and have a bit of a break and I went and worked with Nicole Kidman in the United States.
“I got the job with Nicole thanks to Wendy Day (married to media columnist Mark Day) who is Nicole’s long term publicist in Australia and dear friend. I’d met Nic on several occasions when she would come on the Morning Crew and got to know Wendy Day too. Several years later Nic was looking for an assistant and I believe she really wanted an Aussie and Wendy suggested me as she thought I was always very calm under pressure and had seen first hand the intensity of running a live breakfast show.
“So, I worked with her for about seven years which was wonderful. I really learnt a lot from her. I was her assistant and looked after all of her staff and all of her business. Nic and I are still close friends. She taught me a lot about leadership and management and even things like budgets. I learnt a lot of those kind of business skills in the years that I was with her,” says Gemma.
Having populated a pretty impressive little black book of Hollywood stars, Gemma decided that after eight years of L.A. and globetrotting with Nicole Kidman, “it was time to become a grown up and settle down.” So Gemma, with her British-born husband-to-be in tow, returned to Australia hoping she could land a job back in radio.
‘Just like that,’ she was back at Austereo as EP of the Kyle and Jackie O Breakfast Show. After three years, just as they were busy moving to KIIS, things worked out well for Emma who was about to go on maternity leave anyway.
With no fixed plans other than to give birth and look after her first child, Emma’s husband who does inflight entertainment for airlines was asked by Air New Zealand to supervise the necessary fit-out on new aircraft being added to the fleet – which meant the family had to move to New Zealand.
“I’d never even been to New Zealand. We had always planned on going there on a holiday. We loved it and spent our weekends just seeing the country,” Gemma recalls. “And then Dean Buchanan, the former content head of the Nova network in Australia somehow heard that I was in town and just reached out to me and basically said ‘I heard that you’re in New Zealand and I’ve got a project and I need some help.’ And I said I’d just had a baby and I didn’t think I’d be able to help. But he was quite persistent and in the end I said, okay.
“The next thing I knew, I was the chief of content over there (of NZME Radio). It was wonderful and such a great experience. We ended up being there for two years and it was just fantastic and we really loved it,” says Gemma.
Despite having what many would describe as a dream job it was time to move again and come back to Australia. “That was because we fell pregnant with our second child, We didn’t have any family in NZ. We had lots of friends but no family and it was getting to the point where we needed that support network. And my parents were giving me a bit of grief as well about the grandchildren living overseas. My dad was constantly on the phone: ‘So any plans to move back?’
“Once we made the decision to come back here I was offered a couple of good roles across a couple of the networks. All of them were appealing but in the end I went with this one because it kind of felt serendipitous to come back to where it all began for me,” says Gemma.
In Part Two of our profile of Gemma Fordham, we find out her experience of the radio ‘boys’ club and how SCA CEO Grant Blackley was instrumental in persuading her to return to her old stomping ground as well as her plans for the hit network and lift the troubled 2Day-FM from the bottom of the ratings ladder.
Peter Saxon