Kitchen Cabinet: lunch with bipartisan flavour
Television pick of the day: Kitchen Cabinet, 8pm, ABC,
When it started rather quietly on the ABC’s second channel a few years ago, Kitchen Cabinet was just a little lame, an exercise in awkwardness.
But never to be taken lightly, Annabel Crabb and her producers persevered and the shows improved as the episodes accumulated and her audience grew, with the friendliness becoming less grating and Crabb more cheekily assertive. (She also got a bigger budget, better lighting and more cameras.)
Her most recent series have averaged more than a million viewers an episode and now are a part of ABC prime-time programming with no shortage of politicians willing to wine and dine the attractive and gregarious Crabb.
“The more comfortable you make someone feel, the better interview you’re ultimately going to get,” US talk show host and news anchor Katie Couric once remarked.
Crabb uses all the tricks to relax her wily politicians, meeting her subjects on their level by bringing a cake or a pudding — she’s an inspired home baker — and matching them for mood, energy levels and even body language. She shows she’s fully present in the conversation, not simply treading water waiting for the next cue.
Tonight’s show sees Crabb declare a political truce after some rather nasty years in Canberra politics.
She has organised a bipartisan lunch with two blokes who, as our hostess suggests, spend most of their professional lives shouting at each other.
So it’s a Kitchen Cabinet first when she presides over a cross-party lunch with Liberal Minister Christopher Pyne and Labor MP Anthony Albanese at a Canberra Chinese restaurant.
And entertaining it is too. Both pollies have the gift of the gab and Crabb’s main job is to stop them talking over each other as they face the rather daunting task of rustling up a feast of dumplings overseen by the restaurant’s experienced chef.
Source: The Australian, 4th November 2015
Originally published as: Kitchen Cabinet: lunch with bipartisan flavour
