Capturing The Stars

Sun Herald

Sunday April 27, 2008

Scott Ellis

James Tobin is bracing himself for a very busy life. As the new entertainment reporter for Channel Seven's breakfast program Sunrise, he is about to trade his days in the studio for a series of mad dashes around the country and the world to wherever the next big thing in the celebrity world happens to be.

And quite frankly, he can't wait.

"It sounds a cliche, but it really is a dream come true for me," said Tobin.

"I think it hasn't really hit me just yet that this is what my job is going to be, going and interviewing people who I have watched on screen or listened to my whole life.

"I'll get to go and chat with them one on one; it's just so exciting."

A former music and children's game show host, Tobin knows it won't all be glitz and glamour but he's looking forward to finding the real people behind the fame.

"Everyone is just a person at their core, so it's just a matter of talking to them as a person," he said. "And that's something that's at the core of what Sunrise is about. It is always the real person we are interested in rather than the hype so it's up to me to find that real person and show them to our viewers."

Already, he has seen that won't always be a simple matter. At his first major interview for the role earlier this month, Tobin sat down with actor Robert Downey jnr to talk about his new film Iron Man. Downey jnr, however, had been doing the same interview all day.

"At one stage he said, 'I am just so sick of hearing my own voice!' and I can imagine that if you're doing that day in and day out it would happen," Tobin said.

"We started talking about how punishing it was for him to put on the big Iron Man suit every day and he said that between him and the stunt men, there was always someone needing some pain killers. "And that was revealing given it was Robert Downey jnr [who famously has battled addiction]. I see that as a big challenge but like I said, something I am very excited to be doing."

Sunrise

weekdays, 6am, Seven

The Show

One of the success stories of recent years, Sunrise as we now see it is a very different program to what was launched by Seven in 1991. Then, it was just what the name suggested - an early morning newscast to give the breakfast viewers a top-up of the day's events before they set off for work. Now, under the guidance of executive producer Adam Boland and with Melissa Doyle and David Koch at the helm, it's news, weather, interviews, lifestyle, features and has become the centre of a viewer-network community, the Sunrise Family.

© 2008 Sun Herald

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