Screentalk

Ric Salizzo: The king of unconventional sports television

Posted on 30 October 2012

Producer Ric Salizzo started out as a sports reporter and newsreader on the radio. In his early television days, he was criticised for frowning during news bulletins, and he freely admits that conventional sports broadcasting was not his forte. Salizzo found his production niche with the ground-breaking rugby documentaries The Good, the Bad and the Rugby and Blood, Sweat and Touring. He was also producer and co-host of long-running sports entertainment show Sportscafe, and is currently executive producer of The Crowd Goes Wild. In this ScreenTalk, Salizzo talks about:

• Believing he was terrible as a sports newsreader on One Network News
• Having his face compared to a rubber tyre by a TV reviewer
• Showing the ‘human’ face of the All Blacks in The Good, the Bad and the Rugby
• How the need to create a job for himself led to Sportscafe
• Lana Coc-Kroft joining the show because Marc Ellis fancied her
• Trashing the set in the final programme - his favourite episode
• Learning a huge lesson from the ‘terrible’ Sugar Shack
• Creating a new twist on sports news with The Crowd Goes Wild
• Coming through the tough times of losing his wife Cathy Campbell, and still wanting to tell good stories

This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute via a Creative Commons licence.

• Tweet this
• Facebook