TRIGGER WARNING: This article discusses pregnancy loss.
On Friday, The Project aired its final episode ever.
To mark the occasion, Hit Network’s Carrie and Tommy hosted a roundtable discussion with former co-hosts Waleed Aly, Pete Helliar and Dave Hughes, where they discussed the biggest moments from The Project over the years and the impact the show had on their lives.
During the episode, Carrie Bickmore opened up about suffering a miscarriage on the day of Lisa Wilkinson’s first show as the new co-host of The Project in 2018.
Carrie’s doctor told her she needed to skip the show and get a dilation and curettage but the 44-year-old was worried about the public perception if she missed Lisa’s first show.
“I feel embarrassed to say it, but I will never forget Lisa’s first night on The Project. I had just discovered I had lost my baby, and I’d had a miscarriage,” she recalled. “I sat in front of a doctor — who said I needed to get a D&C — and I remember the words, ‘I can’t because Lisa Wilkinson is making her first appearance on The Project tonight.’
“The repercussions of that felt more overwhelming. I sat on-air that night knowing I had a baby that had passed away inside of me, as I pretended to be laughing and having a great time… that was the power of the outside world. How embarrassing and how ridiculous. I’m mortified that was the sort of decision (I was making) but that’s the power of pitting women against each other.”
Carrie said her and Lisa had the “most fabulous professional relationship” but they were constantly pitted against each other by the media.
“Lisa joining our show was an enormous thing for our show. I knew what was going to happen before it happened — and then it happened — because of how sexism works,” she explained. “It became Lisa against Carrie, and there was article after article about the ‘war’ we were at. I was so confused. Lisa and I were never at war. The more you read, the more you become insecure about your own abilities.”
“When you read about yourself in a certain way — and 95% of what I read about myself is not true, so I ignore it. I wondered whether it was true, and my job was redundant. How ridiculous! It made doing the job so hard.”
Later in the episode, Carrie spoke about experiencing imposter syndrome throughout the entire time she co-hosted the show.
“You talked about feeling like an imposter before. I never have felt enough; I never felt enough on that show. I never felt good enough. It’s a strange thing to say when it was a huge part of my life, and I loved it! I loved it. I don’t know if it was me, my own insecurities, or people’s projections,” she explained.
Carrie said every time someone new joined the cast she felt like she was being compared to them.
“I’ll never forget the moment the words, and it was a turning point for me in how I felt about myself, the words were said to me is ‘why can’t you be more like Waleed?’ I will never forget that. I knew what they meant; you were extraordinary (Waleed) and you arrived on the show and changed the game for commentary everywhere; you were extraordinary,” she explained.
“But that wasn’t my strength, nor should it have been, nor did I want that, nor did the show need that. But the problem was that when something good happens, it’s hard to not want everybody to do that good thing, so we can get more of that goodness, and make it even better because we’ve struck gold! It was like… ‘No, Waleed is Waleed!’ I should never have been you, we needed to be ourselves, and so often I felt like I needed to be someone else. Something clicked in my head and I realised, I just need to be me.”
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