Channel 9 TV journalist Tracy Grimshaw gets a little bristly when I suggest that television is the province of pretty young things.
The 64 -year-old, familiar to most viewers as the long-time host of A Current Affair and the co-host of Today, is now co-hosting a four-part series, Do You Want To Live Forever?
Tracy and medical expert Dr Nick Coatsworth put four pairs of everyday Australians under the microscope, testing the limits of human longevity and travel the world to the regions where people live longer than anywhere else.
Part one of the series has already been to air and the next three episodes screen on Nine and 9Now on Mondays at 7.30pm.
The prospect of living forever is not something that holds much appeal for Tracy.
“I personally don’t think living forever is necessarily a priority and I don’t think it’s a possibility,” Tracy says.
“I think we are designed to die. We’re designed to sort of peter out. I guess for me, it’s more about quality of life rather than quantity of life.”
By addressing the issues that affect the quality of life, the bonus may well be a few extra years.
There are people though, like American tech tycoon Bryan Johnson, who is attempting to age backwards by having plasma infusions from young donors.
“Whether or not he’s successful, I guess we’ll all see over the next 10 or 20 years if he manages to live that long.”
As to her own longevity in the television industry when I suggest it favours the young and beautiful, Tracy disagrees.
“That’s a really old notion. The notion that television is for pretty young things is a very antiquated notion now. I’ve been in television for 43 years and I have seen changes. I wish that this notion that television is only for young women, for example, could be dispelled because it hasn’t been that way for years.
“I’m 64. I walked away from a primetime show 18 months ago that the network wanted to keep me in when I was 62. So, the notion that you’re out the door when you’re young in television is just a nonsense now and it needs to be dispelled.
“There is longevity in television. Clearly you’ve got it in Perth, we have it also on the East Coast and at Channel 9 in particular, people tend to almost have a job for life if they do well at Nine and you get results and perform well.
“It’s such an antiquated view, this notion that we’re out the door young. No one is anymore.”
Tracy says the impetus for making So You Want to Live Forever came from Dr Nick Coatsworth.
“He pitched it to the network because he’s really interested in the longevity space and they came to me because they know I have an abiding interest in medicine. I’m a bit of a medical geek, so between the two of us I think we cover all the bases.”
The show works with four couples over 12-weeks.
“They’re not all couples so two of them are sisters, then we work with father and son, Duncan Armstrong, the former Olympics winner and his son, and two married couples, one in their 20s and one in their 50s.
“They all had different issues. You can imagine someone in their 20s, a couple in their 20s would have different health issues to address than a couple say in their 50s. And so our experts worked with them to curate a program over 12 weeks to see if they could shift the dial on their biomarkers, their biomarkers that might point to their longevity.
“And I was surprised, I didn’t think 12 weeks would be long enough to shift the dial and I’ve been surprised by some of the results. They all had to work very hard, and God bless our participants, they really threw themselves into it and it was a lot.
“Some of them are dealing with addiction, and in Duncan’s case for example, he had a near-fatal heart attack three years ago and heart disease runs in his family and so his son Tom is only in his 30s, he’s obviously inherited those genes. So their program was curated around them and you’d be amazed what you can do in 12 weeks if you apply yourself.
“My take on it is that I always used to believe that when I was in my 20s I thought I was 10 foot tall and bulletproof and no one in their 20s thinks about what their life is going to be like when they’re in their 50s or 60s or older than that.
“When I was in my 20s I couldn’t even imagine being 30, let alone being older than that. And so I do think you take your youth for granted and I’ve always believed that you should be able to take youth for granted because life will bite you soon enough and you ought to feel invincible.
“However, what I’ve learned is that the habits that we form say in our 20s, if we don’t address them, if we keep those habits and we think that our bodies will always be as resilient as we are in our 20s, they will come and bite you later on and we all hope we will get old, we all hope we will have the privilege and the luck to get old because the alternative is terrible.
“And you do have to address your bad habits, the bad habits that you start to develop earlier in life. My message is that you’re never really too young to start to think about these things.”
While Tracy isn’t a big drinker, she may have a few drinks on a Saturday night – and says it’s one area that the docu-series made her think about.
“About one night a week I get on it. And getting on it might be four or five drinks, that’s not eight or nine or 10or getting absolutely plastered. But as I said I’m 64 now, and you get to a point where you think maybe I need to ease up on my body, maybe I need to treat it with a little bit more respect.”
Do You Want To Live Forever continues on Monday at 7.30pm on Channel 9 or watch anytime at 9Now.
