Aside from the occasion in 1991 when ACA ran the story on topless hardware store employees and she walked out for two days, I don’t recall reading about diva like behaviour in connection with Wendt at the height of her fame. There were plenty of stories in the press about certain other Nine personalities during those times. Graham Kennedy’s antics and demands, particularly in relation to his dressing room, were widely covered during the two years he did News Show/Coast to Coast.
I think Jana Wendt is one of the rare breed who won’t do anything for the money. She has her standards and notoriously expressed her disdain for the direction current affairs was heading as the genre was being dumbed down in the early 1990s. Her relationship with commercial television never really recovered after Seven promised her a vehicle (Witness) to deliver quality journalism only to renege on the deal, the dispute ending when Seven settled out of court.
I don’t think it is a question of whether she is “difficult to work with”, it’s just that the networks have force fed us a diet of tabloid current affairs for so long that her style of journalism and her interests are no longer a suitable fit for commercial television.
Jana had high journalistic standards and the network nowadays don’t have high standards.
l remember an interview with her many years ago just after her last exit from Nine and she said her one regret was that she didn’t quit TV sooner.
At the peak of her career she was the highest paid person on television and even won a gold logie which she didn’t attend to accept, citing work commitments in Sydney for ACA as the excuse.
I never heard rumours of diva antics from her but do remember constant rumours of trouble with network executives about content of programs she was fronting.
Although it does have to be said that there’s been at least one Media Spy member (possibly even two) who has actually appeared on Hot Seat as a contestant before…