And in what is shaping up to be one of the most moving moments in Logie’s history, Patti Newton and daughter Lauren will be in the room for the tribute to Bert Newton, who died in October.

Loading

The 80-metre red carpet will be ground zero in the lead-up to the gong show. Stars will be dropped off at the end of the carpet via a fleet of golf carts – “slingback friendly”, explains Flower – while each of the networks is planning big after parties.

But spare a thought for the bean counters from Ernst & Young, who will be collating votes until the red carpet telecast finishes at 7.30pm on Sunday. After verifying the numbers, the top-secret results will be dispatched to a handful of people, including the official engraver, who must get busy scrawling names on this year’s trophies.

All this is happening backstage as television’s glitterati wine, dine and back-slap. Who doesn’t love the Logies?

Tea, towels and triumph for Ita Buttrose

Was a humble tea towel really the launchpad for Ita Buttrose’s stellar media career?

The ABC chair and grand doyenne of Australian journalism delivered the Andrew Olle Media Lecture on Friday night at The Ivy Ballroom to a crowd of 350 – which included tables representing some of the ABC’s harshest critics: Sky News and News Corp.

She recalled how she’d left school at 15, completed a typing and shorthand course, and went to work as a copy girl at The Australian Women’s Weekly.

“I made a lot of tea and coffee,” Buttrose told the audience.

We learn a little more in the July issue of the Weekly, where Buttrose reminisces about her first job working at the magazine under the helm of formidable editor Esmé Fenston.

“We either called her Mrs Fenston or ‘the editor’. There was a bell system outside the cubicle where the copy boys and girls sat – it was like Upstairs Downstairs. You’d hear the buzzer and the flap would come down stating ‘editor’s office’ so you’d go charging along there,” Buttrose said.

“I used to make tea and coffee for 40 people in the morning and the afternoon. I was so embarrassed in the art department because there were a lot of men there, and I was only 15, and it was quite an ordeal. I was just a gauche teenager. They were all grown-ups. I’d wash up all the teacups, but there was no tea towel, so I brought one in from home. I didn’t know until I became editor 18 years later, but that tea towel marked me as a copy girl to watch because I was the only one who had ever done that. I showed initiative.”

She clearly got over her shyness by the time she was editor of Cleo magazine and searching for potential nude male centrefolds, recalling during her Olle Lecture the time she almost had the entire male membership of the West Wollongong Apex Club posing in their birthday suits.

Loading

Buttrose was invited to address the club, which raised money for charity, when “one of the chaps put his hand up and said ‘How much would you pay if the whole club were to pose nude?’”

“$500,” she responded. Later, over drinks at the bar, Buttrose and the men discussed art direction, deciding on a Roman bath setting, with towels covering their “vital parts”.

“Look, you might feel differently about this in the morning,” I said. “‘Oh, no, she’ll be right!’ So they went home and told their wives.

The next morning all hell broke out in West Wollongong. Wives threatened to leave home. The West Wollongong Apex Club almost lost its charter and I lost my centrefold!”

Well before becoming chair of the ABC, Buttrose, who turned 80 in January, was immortalised by the public broadcaster in the 2011 Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo‚ in which she was portrayed by Asher Keddie.

“It was pretty good but I thought she overdid the lisp. I found myself thinking ‘Oh God almighty, Asher, stop lisping!’” she tells the Weekly.

“One thing … they had Asher in pants and they were banned at Consolidated Press. Sir Frank [Packer] wouldn’t allow it and we also didn’t wear boots and had to wear stockings!”

Hush pimps out her wardrobe

Former Harper’s BAZAAR Australia editor-in-chief Kellie Hush arguably has one of the most coveted wardrobes in town, so it’s no wonder she’s putting her designer frocks to good use.

Hush has taken on the role of creative director of Australian online fashion rental platform The Volte, a sort of Airbnb for designer frocks, where owners of a gown can rent it out for four days. The demand for a specific garment determines the rental price, which can range from $50 to hundreds of dollars for dresses worth thousands of dollars.

Hush told PS she already has a Stella McCartney and Tommy Hilfiger number ready to “pimp”, but said she was more inspired to tackle the $3 trillion-dollar fast fashion industry that was causing untold environmental damage and creating bad fashion habits.

“This is about recirculating fashion, or rather, a true circular fashion economy,” Hush enthused.

Some “frocklords” are making up to $100,000 a year renting out their prized dresses on the site, which now has 250,000 monthly users.

Nudie runs and freezing frames

Unexpected encounters at film festivals are not exactly unknown, but one has paid off handsomely for actor Damon Herriman.

The Australian actor from Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, The Nightingale and Mr Inbetween met New Zealand actor-filmmaker Jackie van Beek during the after-party for her comedy The Breaker Upperers, which opened the Sydney Film Festival four years ago. He gushed about how much of a fan he was and she reciprocated.

The result is Herriman and van Beek playing a couple with a straining marriage who head to a sex-obsessed new-age retreat, in an anarchic comedy she wrote, Nude Tuesday, which will be screened at this year’s festival before its general opening in cinemas next Thursday.

It had them naked on a snowy mountain during the shoot in New Zealand – Herriman’s first nude scene.

“It was, ‘OK, I’m naked in this car and I’m about to open the door and run towards all these people I just met a few weeks ago, completely naked’,” he says. “That was pretty weird the first time. The second time, it was a little less, and then it just became about how friggin’ freezing it was.”

Blonde ambition

One of the jewels from this year’s festival emerged during opening night of Gracie Otto’s new film Seriously Red.

The film - the first from all-female Sydney production company Dollhouse Pictures - is about the shadow world of impersonators, from Dolly Parton to Elvis Presley. Krew Boylan (who played Schapelle Corby in 2014’s telemove Schapelle) stars as Red, the redhead who wants to be a very blonde Dolly impersonator.

Loading

Inevitably she ends up in Tamworth in the film, which also stars Celeste Barber, Thomas Campbell, Jean Kittson, Wayne Blair, Todd Lasance and Jack Thompson.

Boylan wrote the film eight years ago. Her script got Dolly’s blessing (who apparently read it overnight and even wrote some music for the film, but which sadly wasn’t used).

Along with Dolly classics, there’s music from Kenny Rogers and Neil Diamond (with Will & Grace’s Bobby Cannavale starring as Diamond’s impersonator). But the surprise package of the show is Cannavale’s wife and Dollhouse Pictures co-founder Rose Byrne, who stars as an Elvis impersonator, though not with quite the same wardrobe budget as Baz Luhrmann.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.