She won’t be drawn on comparisons between her new show and Fran Kelly’s Frankly, which also featured creative types being interviewed in a half-hour format on the ABC. It was axed after one season.

“I just don’t think you can compare them, they’re completely different. These are standalone documentaries, focusing on a particular creative Australian, and that was a talk show.”

Creative Types helps ensure the ABC meets its obligation to cover the arts, but Ben Eltham, lecturer in cultural and creative industries at Monash University, argues it’s not enough. There’s a place for interviews with artists, he says, but “what it misses is both the bigger picture and the specifics”.

He wants more issues-based arts programming on the ABC and argues the ABC it is deficient on industry news, cultural commentary and specialist content of that nature.

“It doesn’t seem like anyone at the top of the ABC considers the arts a core responsibility these days,” Eltham says, adding the push for reach has really affected their specialist programming choices.

Namila Benson’s weekly Art Works, launched in mid-2021, will not return this year. Instead, she will host a new weekly show called The Art Of, to air in the first half of this year.

Creative Types is the first offering from Trioli since she retired from ABC Radio Melbourne in August last year. It’s taken a while to recalibrate, she says.

“Now, something inside me is sort of really stretching and I can think differently. And I’m out of that sort of that relentless sense of having to be connected to everything all the time,” she says.

The new program is something of a lifelong ambition for her, a self-professed arts obsessive. “Because all of these stories in the end relate back to our experience, whether it be comedy, or the extraordinary vision of Patricia Piccinini and how she sees a potential world and a very proximate world,” Trioli says.

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She hopes viewers will “feel very inspired and hopeful for generations of creativity in this country”.

“Because there are people making beautiful and really moving and really remarkable things.”

Creative Types airs at 9pm on ABC and ABC Iview on April 9.