Mike Whitney & Tania Zaetta ‘WE’RE BACK!’
With diehard fans demanding a reboot, the former daredevil hosts open up in their first joint interview in a decade
Former Test cricketer Mike Whitney cracks up remembering just how insane it was for he and Tania Zaetta when Australia fell in love with Who Dares Wins all those years ago, and their lives changed radically overnight.
“I was a professional cricketer for 15 years and thought my notoriety from that was at times huge, but this was just crazy. I couldn’t go anywhere without people daring me!” remembers Mike, 62, in an exclusive interview with Woman’s Day to mark the show’s 25-year anniversary.
He and Tania, 52, both became household names overnight. Mike even jokes that it made him realise that millions of people didn’t watch cricket because the fans didn’t know or care that he played for Australia.
“They asked me what I did before I got into TV!” laughs Mike, who has also hosted Sydney Weekender for the past 26 years.
WORLDWIDE FAME
Tania also happily admits Who Dares Wins put her on the map, eventually leading to a Bollywood film career and TV gigs in the UK. Not to mention the 80 countries that also fell in love with the show.
“My first memory was getting the phone call to tell me I’d beaten 800 other girls to get the job,” she tells Woman’s Day.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘Wow, a regular pay cheque, I’ll be able to pay the rent now!’ Little did I know that that phone call would change and shape my life forever.”
The show was dreamed up on Long Reef Golf Course by producers David Mason and Adrian Brant, and Tania, who is now the mother of three-year-old twins, reckons that even when filming started, no-one had a clear idea of what she should do as the female host.
On Who Dares Wins, Mike and Tania dared ordinary people to do extreme and
record-breaking challenges – and if they didn’t, then Tania or Mike had to put their lives on the line. The simple challenges involved something like eating a sheep’s eyeball, but the extreme ones could involve riding a bike out of a plane in mid-air. “The producers didn’t really know if they wanted a girl who was a stuntwoman or a girl who was scared of everything,” she laughs, happily admitting she was far more of a scaredy-cat than the fans ever knew.
But she became a daredevil when her role was redefined after a “truckie who crushed beer cans on his forehead and ate gravel for breakfast” baulked at jumping off the roof of the Wrest Point Casino in Hobart and riding a terrifying flying fox down to the carpark.
“When he froze, we all froze,” Tania recalls, adding that the producers asked her to get into the harness to do a piece to camera from the roof’s edge to try to save the segment. “I was only going to sit there and pretend to count down jumping off to make it look good.” Until a stuntman gave her a gentle nudge... and down she went!
GUTSY CO-HOST
Tania’s fame skyrocketed as the “Aussie action girl”. What fans didn’t know was that Mike wanted to also do the dares in the first series, but Seven refused to insure him. But he took up the challenge in series two and three.
“Tania never stepped away from one dare – she’s seriously gutsy and had plenty of ticker,” says Mike.
The sportsman’s first dare was to ride a jetski over a jump, which he successfully fluked. But the one that stands out most was having to walk over a pit of crocodiles.
“I didn’t want to be eaten by a croc,” grins Mike.
Tania cracks up as Mike says while he would love to host a reboot, he reckons he’s “too long in the tooth” to do dares.
“I’ve jumped off enough buildings in my lifetime and survived,” she laughs, adding she’d love to see the reruns back on air for everyone to see!
‘I’ve jumped off enough buildings in my lifetime’