Carol Ferrone on ABC’s Back In Time, Personal Brand & Shaking Not Stirred

Nine thousand families applied for Back in Time for Dinner. Carol Ferrone got it after a stranger tapped her on the shoulder outside a shoe shop and said she liked the look of her family. Seven days later the show was hers.

Carol is a TV presenter, MC and storyteller who spent three seasons on the ABC’s Logie-nominated Back in Time series, hosted by Annabel Crabb, living 170 years of Australian history in real time with her husband Peter and their three children. Their house was gutted eight times. She scrubbed laundry by hand in 44 degree heat, churned butter for a corner shop that opened to the public, wore original whalebone corsets, and boiled a calf’s head for a Federation dinner. When her son Julian was sent to World War One in an Anzac uniform, the country cried with her.

She and Rachel talk about the 1950s dinner where Peter ate alone at the head of the table and Carol threw a plate. What an 1870s corner shop taught her about community and why she thinks we’ve lost it. Why she quietly loved having no responsibility except the house, and what it costs to admit that out loud. And her view that a woman can run the room at work and still want to be led at home.

Carol also wrote and shot Shaking Not Stirred, a documentary about her brother-in-law Ralph, who has lived with Parkinson’s since his forties. She wrote it in one night, filmed it in a day on no budget, and had it finished in eight weeks. The premiere sold out in nine days and she upgraded the cinema four times. Every dollar of ticket sales goes to Shake It Up Australia. She has since received a certificate of recognition from the Governor-General for it. The third screening is at NSW Parliament House on 22 September.

She finishes with the personal brand masterclass she normally charges for: the fool, the victim and the queen. One brand per category. The same skincare company for seven years. No filters on a 53 year old face.

Carol drinks a mocktail espresso martini. A hundred and seventy years of costume, one zero-budget film, and her own eulogy: she never stopped, and she partied the whole time.