The Phone Stopped Ringing. Now What?

Lessons on relevance, reinvention and longevity for women in television.

For many women in television, the later stage of a career brings a moment few talk about — when the phone slows, the roles shift and reinvention becomes essential.

You spent decades making television. You survived the alpha men, the impossible deadlines, the budgets that shrank and the ambitions that didn’t, and then, quietly, the calls dried up. This isn’t the end of your story. It’s time to produce the next chapter, and you already have everything you need.

There is real grief in this. If you came up in television in the 1980s and 90s, be it news, sport, entertainment, you gave that industry the best decades of your working life. You bled for it. You fought in rooms where you were often the only woman, frequently talked over, occasionally outright dismissed, and yet somehow you made extraordinary things happen on time and on budget, every single time.

Now the industry you gave everything to has developed a sudden and convenient case of amnesia about just how good you are. The jobs go elsewhere, the calls get rerouted, your inbox gets quieter and you wonder if it’s you. It is not you. Television didn’t outgrow you. It just stopped looking in your direction.

I started in the industry in 1980. I have watched it transform beyond recognition; from analogue to digital, formats, platforms, technology, audiences — everything. Through all of it, the thing that made great television was never the kit, the budget, or the creator’s enthusiasm at a pitch. It was producers. People who could hold a vision in one hand and a crisis in the other and still hit the TX. People like you. So, let’s talk about what you are, and what you could be doing with it.

What you actually have.

When you worked in television, you probably didn’t think of yourself as a project manager, a crisis communicator, a talent director, a logistics specialist, a budget strategist, or a creative director. You were just a producer doing your job. But strip away the television-specific language and look at what producing is. You built things from nothing under extreme time pressure. You managed large, complex teams of people with competing egos and priorities. You made high-stakes decisions with incomplete information, usually in real time, often live on air. You negotiated and problem solved. You delivered, repeatedly, under conditions that would terrify most people.

And you did it in an era before everyone had a toolkit and a framework and a methodology named after them. You learned by doing, by failing fast and quietly, by watching and absorbing and adapting. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, exactly what most organisations are desperate for and consistently failing to find. You have 40 years of making things happen. The world is full of organisations where nothing happens.

The double bind we don’t talk about enough.

We often talk around, rather than about, the experience of being a late-career woman in television. It isn’t the same as being a late-career man in television. The men we worked alongside have largely continued to find work, find their phone still ringing into their sixties. For many of us, the decline was steeper and it came earlier. Ageism and sexism in this industry are not separate phenomena. They operate together, and regretfully, they still operate against us.

I don’t raise this to make you feel worse. Naming a thing accurately is the first step to not letting it define you. What happened to your career is not a verdict on your ability. It is evidence of a structural failure, and structural failures, unlike personal ones, can be stepped around.

Where your skills are actually wanted.

Here is what I have come to understand: the transferable skills conversation is real, but it works best when you stop translating yourself into corporate language and start helping organisations understand what a producer does. Charities and not-for-profits are running communications operations, campaigns, and fundraising events with people who are passionate, but who may not have had to think about editorial rigour, narrative structure, or whether something will land with an audience. You have. Naturally.

Start-ups and scale-ups are full of brilliant people who can identify unmet needs, build products but have never had to communicate their story — to customers, investors, or the media — in a way that works. You know how stories work at a structural level most people never develop. Businesses of every size are organising conferences, launches, brand films, internal communications, podcasts, social content, and training programs. Most of them are doing it with people who haven’t ever worked to a real deadline. You have worked to live deadlines, on camera, with the transmission clock running.

Universities, think tanks, public sector bodies — all are producing content, managing complex stakeholder relationships, and trying to run things efficiently. None of them have your experience of what real production pressure looks and feels like. Stop waiting for television to remember you exist. Go somewhere that will recognise you on sight.

My own pivot: from the sidelines to the C-Suite.

Here’s how it happened for me. It didn’t begin with a strategy or a LinkedIn refresh or a career coach. It began with my son’s Year 12 school rugby. I got involved, as you do, a mum helping out. But I’m a producer, so I staged an event in the school’s important and highly visible Sesquicentenary year. A proper one, and it was noticed. VicRugby saw what I’d done and asked if I’d help with something considerably bigger: their campaign to win the franchise for a Melbourne-based Super Rugby team. We won it. The Melbourne Rebels came into existence, in part, because a television producer who was between television jobs knew how to help build something that landed. That campaign put me quite unexpectedly in a room with the right people. The deputy chair of the Rebels had invested in a Medtech product with a friend of his, who happened to be the cornerstone investor. They were preparing to launch and were convinced they had a packaging problem. They thought they needed a creative to come in and make it more appealing and asked me to have a look.

So, I looked — really looked — under the hood, not just at the surface. That’s what producers do. We don’t just dress the set. We ask whether the set is in the right place, whether the script is working, whether the whole thing makes sense for an audience.

In new rooms for me were the researchers. Scientists and clinicians working with a quiet, fierce dedication on problems that most of us never think about until we or someone we love desperately needs the answer. People spending years, sometimes decades, pursuing solutions that could change what it means to receive a diagnosis, to manage a condition, to survive something that not long ago was unsurvivable. They are brilliant in the way that makes you feel slightly breathless. The work they are doing is not incremental. It matters. And what I came to understand, slowly, then all at once, was that my job was not to be them. It was to make sure nothing got in their way.

That is what the pivot gave me. Not a new identity, but a new context for an old one. A producer’s job has always been to build the conditions in which extraordinary people can do extraordinary things. To handle the noise so the signal gets through. To make the logistics invisible so the vision can land. In television, the talent are the stars; we just make sure everything is in place to support their performance and the audience’s satisfaction.

In MedTech, the researchers are the stars. The patients waiting on their work are the audience — and the stakes could not be higher.I could have smiled, simply executed the brief I was given, taken the fee, and left. Instead, I told them the truth. Uncomfortable, inconvenient, expensive truth.

I looked under the hood. That decision changed everything. They listened. We went back to the drawing board together and I ended up helping to drive the redevelopment of the product itself, leading to a CXO position. A C-suite role in Medtech. For a television producer who had never worked in technology in her life.

Except — and this is key — I had been working in technology my entire career. Television is technology, sometimes under extreme pressure. Managing teams through rapid change is technology leadership. Knowing how an audience thinks, how a product lands, what works and what doesn’t in the real world; that isn’t a soft skill. That is the skill. The one that rooms full of brilliant engineers and investors frequently don’t have and desperately need.

That CXO role embedded me in the world of tech startups, and it turned out that startups, in the best possible way, are a lot like live television. No safety net. Decisions made with incomplete information. Stakeholders and big dollars. Everything on the line. A team that needs someone who has been in high-pressure rooms before and didn’t fall apart. I wasn’t a consolation prize for those startups. I was exactly what they needed, and I found it by staging a school rugby event, doing it properly, and letting the work speak.

Your path will look different, but the instinct is the same: go where you can make something happen, do it with everything you have, and don’t just fix the packaging when the real problem is deeper. That willingness to tell the truth and go further than asked; that’s what will open doors you didn’t even know existed.

How to make the pivot.

I won’t pretend this part is simple, because it isn’t. Changing how you describe yourself, how you present yourself, and where you look for work is genuinely hard, especially when your identity has been so deeply tied to an industry and a craft for so long.

Here is what I suggest, from experience and from watching other women do this well: Start with your network, not job boards. The people you have worked with over forty years are spread across industries now. Some of them have gone into businesses, charities, education, government. Reach out. Not with a pitch but with a conversation. Tell them you’re looking at what’s next and you’d love to hear what they’re doing. People remember producers who were brilliant to work with. Let them remember you.

Update how you talk about what you do. This is not dumbing down, it’s translating up. ‘I produced a weekly live sport program for twelve years’ becomes ‘I led a team of forty people delivering a complex, high-stakes live event weekly, on budget and on time, for over a decade.’ Same truth. Better heard.

Consider the portfolio approach. You don’t have to find one new full-time thing. Consulting, interim roles, mentoring, training, project work — a collection of smaller engagements can be both financially viable and genuinely interesting. Many women I know who have made this transition say they are doing the most varied and satisfying work of their careers.

Back yourself in the room. You spent years in rooms full of people who were confident beyond their competence. You showed up. You learned to hold your ground. Do not suddenly become tentative now, in the room that matters; the one where you are selling yourself. You have receipts. Use them.

A final word.

You are not at the end of a career. You are at the beginning of something that television was, frankly, too narrow to contain. The skills you have; the real ones, the ones forged in those control rooms and edit suites and on those exhausting, exhilarating live broadcasts are rare. They are wanted. They are valuable. The phone might not be ringing the way it used to. So, pick it up, and make the call yourself.

About the Author

Wani Wall began her career in television in 1980 and spent the next two decades producing on-air promotions, sale reels and program pitches across sport, news and entertainment in an era when women in those rooms were outnumbered, underestimated, and still somehow got everything to air on time. She raised two children, born in 1991 and 1993, while continuing to build her career — something that will surprise no one who has ever watched a woman produce a live program with three things going wrong simultaneously and nothing showing on her face. When the television work dried up Wani did what producers do: she looked for the next thing that needed making happen. That instinct took her from a school rugby sideline to a global sports franchise campaign, and eventually into the world of technology and innovation, where she has held executive leadership roles and works with startups that need exactly what television has spent twenty years training her to do. In June 2025, she became a grandmother for the first time. She is, by her own account, doing the best work of her life.