Lights, Camera, Happiness!
Juiced TV is a small but deeply loved television network that operates in Queensland hospitals, bringing happiness and relief to thousands of sick kids. With its fun tone and patient-focused segments, the joy it sprinkles around the sterile hospital corridors feels almost magical. But, as its creator explains, Juiced TV may never have existed, had it not been for one lucky twist of fate.
The story begins in 2005 at Channel Ten’s Brisbane studios, where 18-year-old communications student Pip Forbes – then Pip Russell – arrived clutching her resume.
The broadcaster had advertised for a junior publicist, and the optimistic Pip had decided to apply, even though she hadn’t finished university yet. That have-a-go attitude has informed her whole life, including her decision as a teenager to volunteer to do ‘bedside play’ at the Queensland Children’s Hospital.
“That’s where you would take a trolley of toys around to the kids,” Pip tells The Weekly. “I just wanted to give back to the community in that way, and to those kids who didn’t have choice or control over what was happening to them.”
Pip didn’t get the publicist job, but she’d made an impression at Channel Ten. As luck would have it, they were when she went in for her interview and one of the producers had an inkling Pip would be good on camera. “It was a fluke,” Pip says, but the job was hers.
