Dawn O'Porter: 'I work pay cheque to pay cheque. I'm always broke'
Although Dawn, 46, is a successful author and TV presenter in her own right and is also married to Hollywood actor Chris O'Dowd, she admitted that money is always an issue.
She told the White Wine Question Time podcast: 'I've never seen myself as a celebrity. Even though I'm married to Chris, who is quite a well-known actor, I don't think either of us have ever seen ourselves as celebrities.
'I work pay cheque to pay cheque. I'm always broke. My card got declined last week. I'm like, what the f*** is happening? When will this end?
'I guess if I was a celebrity, I'd get paid lots of money to do things that aren't necessarily my job or don't really feed what I do, but I don't. My job is writing, with the occasional little ad on Instagram to pay the rent.'
Dawn – who has children Art, eleven, and Valentine, eight with Chris – also spoke about meeting Chris just as her successful TV and writing career was imploding.
She said: 'Everything had fallen apart. My TV career had just gone. I was so poor. I was so upset. I had zero confidence. I didn't know what I was going to do. I'd just met Chris, and he was on this trajectory up. I thought, well maybe this is just it. I'm just a girlfriend, and that's it.
'We were living in LA and I just said to Chris, I've got to go back to London to try and claw back my career. And we came back to London for a bit and I'd go for these meetings at TV production companies and I'd been successful.
'I had my own series on Channel 4... and they'd be like, 'What do you want to do?' and I was like, 'I want to do what I do'. But no one wanted to employ me.
'[Stylist magazine] sacked me. I was cool. I had my own show on Channel 4... then as my career just kind of... declined, I think they looked at me and were like, well she's just not that interesting anymore.
'It was the final blow to my confidence. I was absolutely on the floor because I always felt that writing would be the thing that saved me.'
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When Disneyland Paris (Euro Disney as it was then known) was being developed, Eisner amassed a team of the world's best designers to make it the most immersive theme park ever built. They included Eddie Sotto, who meticulously created the park's turn-of-the-century themed Main Street, and Tom Morris, the architect of its majestic castle. The clearest evidence they succeeded is the fact that the Disneyland Paris is still Europe's most-visited theme park even though a new attraction hasn't been built there for several decades. As this report revealed, launching Disneyland Paris may actually be the studio's best-ever deal. Eisner's effect didn't just extend to expansion. "We improved the food at Walt Disney World which was terrible in 1984. We built 30,000 hotel rooms, high-quality hotels, which they didn't have - they had two." He added that 'we did that in architecture. We built 80 buildings around the world at Disney. 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When asked why a media boss would want to own a soccer team he replied 'football is the most direct [investment of my] media strategy. It is the most obvious and the clearest as opposed to the least obvious.' He explained that 'content, in my opinion, is still the essential ingredient in the media and having content is still the most important thing in platform that is appealing to an audience has to have something that lights up the Christmas Tree. And what lights up the Sky Christmas Tree or the ESPN Christmas Tree is live sports.' Known as appointment viewing because fans have to tune in at a specific time to watch it live, sport commands premium prices by broadcasters. "The only thing that demands viewing when it happens is sports. Yes, you have replays and you have all sorts of analysis of sports but if you know the score at the end of the game, the rest is really just icing on the cake." The drama of live sport also yields immensely passionate fans who crave content about their heroes. It explains why Welcome to Wrexham has been so popular but it wasn't the first mover in the streaming space. That accolade goes to Sunderland Til I Die, a 2018 Netflix series about the disputes and dilemmas behind the scenes at Sunderland AFC which had just been relegated from the English Football League Championship to League One. As Eisner explained, "all you have to do is watch Sunderland Til I Die on Netflix to understand the emotion of a team going into dissent." In fact, it was this show that convinced the actor Rob McElhenney to buy a soccer team leading to his investment in Wrexham with Reynolds. At the end of last season Wrexham was promoted to the Championship, one step below the Premier League. The odds seemed stacked against Eisner getting Portsmouth back to the top as English soccer is full of team owners who are prepared to pour billions into their squads in a bid to win on the pitch and earn international acclaim. However, afer seven calendar years in charge, his happy ending is within striking distance. Portsmouth won the League One title in the 2023-2024 season and was promoted to the Championship after a 12-year absence. Since then, the team has retained its place there and will make a renewed charge for promotion to the Premier League when the upcoming season gets underway on Friday. Perhaps indicating Eisner's confidence in its chances, he recently announced that Portsmouth is planning to film behind-the-scenes content over the coming year. It is a momentous milestone as it will give him the content he envisaged back in 2019. Most impressively, Eisner has managed to get this far without burning up blockbuster losses and putting the team in jeopardy. Quite the opposite actually as analysis of its latest financial statements reveals that the team now has the strongest capital structure in its 127-year history with no debt and net assets of $33.5 million (£26.5 million) as of June 30, 2024. Its net asset value has increased more than five fold since the supporters took over the club in 2013 which shows how strong the business has become. The metric is calculated by deducting a company's liabilities from the value of its assets so the higher the value, the lower the level of risk. The net result can be a sign of impending peril and, testimony to this, Portsmouth had net liabilities of $93.8 million (£47.5 million) in 2008 before it collapsed less than two years later. Since Eisner bought the team its cash reserves have risen 16.3% to $3.9 million (£3.1 million) which also gives strong confidence in the business. Its success has been shared amongst its staff as their pay has almost doubled to $13.4 million (£10.6 million) since Eisner took control even though employee numbers have decreased by 26.1% to 275. Staff and players were paid bonuses after the team was promoted and this partly fueled a $7.1 million (£5.6 million) net loss last year which pales in comparison to the red ink burned up by its counterparts in the Premier League. Everton FC for example reported a $67.3 million (£53.2 million) net loss last year whilst Tottenham Hotspur lost $33.1 million (£26.2 million). Both clubs have hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue as they share in the proceeds of the league's broadcast deals which are amongst the biggest in world soccer. It explains why Portsmouth's revenue is far lower though it rose 8.9% last year to $17.2 million (£13.6 million), the highest level since Eisner bought the team. Last year alone, matchday takings increased 6.3% to $8.7 million (£6.9 million) whilst broadcasting revenue rose by almost double that percentage to $3.2 million (£2.5 million). The increased broadcast exposure gave a 21.4% boost to the team's commercial and sponsorship revenue with partners including Nike and Uber Eats paying a total of $2.3 million (£1.8 million) in 2024. It was a family effort as the team is run by Eisner's dynamic entrepreneur sons Anders, founder of zero-sugar brand Activate Drinks, producer Eric and director Breck who made 2005 adventure film Sahara starring Matthew McConaughey and Penélope Cruz. They are accompanied by talented managers including chief executive Andrew Cullen, chief marketing officer Matthew Barker, chief commercial officer Mark Judges and the coach John Mousinho. Although Eisner's spending on Portsmouth hasn't been unchained, he hasn't left the club wanting. Its 2018 financial statements revealed that "the purchase of the club by Tornante resulted in an injection of £10 million [$13.2 million] new working capital which bolstered the balance sheet to a new positive total of £12.6 million [$16.6 million] net assets." It didn't stop there. As of June last year the Eisner family had invested $46.8 million (£37 million) in the club including $24 million (£19 million) alone on the redevelopment of its Fratton Park stadium. This began in June 2021, well ahead of the club's 125th anniversary, and was handled by Robert Stern who Eisner knew through his work at Disney. Stern designed Disney's Feature Animation Building in Burbank, California, with its soaring blue replica of Mickey Mouse's pointy sorcerer's hat. Stern was also behind Walt Disney World's lavish Yacht and Beach Club Resorts, which look like sprawling New England mansions, and their counterpart at Disneyland Paris, the Newport Bay Club. His work on Fratton Park had a magic touch as average attendance increased by around 1,000 to 18,952 in the year to June 30, 2024 and on February 17 last year Portsmouth had its first crowd of more than 20,000 spectators in 13 years. Its latest financial statements add that "in the second half of the season, we capped our season tickets to 15,000 and introduced a season ticket waiting list at Fratton Park for the first time in many years." In turn, the surge in spectators led to record hospitality kiosk and merchandising sales which is perhaps as significant a home run as the team's success on the pitch. "It is a game about winning. It is a game about progressing upwards. It is a game about strategy. It is a game about intelligent management," says Eisner. "Just like in the entertainment business."
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