Sam Armytage steps in as Natalie Barr chokes live on Sunrise

Wednesday morning’s broadcast of Sunrise took an unexpected turn when Samantha Armytage was forced to step in for newsreader Natalie Barr at the very last minute.

Natalie had been reading the news about the latest tax cut bill when she appeared to start choking live on air, prompting her co-star Sam to think on her feet and take over the bulletin.

“I must just take over here because Nat’s choking a little bit,” Sam told viewers of the Channel Seven breakfast show. “So we’ll keep going with the news while she recovers.”

Later in the show, Natalie rejoined the panel alongside Sam, David ‘Kochie’ Koch and Mark Beretta.

“Are you ok?” Sam asked her co-star, who assured the rest of the cast she had recovered since the incident.

“Yeah I’m ok,” she said. “I just breathed in a bit of dust or something and then I just was choking, but apart from that I’m fine.”

“I thought you were getting emotional over the tax story,” co-star Kochie then said to lighten the mood.

“I can understand, tax is a very emotional issue.”

“It is,” Nat joked. “Just seeing Peter Dutton on the screen.”

Reality TV feud

The Sunrise team found themselves in a little hot water earlier this week when they made a joke at the expense of former MAFS star Martha.

Reflecting on the Logie Awards, Kochie accused the Kim Kardashian lookalike of forcefully elbowing him out of the way on the red carpet.

“I’ve still got bruises in the ribs from the Married At First Sight woman who elbowed me on the way through on the red carpet,” Kochie revealed.

Sports presenter Beretta then joked, “Do not get between Martha and the camera!” while Sam said, “Especially when you’ve only got 15 minutes of fame!”

The joke did not go down well with Martha however, who took to her social channels to call the journalists out for ‘bullying’.

“Sam continued to make fun of me, a women in the industry that I’m meant to look up to. Sam, you have single handedly incited online hate towards me,” Martha said.

“Just when I had built myself back up after the tumultuous time on MAFS, you brought it all crashing down.”

To add insult to injury, she mispronounced Kochie’s name in a video on her Instagram stories, saying “kot-chi”.

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