One of the final sessions at Radiodays Europe 2026 was titled Your Biggest Star Just Quit. Now What? It was organised because of, you guessed it, the recent demise of the Kyle and Jackie O Show. If you want a sense of just how big a story this has been globally, because this will have been a fairly late ring in it was in one of the smaller rooms and packed to standing room only.

The panel was:

Nik Goodman – London based music and radio consultant who was the facilitator of several sessions I watched.

Dan McGrath – Music & Audio Producer, Bounce London

James Cridland – the British born now Brisbane based radio futurologist

Cathinka Rondon – Head of Audio, NRK Radio Norway

With additional guest appearances from Wade Kingsley. 

There was plenty that you will be well familiar with if you’ve been following the KIIS breakdown over the last six weeks, including the audio from was is now Jackie O’s last day with the network. There was also a snippet from a keynote session Jackie was part of at the conference last year saying she was not and never was doing it for the money, which now feels prescient.

There were rumbles of displeasure when the extent of the K&J salaries were disclosed and a couple of quiet cheers when it was additionally noted that Jackie was paid the same as Kyle. Then the session deviated to an unexpected path, and one most Australians won’t be aware of, there has, sort of, been a precedent for Kyle and Jackie O in England, and his name is Chris Evans.

25 years ago I was living in England myself at the height of the Chris Evans palaver, where his every move with then wife Billie Piper was scrutinised and he was in the midst of a court case against his former employer Virgin Radio after being fired for failing to attend work on one to many occasions. To make the court case even more spicy, an organisation called Ginger Media Group set up by Evans had bought Virgin Radio from Richard Branson a few years earlier, so he owned the company he’d been let go from.

This session started a few years before then, because Dan McGrath had been part of Chris’s on-air team when Chris was given the high profile gig hosting BBC Radio 1 Breakfast in April 1995. Chris had had incredible success on TV prior to the BBC and was considered something of a creative genius with an incredibly loyal young audience.

Chris Evans centre, Dan McGrath far right.

Chris was considered such an asset that a media throng was there to watch him sign the £1 million contract, unheard of money for the public broadcaster. Then there were all the other clauses like Chris and his Ginger company were in control of the show’s production, not the BBC – again a first. And he was still able to make his TV show on Channel 4, which would become a sticking point later.

The show’s highest audience was 7.5 million. So confident, or complacent, did Chris become that heading into a public holiday near Christmas Chris and Dan were out partying alongside many other Brits. Chris said to Dan he had a great idea, and that was that he wasn’t going to turn up for his breakfast show the next morning.

Dan was mildly horrified. True that most people were going to be enjoying the sleep in the next day but that was no reason to not show up for the ones who would still be tuning in.

Chris said:

‘They pay me for my brilliant ideas and mine is to not show up.’

And he didn’t. The BBC fined him £7000 but later Chris would return from holidays a week later than expected, and another time decide to start at 6:30am not 6 because that was too early. The latter became a permanent arrangement. The final straw was when Chris decided that he should also have Fridays off so that h had a full day to prep for his TV show. This time the BBC refused and so Chris quit.

Nine months later he was back on air at Virgin Radio with 7am starts and Fridays off. But as he bought up the station, the ratings started to dip and with that Chris’s confidence. Dan said there was one time when Chris casually wandered in and said he’d checked his bank account that morning had had a mere £35 million sitting in it. Another time Dan and a music director brought Chris in for a chat about the music he was and wasn’t playing from the scheduled log. His response was:

“Yeah, but I own the radio station.”

He was beyond control and became controlling, not wanting any of his team to speak to anyone else in building. Eventually Chris approached Dan to do some firing of team members that Chris was now wary of, and when Dan said he wasn’t prepared to, Chris had him fired instead.

I’m unsure whether Dan and Chris have mended fences, but what Dan did say is that when he was fired from Virgin, and lost the court case and his share options, the three year break afterwards did him the world of good. He returned on BBC2 in late 2005 on a Saturday afternoon, ending up back on breakfast in 2010 and then in 2019 he was welcomed back on Virgin Radio UK where he hosts breakfast to this day.

He’s been married to Natasha Shishmanian since 2007, has a young family who he dotes on and does radio now because he loves it. He does also have a penchant for very expensive fast cars, but all the self destructive vices appear to have gone.

With what might be his own lengthy sabbatical from radio due to the the court proceedings with ARN, Kyle too is taking stock of what radio means to him. He’s said on air that it is all he knows how to do, it’s all he wants to do. While the court case will result in some sum of money being sorted out between he and the network, Kyle will be back on air somewhere and somehow, being paid something unlikely to elicit the same gasps as his old one.

This session was most interesting because Chris Evans was the precedent for Kyle Sandilands and a future in radio from here. What that sounds like remains to be seen.

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo reporting from Radiodays Europe 2026 in Riga, Latvia.