“If there was an Andrew Denton fan club I’d be the number one fan,” Craig Bruce confides in his latest Game Changers podcast.
Andrew has created compelling content across many platforms.
His radio career started with Doug Mulray and later he was brought back to Triple M for his own breakfast show.
Talking about his two stints on radio he told Craig Bruce:
“It was a time when we had licence to do anything… party, rock and roll, be outrageous.
“There was an intoxicating power to it… everyone from garbos to Barristers listened to it… it was incredibly exciting.”
He told Criag the story of his first efforts to get into radio:
“I was 19 years old, at Uni… I realised the FM licences were being applied for and I checked the names of all the applicants and wrote to them…
“I heard from no one except Rod Muir… he said, come in and have a chat. I was nobody, I was chewing gum on the footpath… he offered me a job in the cart room, but I declined because I didn’t want to start there…
“This is why Muir was successful he worked hard and he looked for good talent… he didn’t have to spend time with a dipshit kid from the Blue Mountains, but he did.”
Denton has never told that story publicly before.
Denton rode the wave of FM radio when it was first introduced. “I was excited about the rise of FM Radio in Australia. There was only AM radio and I lived in Katoomba… what I had grown up with was a sad musical education, but then FM came along with energy it was very exciting.”
Lessons he has learnt in his radio career include: don’t go on holidays and have the confidence to ask for more money.
He thinks that modern radio breakfast shows can “make your comedy muscles lazy” if you only talk about what happened to you today. “You have to sit down and work hard to write funny things,” he advises Criag Bruce in the podcast, and also confides that he thinks sketch comedy will come back if comedians work hard on it.
Denton still loves comedy, but moved beyond comedy to interviewing because “life was more interesting that just comedy.”
Hear the full chat on Game Changers, below.