Comment from Peter Saxon

The other week, Jackie O Henderson (without Kyle Sandilands) sat down with her good friend Gemma O’Neill for an intimate chat in front of a 500+ audience made up mainly of advertising types, at CRA’s HEARD event in Sydney. (Pic Below Left: Peter Saxon)

It was the last of four nicely curated sessions, before drinks and networking, designed to drive audio sales through a combination of sizzle and steak and a small vegan section among the slick presentations.

Even without Kyle, Jackie was the ranking talent at HEARD, the household name that best fit with the dominant demographic in attendance. She wasn’t about to blow this opportunity to speak directly to them and try to win some of them back to the Kyle & Jackie O Breakfast Show.

With her keen instinct for reading a room, she knew that bullshit and bluster wasn’t going to cut it. So, she opted for honesty and humility plus a pinch of vulnerability.

“In a weird way,” she confided, “Melbourne not being a success, instantly, is a good thing for us.”

“By it not being a success straight away, it humbled us, and it made us go, ‘Have we lost our way?”

She acknowledged that the show had gone off track with the amount of smut being aired. But that that had now been addressed and fixed.

“I cringe when I think (about it),” said Jackie. “Anyway, it is what it is, it is done and now we have to rely on those people (lost listeners) to re-tune in and give it (the show) a second chance.”

“(It) really made us reassess where we were at, what we are doing with the show.”

All well and good, but the smut is only part of the problem that Kyle and Jackie O have had in attracting listeners in Melbourne. The other problem, and IMHO, far greater, is one of attitude.

It was always going to be a big ask to broadcast a networked Breakfast Show into Melbourne with outside talent. It had never been done successfully before – not by Laws, not by Jones, not by anyone. Nights, yes. Drive, sure. But Breakfast? No way!

Still, as I suggested in a recent comment, Luck has a habit of running out when you push it when you’re on a roll, you think fortune favours the brave – so you push it. And it was certainly a brave move (“courageous,” in the language of Yes Minister) to import a complete unknown from England in the guise of a Breakfast jock by the name of Christian O’Connell and put him on GOLD104.3. So, given the raging success that decision turned out to be, why not Kyle and Jackie O?

One reason might be that O’Connell came from merry old England, home of the Beatles, the Stones and James Bond not Sin City, home to uncouth Rugby fans that wouldn’t know one end of an AFL ball from the other. Besides, O’Connell moved to Melbourne and broadcast from local facilities rather than beam himself in from studios that overlook Sydney Harbour.

The real reason though, comes down to attitude. K & J came to Melbourne like a pair of 10 Pound Poms. For those readers unfamiliar with the term, it comes from an era following WWII, when the government felt that Australia needed to populate or perish. Trouble was that the ‘white Australia’ policy, well-entrenched at the time, severely restricted the gene pool of potential immigrants.

As they say, ‘you fish where the fish are’… So, the Aussies set up a ‘recruitment station ’ in Australia House on the Strand in London offering one way passage to Australia for just £10.

Unfortunately, many of the applicants laboured under the misapprehension that the crude colonial, convict bred yokels of Australia would welcome their betters from Mother England with due deference. However, the accommodating folk at Australia House who were the beneficiaries of a generous commission structure, were not about to dissuade applicants from this notion. Thus, the phrase ‘10 Pound Pom’ or ‘Whinging Pom’ became a derogatory term to describe those British immigrants who felt that Australia owed them a living because Australians were somehow inferior to themselves.

I’m not suggesting that Kyle and Jackie O had deliberately set out be obnoxious prats, but Kyle had already cultivated a certain persona as the nasty judge on Idol – a bull, constantly looking for new china shops to demolish. Melbourne refused to play by his rules. And it wasn’t good enough for Kyle to simply abstain from sport. In Melbourne, you must choose an AFL team and be able to name at least three platers before anyone will engage in conversation with you or take you seriously as a radio presenter.

On the other hand, the real Pom, O’Connell, is no whinger, arriving in Australia keen to make new friends and soak up the local culture.

Where Kyle was brash, O’Connell was humble – just the ticket to win over ambivalent listeners.

That leaves the K & J Breakfast show on the horns of a dilemma. Do they smooth out some of the rougher edges of the show to attract Melbourne listeners and risk losing those in Sydney whose reason for listening is precisely for the rude, crude Kyle they love to hate? Either way, K&J risk having one foot on the ship and one on the shore as the gap in the middle grows wider.

Having said that, the other night, we watched the latest episode of Australian Idol… the first of the eps in which Kyle, due to his well-publicised illness, has been replaced by Ricki-Lee Coulter. Taking nothing away from Coulter, the change in dynamic behind the judges’ desk brought into sharp relief how important an ingredient Kyle is to the show’s recipe. Although Kyle has cut back on crude insults in favour of more constructive criticism, he still manages to add some wry humour and curmudgeonly personality to an otherwise expert but dry panel that at times takes itself too seriously.

Without him, frankly, Australian Idol looks as if it’s been produced for ABC TV rather than the 7 Network. Draw your own conclusions.

Kyle’s back on Idol and Radio for now. But sometime soon, when his doctors feel the time is right, he’ll  undergo a couple of very delicate operations for aneurysms on his brain and on his heart. It will likely put him off-air for eight weeks or more –  the radio equivalent of two or three surveys.

The good news for Kyle is that living in Sydney or Melbourne, he has access to some of the best medical teams and facilities on the planet that do this kind of stuff every day.

The bad news is that with everything that’s going on with the show and his medical issues on top, it’s bound to significantly raise his stress levels. As any cardiologist will tell you, stress is a major cause of coronary heart disease.

Kyle, (I’m talking to you, old son) because I’ve gone through pretty much what you’re going through right now… and I’m still here to tell the tale after a triple bypass 28 years ago. So, I’ll stick my neck out and offer you some heartfelt advice.

Here’s what I would do, if I were you:

• Forget Melbourne for now. Call it a tactical retreat to reload and replenish supplies.
• After you come back from hospital relaxed and recuperated, re-establish yourself as an older and wiser Kyle with the listeners that know and love you. They’ll be anticipating some sort of change. You’ll never get a better opportunity.
• Cut a new deal with ARN that is grounded in reality and takes the pressure off you, Jackie and the bean counters to perform to an arbitrary survey number rather than to the best of your abilities. Think of all the money you’ll save on drugs and lifestyle in order to save your own life.
• Concentrate on being a better man, husband, father and role model for your young son. If you can succeed in that, you will have succeeded in real life. Radio is just a job.

More than anyone, Jackie knows (and has said as much) that if anything happened to Kyle, she “could not continue without him.”

It would be like Abbott without Costello.

Peter Saxon – Managing Editor