Determined to demonstrate its youth credentials, triple j has announced a new breakfast team for 2010, stand-up comics Tom Ballard and Alex Dyson. At just 19 and 21 respectively, Tom and Alex are the youngest breakfast team in the country.

Replacing Robbie, Merieke and the Doctor, for the past year the boys have been cutting their teeth on Weekend Breakfast with their unique segments and ramshackle banter.

radioinfo caught up with them for a chat…

radioinfo: How is radio different from stand-up comedy?

The main difference is when you’re onstage doing stand-up, you have a profound inability to go to a track when a joke bombs onstage. Unfortunately. Radio is obviously less immediate in terms of feedback from an audience. On a radio show you can be really funny and then boring and then interesting and then annoying, all over a three hour period, while with stand-up, chances are people are either with you or they’re not. Also you can’t say as many naughty words on radio. The upshot to radio though is more people have greater access to you and you get to do a whole heap of different stuff.

radioinfo: Do you feel pressure to ‘be funny’ every day, and how do you handle that?

Every now and then someone whips you the ‘say something funny’ line, so there is a little pressure there. It’s mainly from people you don’t know that well though. We think the better you know people and the more comfortable you are in their company the more you can come out of your shell and the funnier you can be.

radioinfo: Weekday breakfast radio is the most grueling gig of all. You have been doing weekends till now, but what are you doing to prepare for 5 early mornings per week?

The good thing about getting up at 4.30 is that it’s not really a time. Your alarm goes off and you hop out of bed because you have to. It’s not like seven in the morning where you say ‘ooh, I had to get up early this morning.’ It is another world, and we are relying on the radio alarm gods to stop us from setting pm instead of am. That and punching large pig carcasses. That helps you prepare too.

radioinfo: How will your show be different? What can listeners expect?

Well, given 2 male friends talking drivel over radio frequency isn’t the most original of radio stunts, we’re hoping to use the strengths of triple j as a station to get Australia involved. We want to communicate with and have input from around the country and hopefully make the show a real conversation and way to connect with other people who just like good music and a couple of laughs at the absurdities of life. That and we want to play the board game Risk on the radio. Like, a massive game of it over the whole year. It’ll be awesome.

radioinfo: How important is triple j to Australians?

To the people who love it, and there are a lot of them out there, it’s very important. Especially for young people from regional areas who are starved for choice. I think we’re the only radio station that people get tattoos of, so there’s some proof of people’s passion for triple j. Coming into this environment where people feel (and actually do have) so much ownership of the station, we’re very aware of how much it means to people. We’ll do our best to have fun ourselves and hopefully other people will enjoy it as well. If all else fails we’ll just play some Presets.

Tom and Alex have been friends since childhood having met at playgroup in Warrnambool VIC. They attended the same primary school and bonded in amateur musical theatre. They realised they had a knack for working together when they wrote a ridiculous play for a local drama festival.

In 2006, triple j Program Director, Chris Scaddan discovered Tom at the Raw Comedy Final, learnt that he had an established creative partner and commissioned radio demos from the pair. He liked with what he heard and immediately threw them into the late-night deep end, impressed by their progress the childhood mates promptly moved to reign Weekend Breakfast.

Both overachievers, Alex is a self described “athletic 21 year old fond of racing cars (on foot), playing footy and performing sketch comedy.” With a whole heap of creative writing, performance and a string of short films under his belt Alex recently graduated with a Creative Arts Degree from Melbourne Uni.

6’ 3” Tom is a socially observant 19 year old comedian who has knocked over crowds in both Edinburgh and Canada and earned ‘Best Newcomer’ at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009. He regularly gigs at comedy venues nationally with guest spots on ‘The 7pm Project’ and ‘Good News Week’.