Triple J’s Ben and Liam move to Nova 919’s breakfast show
Adelaide’s Triple J duo Liam Stapleton and Ben Harvey are leaving the station for a new gig in their home town.
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Adelaide’s Triple J duo Liam Stapleton and Ben Harvey are coming home to host Nova’s new-look breakfast radio show.
Stapleton, 23, and Harvey, 25, who grew up in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, will become SA’s youngest commercial breakfast radio presenters when they take over from Dylan Lewis and Hayley Pearson in January next year.
After three years in Sydney as hosts of Triple J’s national breakfast show, the pair say the lure of coming home and tackling commercial radio for the first time was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“The coming-home card is always pretty massive for Ben and myself,” said Stapleton, who met Harvey at Adelaide community radio station Fresh FM in 2012.
“It was that gamble, where you think, ‘Life is great here’ (in Sydney) but we want new challenges and to try new things while we’re still young.
“We’ve worked in the industry since 2012 but we’ve actually never worked in commercial radio which is weird. So in the end we thought, ‘Why not roll the dice and try something new?’”
It’s been a meteoric rise for the pair, who started on-air as hosts of Fresh FM’s breakfast show in 2014, before moving to Triple J to replace Matt Okine and Alex Dyson in 2017.
They’ll fill the void left by former Recovery TV host Lewis and Adelady founder Pearson, who announced they were leaving Nova’s breakfast show last month.
In the most recent radio ratings survey, Nova 919 finished in fourth place in the breakfast timeslot, behind FIVEaa, ABC and Mix 102.3.
“There’s no big grandiose plan for tackling the Adelaide radio market by storm,” Stapleton said.
“We’re just two mates, from Adelaide, talking a hell of a lot about Adelaide, having a laugh. That’s what we always try and do, we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
Stapleton and Harvey will be replaced on Triple J by Sally Coleman and Erica Mallett, better known as hip-hop duo Coda Conduct, who have been regular fill-ins on across a number of Triple J programs including Breakfast.