Life after radio: Cosi is ready to take on Australia
Sacked SAFM host Andrew ‘Cosi’ Costello says he knows the secret to getting the station back on top – but admits he’d rather avoid this year’s “dogfight” on Adelaide’s radio airwaves.
SA Weekend
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Don’t expect Cosi to be wallowing in the wake of his shock sacking from SAFM last year – he’s planning to take on Australia.
Andrew “Cosi” Costello says he is happy to turn his back on radio for the moment, because he is preparing to take the Cosi brand national.
While he is tight-lipped on the precise details, Cosi, who has been spending some time with his family (and camels) on his farm near Harrogate, says the offer is there for an “Aussie with Cosi” show, made in South Australia but travelling around the nation and reporting the same heartwarming stories about people and places.
“I’ll look at that this year and I’m interested in a couple of other different kinds of projects on TV that I’d like to get off the ground,” Cosi says in this in-depth interview with SA Weekend.
“I can’t really say too much.
“They’re concepts I can take to the network.”
He did a spin-off from the show last year with a book, Top 100 Places to Visit in SA, under the South Aussie with Cosi brand.
It encourages people to get out and get to know their state and he wants to spend time this year promoting it.
Cosi thinks he knows how to fix SAFM, once the number one station but now languishing well down in the ranks and with another new line-up to break in this year after Bec Morse was teamed up at breakfast with Mark (Soda) Soderstrom.
“They’re addicted to change, they can’t help themselves,” Cosi says of station management. “Bec and I had very good chemistry but when they added Lehmo (from Melbourne) it was very challenging to do the show with someone down the line.”
He thinks SAFM should decide who they want to be and stick with it.
“People don’t like change. But at the end of the day, that’s not my business,” he says.
He still loves SAFM and would do anything he can to help them get back on top.
He also knows, and respects, the very commercial nature of the business and was told early on if he couldn’t handle being in a “backstabbing, conniving industry”, he might as well go back to the farm.
He stayed but maybe now he has had enough.
While not confirmed, the radio offers are thought to have come from rival stations Nova and Mix, where Ali Clarke has been struggling to be heard after her move from the ABC, although it is still early days.
Cosi has a lot going on, but maybe this year also wasn’t a good time in radio to be playing a long game.
“There’s so much going on and I think it’s not a bad year to stay out of radio,” he says. “It’s going to be a dogfight.”
More than two decades after radio opened its doors to an overweight pig farmer who called SAFM from the top of a silo near Murray Bridge, Cosi might be just about done.
He has been sacked twice, and after the first time was so devastated, he promised to never rely on a job like that again.
In the second half of last year, he and his on-air hosts at SAFM Breakfast, Rebecca (Bec) Morse, and Anthony (Lehmo) Lehmann, saw the end coming.
“In radio, if you’re not signed up by August, they are looking around; September, you’ve got problems,” Cosi says.
“We used to laugh about it every morning. ‘It’s sacking season!’ We knew we were cactus.”
The thing about Andrew (Cosi) Costello is that radio made him a name but it was Cosi’s big-hearted, country bloke persona that built his everyman brand.
His style is made for tradie radio; good for a joke, a bit of a dag, ready to help his community, and with an image so non-threatening he lays claim to the worst Year 12 maths mark in the state for his year (it was below five per cent).
In the closing stages of last year, having lost the breakfast radio slot that had him getting up at 4.45am for three and a half years – and being taken off air before the year was up – he knocked back interest from not one but two Adelaide stations.
He doesn’t need radio like he used to.
“Radio isn’t a big part of my life anymore,” he says, a day before leaving to visit the charity he runs in Cambodia. “That’s why when everyone was so shocked about me being sacked, I’m thinking, ‘It’s fine!’ Radio is only about 15 per cent of my working life.”
The industry is overflowing with larger-than-life personalities but Cosi has more to him than the face pulls and antics. His country roots run deep and the afternoon we met, he was heading later to his place near Harrogate to vaccinate and drench some sheep.
He grew up in Kadina and after the maths disaster he repeated Year 12 – he called it his honours year although his parents were not amused – and says he pretty much failed his way through Roseworthy Agricultural College and only just got his degree.
In his early 20s his aim in life was to save enough for a house deposit and he worked as a pig vaccinator, sleeping rough and travelling from farm to farm, injecting up to 4500 pigs in a morning.
“Gas-powered vaccination gun, give them multiple injections, 20 pigs to a pen,” he says.
“I was the fastest – probably still am – pig injector in the world. They flew some people out from the US and they flew me to Bendigo just to watch me inject pigs.”
It’s a spectator sport?
“I don’t think there were many players. That’s why I was number one.”
This was the only world he knew when he heard his SAFM heroes, Amanda Blair and James Brayshaw, talk about The Great Race, the radio contest that set two teams against each other to compete a series of challenges on their way to the other side of the world on a very limited budget.
“I thought how cool that would be, I mean here I am injecting pigs seven days a week, no days off, in a typical SX station wagon that had an actual coat hanger as an aerial,” Cosi says.
He has a form of dyslexia but liked writing funny poems and came up with one as his entry. Covered in dirt, he climbed to the top of the silo to get reception and rang SAFM, only to be told the contest was over. But the man who answered, Amanda Blair’s husband, Michael Farquharson, heard the pigs in the background and asked where he was.
He then listened to the poem and told Cosi if he could get it to the station before morning, they would take his entry.
Cosi says he never used to go to Adelaide as it was “completely the wrong way”. “By the time I’d finished with the pigs and had a shower I’d drive to the next farm, roll out my swag and have a sleep.”
But he went anyway, and used a street directory to get to Greenhill Rd. The station was closed and he had no paper in the car so he did the next best thing and ripped the cardboard side from a slab of beer, wrote the poem in Texta and pushed it under the doors.
He won, of course, and his daily progress reports on the way to somewhere 1500km off the coast of Portugal led to a radio offer when he got back. He had almost turned the trip down. When he rang his parents to tell them he’d won, his mother put him on speaker and didn’t say a lot. “Then she said those words that even at 42 every child is still scared of,” Cosi says.
“She said, ‘I’m going to put your father on.’”
His father, a conservative policeman in a small town (who was also kind and caring and meant well) told him not to go: “I’ve been standing here listening to what you’ve been saying to your mother – what do you know about going overseas? You’ve never been. It doesn’t sound good. So, you’re actually going to go on radio? If you go on radio, it’s not just embarrassing for you but for everyone else and you will bring disrespect to the family name.”
Crushed, Cosi dialled SAFM to say no but hung up after the first ring. “That was a super big sliding doors moment,” he says.
He started doing bits and pieces on radio, like live crosses about petrol prices where he talked to people at the bowser. He was still juggling piggery work and would finish a day in the country then drive to town, park in his car and if the weather was fine, take his swag across Greenhill Rd and sleep near a creek. It was a sweet spot to camp, he says.
He remembers how embarrassed he was driving Amanda Blair, his idol, to town one day in a car that reeked of pigs and had a door that didn’t open.
That was bad enough but then she saw the gun; he kept a .22 rifle in between the seats in case he saw a snake or fox, or an animal had to be put down. He was from a different world and still to some extent is.
“I was never some yuppie person who landed a job in the media and I still think to this day that helped me in the industry,” he says.
“I was basically a listener who went on air and I always was and still am one of the people from the suburbs. I think that is possibly what has helped me last that long.”
Once on air, his confidence grew and people found him funny and loose.
“I think I said things that people thought but would never say on air, and I didn’t care,” he says. “It grew from there.”
After SAFM he went to Triple M in 2005 and was on air as part of the New Zoo, with Jane Reilly, John Blackman and Scott McBain. He lasted 10 years and got in two days of long service leave before he was called in from holidays and sacked. He was so green he had no idea it was even happening.
“I thought, ‘That’s weird, why would you want to talk to me on holidays?’, I had no inkling and no one ever said to do anything differently,” he says. After ringing his wife Sam and telling her the bad news, he sulked for a day, then thought about why they sacked him.
One reason they gave was his absence from social media so he signed up, studied what other companies were doing and how they used it, starting posting and monitoring the interactions and went from a private page with 5000 users to a public page that has 430,000 followers.
“We cruised past the SAFM page and I just loved it, it was a cool way to connect with people and show what I was doing,” he says.
After the first sacking, when he was all but out of contract with SAFM, he got a call from Triple M and went back on air.
In his time off, he had launched South Aussie with Cosi, a travel show about South Australia with an emphasis on positive stories. It troubled him that media seemed to focus on the worst in people when in the world he knew, neighbours got along and people helped each other.
He knew that after Postcards finished its run each year, Channel 9 ran fill-ins like Antiques Roadshow so he pitched to them a travel show talking to people “doing really cool stuff”. They loved it but networks don’t pay and he needed a backer.
At the races at Murray Bridge – Cosi’s equivalent of networking at the Adelaide Club – he ran into the head of SA Tourism who loved the idea.
To make a pilot of the show, he remortgaged the house, hired a production company and went to Port Hughes with his son and two infant daughters in the back, to stay at his brother’s place.
“We couldn’t afford actual accommodation, and we did a show about four couples sharing costs to show how cheap it was,” he says. “We went out on a fishing charter, had a big breakfast, did stuff on the jetty.”
Showing it to SA Tourism was like fronting up with a school project for the teacher but they loved it and have supported South Aussie with Cosi for the past 12 years.
He does around 28 new shows a year and hasn’t come close to running out of ideas.
It lost money the first year and the next year made around $15,000 but he believed in it and after a while, so did the sponsors. He had a decade with Channel 9 then in July 2021 Channel 7 approached him and offered a long-term contract which meant he could safely invest in equipment and more staff.
One of his main reasons for staying away from radio now is to take the Cosi brand national. The offer is there for an Aussie with Cosi show, made in South Australia but travelling around the nation and reporting the same heartwarming stories about people and places.
“I’ll look at that this year and I’m interested in a couple of other different kinds of projects on TV that I’d like to get off the ground,” Cosi says.
“I can’t really say too much. They’re concepts I can take to the network.”
He did a spin-off from the show last year with a book, Top 100 Places to Visit in SA, under the South Aussie with Cosi brand. It encourages people to get out and get to know their state and he wants to spend time this year promoting it.
His charities, Cows for Cambodia and Cows for Botswana are labours of love.
He is a bit ashamed to admit now that he never wanted to visit Asia, preferring to stay at home. “I thought there were too many people there and if I went I would be just one more, adding to the overpopulation,” he says.
But he was talked into it by a friend and once he got to Cambodia and met some of the people, he saw things differently.
“These people were some of the poorest in the world but they were also the happiest, so that interested me,” he says. “In Australia, we have all these materialistic possessions, so how come these people who have next to nothing are far happier than we are? It intrigues me to this day.”
Being Cosi, he wanted to help. He went back and tried to buy a cow with the help of a taxi driver who had no English. It was a total failure so he sought help from a veteran expatriate, Geraldine Cox, who founded the Sunrise Cambodia orphanage. She got him a tour guide and through him, he bought his first cow. “This guy was puzzled – why does this fat, white westerner want to buy a cow? He asked me what I wanted to do with it,” he says. “I said, ‘After lunch we’ll find a family and give it away.’”
They found a woman selling water near a temple who had cows when she was young and had the space to keep one. Cosi watched her eyes fill with tears as the guide explained they would give her the cow, which was pregnant, that she would care for it and once the calf was old enough, she would return the cow but keep the calf. He had no idea if it would work.
“I didn’t know what would happen – I thought she’d sell it or eat it, I didn’t know,” he says.
A month later he went back and the woman had built a cow shelter and the animal was well cared for and had put on weight. “I thought, ‘My God, it had worked’ so I bought three more cows that trip,” he says.
It was the start of Cows for Cambodia which now has 280 cows along with pigs, buffalo, chickens, ducks, geese and goats housed at a world-class facility Cosi’s charity built for $300,000. The cows are impregnated there and sent out to families to calve and later returned.
He did the same in Botswana although the model there is slightly different. He runs about 60 cows on a farm at the top of the Kalahari Desert and provides beef to schools where so many children are malnourished. He would love to buy land there but doesn’t quite have the courage to do so, yet.
Both charities bring him a lot of joy because they are agriculture based, which means he is investing in his passion while changing people’s lives. “There will be more people at my Cambodian funeral than my South Australian funeral,” he says. “It’s crazy. They are very loving and grateful, and I love flying the Australian flag there.”
Cosi’s other great passion is his family. He met his wife, Sam, at Shenanigans Ladies’ Night at Marion, where he was host. He thought she was stunning, went up and asked if she and her friends would like a free drink. Then he asked her what she did. “I’m a mum,” she said. “Gee, your husband’s lucky,” he replied. “No, I’m a single mum, I don’t have a partner.”
He was in his early 20s and his mates ribbed him about dating a single mum but he could not have been happier and always loved her little boy, Harry, like his own, so much so that when he had his own children with Sam, he worried he wouldn’t love them as much.
“The funny thing is, I’m probably closest to Harry because when the girls were born, I was automatically their dad but with Harry I had to earn it,” he says.
“I’m a huge advocate of single mums never feeling like they’ve got baggage. The other thing is when women say ‘I’m just a mum’, I want the ‘just’ taken out of that sentence.”
The closest Cosi has come to controversy was his public support last year for mining billionaire Gina Rinehart after she withdrew $15m in sponsorship from Netball Australia because of rumblings from members of the Diamonds over historic racist comments made by her father, Lang Hancock.
Cosi, whose Cows for Cambodia benefits from her sponsorship – although he denies this influenced him – defended her then and now, saying he felt sorry for how she was treated.
“I’m always interested in why Gina Rinehart isn’t more loved – she’s the richest person in Australia and she’s female and she worked her arse off to get there,” he says.
“Is it because she’s too ruthless? But if a man was that, it wouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. Is she not pretty enough? I don’t lose sleep over it, I just said what I thought at the time.”
He can never know for sure whether his Rinehart remarks caused him to be pulled off air in October while Lehmo and Bec stayed on, even though his contract had a few months to run.
“I just don’t know,” he says. “They never said anything, so there was no reason to think that was the case.”
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