‘We’re both glamorous, why are we unlikely?’ The (very Melbourne) duo drafted to ABC Breakfast

Sharnelle Vella has spent the past week telling people she was leaving Channel Seven News to become host of The Golden Bachelor. In truth, she is headed to ABC Radio Melbourne, where she will co-host Breakfast with Bob Murphy from January, taking over from the departing Sammy J.

“It’s been a bit of lying to people,” she says. “When you resign from a job of seven years, saying ‘I’m leaving’ but not saying where you’re going, it makes it worse. So I realised I just had to say something outrageous to stop all the questions.”

Bob Murphy and Sharnelle Vella will take on the ABC Breakfast radio slot in 2025.Credit: Chris Hopkins

While she’s not really off to a matchmaking program, there are those at the ABC who have already dubbed Vella, 36, and former Western Bulldogs captain Murphy, 42, “the unlikely couple”.

“I was like, ‘We are both intelligent, both hard-working and both glamorous. Why are we unlikely?’,” jokes Murphy.

The sobriquet owes as much to personal as professional differences. He’s the one-club footballer who was there when Footscray’s finest won their first flag in 62 years, but didn’t play because of injury, a fact he characterises as both heartbreak and dream fulfilled. She’s reported on crime, courts, politics and Olympics, and became an assiduous chronicler of COVID-19 updates during the city’s greatest time of crisis.

He lives in Northcote, and says, “my interests are Melbourne, its culture and politics and sport, catching the train and rock ‘n’ roll”. One of his dogs is called Tex; like the shirt he’s wearing as we chat at the ABC on Thursday morning, it screams inner-city hipster.

She is proudly suburban, having grown up in Glen Waverley and Dandenong, now living in Rowville. “I have no public transport in my area, but I can see the hills, and I love where I live,” she says.

Sport is not her strong suit. “I did not grow up with football in my house. My dad’s Maltese, my mum’s Sri Lankan. They met at a multicultural mixer put on by Jeff Kennett at Melbourne Town Hall, and I married a Greek.”

Murphy says: “Wow. That’s a Melbourne bingo card. I couldn’t have laid it on any thicker, and you go ‘bang’.”

He has three kids, aged 17, 15 and 10, with his high-school sweetheart. Vella has been married for three years, but the partnership dates back to her teens, too.

“We met when I was 17 at a nightclub in Crown casino, with my sister’s ID, and Molly Meldrum was on the mic,” she says.

“Is this a joke now?” asks an incredulous Murphy, who is learning the details of his on-air partner’s backstory for the first time. “Is this Melbourne Trivial Pursuit come to life?”

ABC management hopes it’s a Melbourne pairing that comes to life. Breakfast and Mornings are the bedrocks of radio, and while COVID-19 gave 774 a huge boost as people tuned in for crucial updates, as the air of crisis moved on, so did many listeners.

A change of presenters offers a brief window of opportunity to get them back, at least for a short while. Come January, the job of Murphy and Vella will be to keep them.

The ABC has been auditioning Murphy for about three months, since he returned from a three-year stint in Western Australia with football, an experience that was fun but ultimately taught him “that’s not what fulfilled me”.

Vella – whose media career began at right-wing talk station MTR as a cadet at the feet of Steve Price – received a text message about two months ago telling her she was in the frame. It landed just as her career itchiness was ramping up.

After the pair did a trial session together, they felt it might work. But it was a missed phone call that convinced Murphy.

“She had called, I’d missed it, and I called back, and she says, ‘What’s with the missed call? Is this a power play?’ And from that moment, I was like, ‘This is going to be great’.”

For Vella, the gig represents a chance not only to apply the skills she has honed in TV but to show a side of herself she’s had to keep hidden.

For Murphy, it feels like coming home. “When I hear the ABC jingle, I can smell burnt toast and marmalade from the kitchen table growing up,” he says. “This is the North Star.”

Melbourne is a big story, he says, citing former Age journalist Martin Flanagan: “To tell a big story, you need to tell a small story. So it’ll be a thread count of a million small stories that then capture Melbourne.”

So, a kind of fine Egyptian-cotton approach to capturing the life of the city?

“Exactly,” Murphy says. “We’ll see what sort of thread count, but we’ll try our best for satin.”

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