Broadcast legend on air for more than seven decades dies at 97

BOB ROGERS: 1926-2024

Sydney radio would not have been the same without Bob Rogers and won’t be quite the same again. He was one of the first to play popular music, the first to have a Top 40 show and one of the first to fight for announcers to get proper pay and secure contracts. He went on working into his 80s, chatting, gossiping, playing music that people liked and having a good time on air.

Bob Rogers at 2CH radio station in 2011.

He was still working until 2018 after a life of being up and down in the ratings, twice fired for letting swear words on air and retiring more times than anyone could count.

He also showed he had more than the traditional “good head for radio” by doing two television programs and posing naked, twice, as a Cleo centrefold.

He didn’t take nonsense and could be quick to move if he thought he was being exploited, but could also take time to telephone and congratulate people whose work he had enjoyed. He was called egotistical and a diva and his voice was sometimes likened to a cockatoo, yet every interview with him praised his charm, good manners and love of family.

Rogers was born in December 1926 on a farm near Donald in Victoria and remembered the day his parents bought a radio, which entranced him. The family moved on to Melbourne and he got a job at 3XY on 19/6 a week. By 1949, he was in Sydney on £8/10/0 a week (£2 above the basic wage) but overslept one day and was fired.

Rogers joined The Beatles on tour in Australia in 1964.Credit: Archive

He moved to Hobart, where he met Jerry Douglas, who was 18 and down from Queensland picking strawberries, on a blind date. They were married three months later and stayed together, barring a time in the 1960s when he left home and got a red sports car, for the rest of his life.

In Hobart, Rogers started playing popular music records, which he obtained from American sailors visiting the city. He was well ahead of the rest of the country because in those days records could take six months to be legally imported.

The Hobart station wouldn’t pay him any extra for what became a hit show so he walked and got as far as Brisbane. He got a job with 4BH and then returned to Sydney, first on 2UE before moving to 2SM.

He also got a television contract for Channel Nine’s Tonight show, but after 13 weeks it went into summer recess and didn’t come back.

A peace posey? Rogers and John Laws at lunch to supposedly end their long feud in 1977.Credit: John Patrick O'Gready

In mid-1963, Rogers suggested to 2SM that the station go 24 hours a day with The Good Guys, which took off like a rocket and suddenly 2SM was No.1 in the ratings. In 1964, Rogers was so popular that he was sent by the station to travel Australia with the Beatles, interview them every day and record their concerts, although there was so much screaming by fans at the concerts that none of the tapes was any good.

Phil Haldeman, also on 2SM at the time, said of Rogers, “he was always so good at picking trends. I can remember the day he walked into 2SM in the early ’60s and said ‘this group, The Beatles, are going to be the biggest thing and if you fellows aren’t going to get on to this, you are out of your brains’.”

When 2UE offered him a place, he became what one reporter said was a substitute for housewives gossiping over the back fence.

Bob Rogers met Bob Hawke, then prime minister, at the opening of the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra in 1984.Credit: Fairfax

“I looked at the competition and saw 2GB was the No.1 station,” he said. “It had Andrea and Eric Baume and Dita Cobb in that order. They were all rather outrageous. Andrea would talk about homosexuals, Eric was always preposterous and Dita always played it a bit kinky. I thought, ‘surely there is a role for someone who lives a fairly normal life and can relate some suburban happenings on the air’.”

In 1969, he tried television again with a tonight show for Channel Seven. It did well, lasting until he pulled the plug in 1973, saying he wanted to take a rest.

In 1970, he resigned from 2UE after an off-the-cuff remark about Labor leader Gough Whitlam was misinterpreted and Rogers was suspended. However, an apology was read on air and three days later he was back.

In 1975, he left 2UE to go back to 2SM on a salary that was rumoured to be $75,000 a year, when the prime minister was earning $62,000, but nine months later he was off air again, saying “I didn’t expect the culture shock I found in dealing with a younger market” and moved back to 2GB because “I wanted to get away from the attitude that there is nothing more in life than ABBA”.

Rogers was always careful of his health and played tennis well into his 80s. In 1976, he posed for his second centrefold to celebrate his 50th birthday.

Rogers at his broadcast desk at radio station 2CH in Pyrmont in 2010.Credit: Tamara Dean

The 2GB job ended in 1976, when he was sacked for allowing the word “f---” to go on air in an interview with John Singleton. He had a long lunch the following day and said he was going to stop and smell the roses, but in August he was replacing an Adelaide announcer on holidays and by October was back on air in Sydney on 2KY on the weekends, and 3UZ in Melbourne on weekdays, flying back and forth.

In 1980, he “retired” from radio to open a chain of women’s fashion shops, saying that with four daughters he’d spent most of his life observing how much women paid for clothes and thought he could do better.

Inevitably, in 1982, he was back on air. In March of the following year, an open mike let the word “f---” on air again – twice – and he was sacked from 2UE, but immediately started talks with 2KY. Those didn’t work out and he “retired” again. Soon, of course, he was back on air.

In 1994, he was back at 2UE and doubled the station’s Sunday morning ratings.

By 1995, he was at 2CH, up against his old sparring partner John Laws in the morning slot, and in 1999 signed a 10-year contract with the station to be on air five mornings a week and also produce a two-hour music program played on Saturday nights.

In 2002, Rogers was one of the first two people named in the Australian Radio Hall of Fame.

Away from radio, he spent his last years working with his youngest daughter, Skye, on his biography and grumbling about being old, while keeping up a full social life, reading widely and telling everyone what his daughters were doing and how proud he was of them.

He is survived by Jerry, their daughters Sheridan, the food writer, Brett, Justin and Skye, and four grandchildren.