In typical Sydney fashion, Kyle and Jackie O just don’t get Melbourne

Like an alien spaceship from Planet Porno, the arrival of Sydney breakfast shock jocks Kyle and Jackie O on Melbourne radio this year was an attempt to crash through ingrained media parochialism. Instead, they’ve just crashed.

The latest ratings, released on Tuesday, are abysmal. According to ratings agency GfK, the pair, who have ruled Sydney FM breakfast radio for years with a mix of celebrity, sex, scandals and contests, dropped to eighth in the Melbourne breakfast market, sinking to a 5.2 per cent share, down from 6.1 per cent in the previous survey. Meanwhile, their audience dropped from 491,000 daily listeners in July to 420,000 in September.

Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson are failing to cut through with Melbourne listeners.Credit: Instagram

Yet in Sydney, the pair returned to the top of the ratings with a 13.7 per cent share, raking in the ad dollars and accruing enormous salaries (the duo are reportedly on a combined $200 million 10-year deal).

But the centre cannot hold. The program’s national rollout strategy is in jeopardy, while the duo’s parent company, ARN, is in crisis.

Despite both being born in Queensland, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson are quintessentially Sydney. But nationally networking their show is a failed attempt to go against Australia’s natural order: rampant geographic separatism.

There’s a fundamental inability among some Sydneysiders to understand the rest of the country, or indeed to even give it a passing thought. We are all Australian, is the mentality. But anyone living beyond the Sydney urban sprawl knows that there are two parts to Australia — the place where they live, and Sydney.

Consider the most recent pressure test of this, the 2024 AFL grand final. It was predictable that, mere weeks after Team Australia bathed itself in collective Olympic glory, we reverted to our standard mode of state-based sledging.

During grand final week, Melbourne experienced what could best be described as a mild identity crisis because – for the first time in 18 years – neither of the teams were Victorian.

Thank goodness Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan came in at the eleventh hour and was able to reframe it in palatable terms.

“The first South Melbourne vs Fitzroy grand final since 1899. Two great Victorian teams,” she posted on X.

Following the match, she said: “It was a great showing from the Lions yesterday, but the real winner is Victoria. Around 130,000 people flew down on 40 extra flights to soak up the atmosphere in the sporting capital.” Even when Victorian teams lose, the state still wins.

I don’t subscribe to the theory that Melbourne is a cultural oasis where everybody passes between Readings and The Wheeler Centre on the way to the State Library or The Australian Ballet. After all, this is the city that gave the nation Derryn Hinch, Andrew Bolt, Kath Day-Knight, and the first Australian instalment of the Real Housewives franchise.

But Melbourne is a community. And while Kyle and Jackie O – just like your family WhatsApp group, local Facebook page, or newspaper letters section – has successfully fostered its own community, which adores its trashy fun, that community has proved incompatible with Melbourne’s.

The audience they seek is divided between those who find Sandilands’ obsession with sex, celebrity news and endless competitions addictively entertaining, and those who find the duo’s topics of conversation demeaning and misogynistic.

After their first morning on air in Melbourne, I wrote that listening to the team was like “arriving late to the pub and plonking ourselves at the end of the table while everyone discussed their tiny penises, vaping from their vaginas, sleeping with their cousins and extra-long foreskins”. Vile and Tacky O, as one commenter dubbed them.

Networking rarely works in morning radio. It did for Melbourne’s Hamish & Andy, but they were in the afternoons, and avuncular rather than abrasive. Plus, they didn’t cause station management to sack a popular breakfast team to make way for them.

When Sandilands and Henderson launched their show in Melbourne in April, I wrote they were “crass, rude, family-unfriendly, profane, abrasive – and weirdly compelling”. Imagine my surprise when those very words then appeared on a giant KIIS billboard at Flinders Street Station promoting the show’s arrival. In retrospect, I should have added “shameless” to the list.

What many Sydneysiders fail to understand is that not living in Sydney is a choice – just as it is to listen to Kyle and Jackie O. Or in the case of Victorians, not to listen.

When walking through the Melbourne Royal Show on the opening day last week, it felt fitting to happen upon Kyle and Jackie O’s Haunted House. Part of KIIS FM’s sponsored attractions at the event, seemingly no one was interested in what the installation had to offer.

Much like their radio show.

Stephen Brook is a special correspondent and CBD columnist.