“The worst year of my life”: Kip Wightman on divorce and why he jumped to rival radio show
Kip Wightman admits he was feeling sidelined while on Nova’s breakfast radio show but was told he wasn’t being deliberately excluded when he raised his concerns. This is what finally made him jump ship.
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It’s a strange feeling when, mind fogging and focus slipping, you find yourself driving the familiar roads towards your old home, only to find it filled with strangers.
That’s how Kip Wightman describes parts of his first week anchoring the 97.3FM breakfast show in a Milton studio, a few curls of the Brisbane River away from the Teneriffe Nova 106.9 studio, where he had welcomed audiences in and out of segment breaks for 15 years.
“Today I hadn’t realised the song was ending and I turned on the mics at the last second and I was just milliseconds from going ‘Ash, Kip and Luttsy’,” Wightman, 45, laughs.
He only left Nova breakfast show, Ash, Kip, Luttsy & Susie, three months ago, suddenly and without fanfare.
Now he’s taken up the same breakfast radio anchor job at the rival FM station, jumping into the seat vacated by stalwart presenter Bob Gallagher and alongside his co-hosts, Robin Bailey and Terry Hansen.
His muscle memory, though, is understandably persistent.
“I haven’t said ‘Ash …’ yet but I’m so close to it so many times. I’ve been saying those words for so many years,” Wightman continues. “I did ridiculously say ‘Robin, Terry and Bob’ the other day.”
It was sudden and unexpected when he announced he had resigned from Nova on October 20. He launched the station in Brisbane in 2005, alongside David “Luttsy” Lutteral and Ash Bradnam, and the longstanding trio, now with swimming legend Susie O’Neill, were the conclusive leaders of the typically competitive Brisbane breakfast radio market, with five consecutive survey wins at the time.
Wightman explained, having separated from wife Amber Preiksa a year earlier, that he needed time with his son Rafael, 2, away from the relentless early morning radio routine. But there was no farewell show for the presenter who had dedicated 15 years to co-hosting at the station.
There was none of the sadness you’d expect of the larrikin trio of Brisbane radio, whose friendship had seemed infallible.
And by the time he announced he’d signed with one of the show’s main rivals within months, the messages from friends, colleagues and listeners suspecting there was something deeper to Wightman’s decision to leave Nova were flooding into his phone.
“I think the reality is you don’t leave a No.1 show if you’re happy and I definitely wasn’t happy,” Wightman says, speaking openly about the fractures he felt within the team for the first time.
“And I definitely didn’t feel like there was room for me on the show anymore. These last couple of weeks alone have just absolutely cemented my decision, that it was the right decision, because I’m just feeling like, when I left I had a weight off my shoulders.”
It was a weight that had grown heavier for Wightman for almost two years – the weight of a failing marriage, the weight of trying not to let down his young son, and, finally, the weight of no longer feeling he had a voice on a show that had, for a long time, been a joy.
“After a couple of days you might go, oh that’s just a coincidence, but when it happens for a year and no one brings you into a conversation you go, well maybe I’m not wanted here, maybe they actually feel like they don’t need me, and that was kind of the vibe I got, was that we actually don’t need you on the show,” says Wightman, who took a pay cut to switch stations.
“I think there’s definitely an element of that show that wants to see if they can do it without me, so let’s see how they go.”
Wightman is fresh off the microphone when he greets us on a Tuesday morning in February, his second on air with Bailey and Hansen.
He’s been regaling them about his son Rafael – or Raf – who is somehow obsessed with monster trucks despite Wightman’s lack of encouragement on the subject.
When they aren’t playing with them at his modern home, tucked off the main hub of Balmoral in inner-Brisbane, they are having a rest to watch monster trucks on TV. “Which drives me mental,” he laughs.
He had three months at home, unemployed and hanging out with his toddler, swimming and playing in their pool, once a day minimum, Rafael jumping on the mini trampoline he got for Christmas, with I Like To Move It from Madagascar on repeat.
“It was like therapy, especially having those mornings that I’d never had,” says Wightman, who still woke up at 5am.
“It was nice to spend a couple of hours in the morning without talking. I would just not say a word.”
He picks Rafael up from daycare three days a week now and spends every second weekend with him – he and Preiksa resolutely wanting each other to have maximum time with their son as they navigate co-parenting.
It is part of his deal with 97.3FM to leave early those days and he says the station didn’t skip a beat agreeing to the terms, which, while he admits he didn’t push for it, wasn’t the feeling he got at his previous job during the early stages of his divorce.
He also has a new girlfriend, Nyomie Essa, 35, whom he’s been dating for six months and has been “an absolute godsend”.
“We’ve been friends for years through mutual friends,” he explains, relaxing into a smile. “We saw each other out running and decided to start running together – then running and eating Thai, then just eating Thai.”
He finally managed a 7am “sleep in”, typically the week before he was due to start his new role, and the alarm has now been switched back to its usual 4am hounding. But Wightman is happy going to work, his mind buzzing with these stories about his life, the kind he hadn’t shared with Nova listeners over the difficult past 18 months, and hadn’t felt they were wanted.
“That’s the big difference that I’ve felt at 97.3,” he explains.
“I’ve gotten a bit reserved, but they are like, ‘we want more from you, we want you to tell us more about this’ … and it’s nice to be with people who are genuinely interested in what you’ve got to say.
“There’s just more room for everyone and they made it really clear as well, Robin and Terry, where they were like we don’t care who gets the punchline. They seem to have no ego about it which is really nice and really rare.”
It’s a breakfast radio presenter’s job to share their lives on air and it becomes habitual when something happens at home to wrap it in a punch line and mentally log it for a future segment.
That’s been a part of Wightman’s life since he began his career in radio after school.
His parents, Paul and Sylvia Wightman, owned Price Attack hairdressing franchises and the family, Wightman and his brother and sister, moved to Brisbane from Adelaide when he was eight.
He attended primary school at Bray Park, in the Moreton Bay region north of Brisbane, graduated to Grace Lutheran College nearby and shifted to Perth when he was 16 to finish school.
He landed his first radio job in Karratha in WA’s north in 1994 before spending four years in Perth as a late-night announcer.
After a period in Sydney, where he first signed with Nova, it was a welcome homecoming to Brisbane, where he began the breakfast show in 2005 with Bradnam, Lutteral and comedian Meshel Laurie. After separating from his first wife Leanne, he briefly left the show in 2009, spending time in the US, but he rejoined Bradnam and Lutteral by 2012. The trio have presented the top-rating show ever since, adding O’Neill as a full-time co-host in 2019.
They had dominated the ratings in that time, barely dropping a survey, with Nova itself consistently the most listened-to station in Brisbane.
But Wightman had stopped sharing his life with listeners, and for a while he’d stopped even thinking of stories to tell as he drove across the river to Teneriffe each morning, instead allowing the repetitive phrases at the beginning and end of each segment break to roll off his tongue on autopilot.
“It kind of coincided with me going through my divorce,” he explains. “There was a time when I actually didn’t have much to say. I was just struggling.”
Wightman married Preiksa in 2017, a year after he proposed during a holiday in Tanzania, Africa, presenting her with a $20 ring to save travelling with its more expensive alternate.
They welcomed their son in July 2019, taking name inspiration from tennis legend Rafael Nadal, and Raf’s middle name, Victor, a nod to Preiksa’s father. “With Amber we were pretty keen (for a child) early on,” Wightman says.
“Up until then I’d been in no hurry. I just thought, ‘this is us, we’re going to be together forever so let’s make a family and do it right,’ and so I didn’t have any reservations then.
“All of a sudden I was ready.”
In 2020, as the pandemic sent the world into a spin, the couple was building a house and preparing to move from their old one, their baby boy was just reaching his first birthday and Preiksa was mourning the death of her mother.
“I don’t fully understand what happened,” Wightman says of their separation.
“All of those things happened in the space of two months. I thought we were strong enough to cope with that, but we obviously weren’t.”
“Particularly having a one-year-old at home, I thought, ‘OK, we’ll just keep working until we sort it out’. But I think by the time I knew that things were really bad for Amber, she was done.”
Despite the strain on his marriage, he didn’t mention it to his colleagues at Nova or on-air, believing he could simply fix it and the problem would, kindly, disappear.
They’d been trying desperately to seek couples counselling for two months in the latter parts of 2020 but amid the challenges of the pandemic they couldn’t get an appointment, Wightman instead accepting solo sessions when nothing else was available.
“We called everyone,” he says. “By the time we went to a session it was too late.”
It was at the end of 2020 that they agreed to end their four-year marriage – Wightman’s second divorce even more devastating because of his son, and the life he’d wanted to give him.
“I just didn’t want to let him down and I had this thing in my mind that I needed to give him everything I’d had, and I’d just grown up in this ‘normal’ family and I was just determined to give him that,” he explains.
“Knowing that I couldn’t do it, that there was no way I could do it, was a pretty bitter defeat.”
Wightman’s parents live on the Sunshine Coast now, along with his brother and sister, who are both married, and his four nieces and one outnumbered nephew.
They were a source of great support during the divorce and the difficult moments that consumed much of 2021 as Wightman, who has continued seeking therapy, accepted a new normal for Raf.
“He’s got so many people that love him now and he’s such a happy kid,” Wightman says. “He’s never seen his mum and dad fight … and he’s happy as can be, so I guess I’ve just got to let go of my notions of what he needs and just actually give him what he needs.
“I remember people telling me how kids make you happy and I kind of didn’t believe it,” he adds.
“But he’s just been this bringer of happiness that I could never imagine.”
Wightman confirmed his separation amid speculation in early 2021, but didn’t discuss it on air. He had eventually told his colleagues privately, deciding it felt wrong to tell the Nova audience at the time.
But an uneasiness crept over him, as if, after taking a step back on the show, the space for him among his three co-hosts had suddenly closed in.
“It didn’t necessarily feel like a safe space to go, ‘hey, let’s get into it’,” he says. “It kind of felt like, you’re going to have to deal with this yourself.”
“I think all of us over the years have had times when the others have had to lift,” he continues.
“And I kind of thought it would be the same type of thing where I would lean on them for a bit and then get back in, but it just never really happened that way.
“As I started feeling a little better, I guess the room for me on the show was gone.”
As 2021 tumbled on, Wightman felt increasingly sidelined in the four-person studio – a break away from the trio model that’s a consistent choice for Australian radio shows.
He remembers a pivotal moment returning from their mid-year break with a story fresh in his mind. Three weeks went by and he still hadn’t found the chance to tell it on air.
“I had started to forget what the story even was,” Wightman says.
“I think that was a really important moment where I thought, I’m not really part of this show anymore.
“I described it as like being in a soccer team when no one is passing you the ball.
“I felt like all the directions were, Ash asking Susie questions, Susie asking Ash questions, Ash asking Luttsy a question, and no one actually cared what I thought.”
He raised his concerns with his colleagues, as well as Nova management, who reassured him that he wasn’t being excluded from the show.
“You keep going obviously but after a while you just start thinking, well where else can I go, what else can I do,” he explains.
Crawling into the second half of 2021 amid the most difficult year of his life, he began calling other radio stations to see what options he had, not wanting to leave Brisbane and his son.
But, unlike other Australian markets, Brisbane radio stations are traditionally loyal to their small circle of breakfast presenters, many of whom have kept their job for more than a decade.
“All the big-wig directors in Sydney were saying ‘we’ve got nothing for a long time’, so I got to the point of just thinking, well would you rather keep going or just stop altogether – which was the decision,” Wightman says.
With 25 years of runs on the board and a bank account padded with the rewards of breakfast radio’s generous six-figure salaries, Wightman resigned on Friday, October 15.
He was disappointed though when, after deciding not to renew his contract that Friday, Nova’s management agreed by the afternoon that he wouldn’t return to the show on Monday and put out a media release the following week in the place of any proper on-air send off.
Nova group operations manager Brendan Taylor said: “It’s hard to put into words the impact Kip has had on our loyal listeners and the entire team. “He’s been an important and influential part of Nova Brisbane from the very beginning. From all of us at Nova, I would like to thank Kip and wish him all the very best for the future.”
Wightman acknowledges it was the right decision considering the circumstances of
his resignation.
“The show has always been pretty real so it would’ve been pretty false to have a goodbye show,” he explains.
“I think it was probably the correct departure; it was the real one. And I think the only people that really missed out were the listeners who probably wouldn’t have understood what happened.”
Except for Lutteral, whose brother married Wightman’s cousin – “we’re family” he laughs – Wightman won’t see his former co-hosts, Bradman and O’Neill, often now, having never talked to them much outside the studio.
“We had enough time to chat inside the studio, but it wasn’t really habitual for us to go and do stuff together,” he explains, adding with a laugh, “so I guess we’ll just continue that tradition and never see each other.”
He was still adjusting to a new life of quiet mornings and monster trucks when Alisson Longhurst, 97.3’s content director, phoned him in early December.
She previously worked as executive producer for Nova’s breakfast show from 2011 to 2013, and knew Wightman was looking for work. Gallagher had resigned from the anchor position he’d held since 2006.
“I’ve got nothing yet, but there’s talk. What are your plans next year and how late do you want to start?” she asked him.
When he replied “June or July would be nice”, she suggested, “what about February?”
“I’d had two months by then so I was already ready to start thinking about it,” Wightman says.
“But it happened quicker than I’d hoped.”
There are only about five jobs in Brisbane that exactly match his skill-set and one of those jobs becoming available, for the first time in 15 years, was too good an opportunity.
“I just also felt like the station was right for my personality and even my age; I thought this is somewhere I could be for 10 years,” he says.
He was happy to accept a pay cut, gearing his deal towards bonuses if they reach No.1.
“I want us to shoot to be No.1 and hopefully there’s some good bonuses when we get there,” he explains.
“That was something for me, I want to be incentivised because I’m here to hopefully take us to No.1 and stay there. I like that challenge – If we don’t succeed then we don’t get paid as well.”
Nova recorded a loss in the final ratings results of 2021, the first ratings since Wightman left, dropping to third overall behind 97.3 and 4KQ. Ash, Luttsy & Susie also fell to third, a loss of 2.4 points, behind 4KQ’s breakfast show Laurel, Gary & Mark and 97.3 in second. It’s a strange feeling for him to rival a station he helped build, but Wightman isn’t shy about wanting to beat his former colleagues.
“I definitely want to win … and I’d certainly be disappointed if we’re not there by the end of the year,” he says.
Wightman has been interacting with Brisbane listeners for 15 years but he was overwhelmed by the amount ofpeople who reached out after he resigned.
“I love the place … the way that people will call the show without being invited,” he laughs.
“People just call up and just want to talk to you and they feel like they know you – and I guess I’ve been here long enough that they probably do know me.
“The support from not just family and friends but so many listeners who have reached out on Facebook and Instagram saying ‘Hey we’re coming with ya’, a stunning amount, I really did not expect it,” he adds. “It feels really nice.”
When Wightman arrived on his first day at 97.3 in late January, nervous about how he’d fit in with Bailey and Hansen, he was told by the production team how they usually did things. Then Bailey interjected, “but what do you do? … because we’ve taken this as far as it can go, you’re here to take us up to No.1, so let’s do it the way you do it”.
“It’s pretty awesome,” Wightman says, his mind now brimming with punchlines from his new life as a co-parent with a budding new relationship.
“That (2021) was by far the worst year, particularly the first six months of it, but this year is off to such a great start, I just feel like I’m coming out of it and I’m waking up happy.”
“I think it’s going to be a long-term thing this,” he smiles.
“I think this has years in it, I reckon.” Robin, Terry & Kip, that is.
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