Hiding out with $250,000 on the line: Nova goes nuclear in the big bucks battle for breakfast radio

Lauren Phillips and Jase Hawkins have gone ‘off the grid’ as Nova enters into a $250,000 high stakes game in the latest play in Melbourne’s ferocious big money breakfast radio war.

Cloak and dagger: Jase Hawkins and Lauren Phillips. Picture: Supplied/Nova

Lauren Phillips and Jase Hawkins have gone ‘off the grid’ as Nova enters into a $250,000 high stakes game in the latest salvo in the breakfast radio wars.

Phillips, Hawkins and Clint Stanaway are in hiding somewhere in Melbourne in a real life game of hide and seek with their listeners.

“It is cloak and dagger,” Stanaway said.

“It is like I have been training as part of the Special Operations Group to disappear and go undercover.”

Up to $250,000 is on offer for the listener who discovers the trio tucked away in their makeshift radio lair.

Lauren Phillips and Jase Hawkins are playing their biggest ever game of Hide & Seek.

Nova’s $250,000 Hide and Seek competition comes after Fox FM’s Fifi, Fev and Nick launched a secret sound worth $150,000 to the winner and KIIS FM’s Kyle & Jackie O Show had $200,000 on offer for The Noise.

In an undertaking worthy of scenes from a Mission Impossible movie, Phillips and Hawkins were individually spirited to the sparse, nondescript, secret location on Thursday.

Leaving from Nova’s South Melbourne studios separately and hours apart, Phillips and Hawkins did multiple car changes in underground carparks, hid under blankets and wore disguises before being smuggled into their mystery bunker.

Stanaway snuck into the hideaway on Friday night, buried under puffer jackets in the back of a vehicle after wrapping the Channel 9 news bulletin.

The trio are living in the hideaway, existing on frozen food in their bar fridge, and broadcasting their show as fans scoured the city looking for them.

Nova’s $250,000 game of Hide and Seek started on Friday. Picture: Supplied/Nova

Clues are being dropped on air and social media daily to narrow down the search field for listeners.

I accepted a mysterious invitation to join Hawkins, Phillips and Stanaway in their radio bolthole on Friday.

Standing at a dark, out of the way meeting point in the late hours of Friday I waited for my unknown contact.

Materialising out of the shadows he identified himself with the coded phrase “What do you seek?”

Blindfolded and helped into the back of a car, we travelled for about 30 minutes before arriving at the location.

Still blindfolded I was helped out of the vehicle and taken inside a building. Only then was the mask removed and Hawkins, Phillips and Stanaway appeared.

I was deep inside one of radio’s biggest competitions, embedded within Melbourne’s radio wars and standing in a sparsely furnished room with blow up mattresses in smaller rooms off the main living space and a pop-up broadcast studio behind a curtain.

Jase Hawkins and Lauren Phillips have listeners running around Melbourne looking for them.

A cross to the Chrissie Swan show on Friday almost torpedoed the Hide and Seek game after a sheet with the clues to their location was visible in a video of the interview that was loaded onto the @JaseandLauren Instagram.

“A listener messaged us and said, ‘hey guys, don’t know if you know ….?’, we pulled the video down straight away,” Hawkins said.

He added he was enjoying his seclusion.

“I just want to stay for a week,” he said.

“I am away from the kids. If someone knocks on the door tonight I am just going to give them five grand and say see you later, come back in a week, please.”

The clues dropped so far:

Clue 1 – ‘Sunshine is west’

Clue 2 – ‘Add me together and you get 11’

Clue 3 – ‘If we look out the window, we see red’

Clue 4 – ‘All eyes are on us’

Clue 5 – ‘Sorry but we have to Dash’

Clue 6 - ‘Some things weren’t meant to be broken’

Originally published as Hiding out with $250,000 on the line: Nova goes nuclear in the big bucks battle for breakfast radio