How best friends Lise Carlaw and Sarah Wills became radio stars

You know those moments when you’re doubled over in stitches with your best friend and think, “We are so funny we should have our own radio show?” — here’s how two women made it happen.

YOU know those moments when you look at your best friend as you’re doubled over in stitches of hilarity and think, “We are so funny we should have our own radio show?”

It’s a pipedream for any dynamic duo where laughter is a by-product of a friendship.

Meet the Gold Coast radio station Hit90.9’s new Brekkie Crew co-hosts, two women who are living that dream.

Lise Carlaw and Sarah Wills are known for their pre-dawn national radio show Those Two Girls on the Hit Network, a Southern Cross Austereo company that airs 2DAY FM in Sydney, Fox FM in Melbourne, hit105 in Brisbane and more regional and metropolitan stations throughout Australia.

The pair were orbiting in neighbouring galaxies in Brisbane but never crossed paths until five years ago. And like many new-age love stories, it began on the internet.

“We love telling this story,” Lise says.

“Lise and I met online,” Sarah says.

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Sarah Wills and Lise Carlaw, also known as Those Two Girls, have joined Dan and Ben for the Gold Coast breakfast slot and will continue to host their national mid-dawns show on the Hit Network. Picture Glenn Hampson

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“While we were on maternity leave we were writing articles and sending them to different websites and we developed a bit of a following.

“Mutual friends said I think you should meet Lise, and Lise’s friends were saying the same thing about meeting me.

“It turns out we lived about 1km away from each other in Brisbane.

“So Lise has rocked up to my house one night with warm brie from the IGA, crackers, and a bottle of cheap wine.

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“And we stayed up talking for hours and hours, and we liken it to falling in friendship love.”

Lise says the similarities and shared experiences between them were bizarre, certainly too peculiar too ignore.

“(Before we met) I deadset thought she was from Melbourne. I thought ‘she’s got fancy hair, she just looks like she’d be from Melbourne’,” Lise says.

“The things we had in common were uncanny. We’re born in the same year, married in the same year, married to similar men.

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Brisbane's Those Two Girls duo Sarah Wills and Lise Carlaw in 2018. Pic Mark Cranitch.

“We had the same fertility doctor which was some random dude out in Ipswich. And the same fertility issue — progesterone just does not work in our bodies that well.

“If you believe in all that serendipitous juju stuff, there was a reason we didn’t meet when we were younger because it never would have worked.”

The twosome knew they had something special and it was Lise that decided their pizzazz was worth pursuing professionally.

“Within four months of us meeting, Lise said ‘I’ve had a daydream, and we’re both standing holding microphones’. And I said ‘all right, let’s do that’,” Sarah says.

“I had this really strong vibe that we had to do something together, because the banter and the chemistry was real,” Lise explains.

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Pictured at Burleigh Heads for the announcement of the new hosts joining the SeaFM Radio Show and Station rebranding L-R Dan Anstey, Sarah Wills, Lise Carlaw and Ben Hannant. Pic Mike Batterham

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They began a business as a double act MC for corporate gigs and put on their own events in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, hosting forums interviewing women including Mia Freedman and Zoe Foster-Blake.

The audiences lapped up their self-deprecating jokes taking the mickey out of each other, their knack for finding hilarity in the mundane and their natural storytelling skills. They learned the crowds were coming for the interview subjects but staying for the interviewers.

“I remember the first (event) — 500 tickets sold out in three and a half hours. And we were nobodies. We were hosting somebodies, but we were like ‘what the hell’,” Lise says.

“People said ‘we could have had more of you guys on stage’. So then you feel a bit up yourself, but you’ve just got to own it.

“It’s not about us, it’s about people seeing their friendships reflected in us. They just vibe it. We rag on each other all the time and they love it. And we mean every word of it.”

The move towards their own national radio show began with a slide into their DMs.

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Those Two Girls, Friends Lise Carlaw and Sarah Wills as Hit105’s Saturday breakfast show hosts in Brisbane in 2018.

Hit Network head of content Gemma Fordham had clearly been keeping an eye on their Facebook page, a library of Those Two Girls’ comical escapades, and sent them a message asking how they’d feel about having their own radio show.

“We said ‘we’d feel pretty good’,” Sarah says.

“Then she gave us the weekend breakfast show on Hit105 in Brisbane, and then the following year we had a national early breakfast show.”

After about two years schmoozing on the airwaves from 5 to 6am weekdays, Gemma came back with another offer to have the women join Ben and Dan from the Brekkie Crew on Gold Coast radio station Hit90.9, formerly SeaFM, every weekday from 6 to 9am.

“At first we were nervous of a four-hander show, four people seems like a lot to handle, but we thought let’s demo, because we’ve been our happy little twosome for a while,” Lise says.

“After the demo, a producer said to us ‘that sounded like four friends at a pub who’d been shooting the breeze for a while’. It just clicked.

“I can see the excitement in their (Ben and Dan’s) eyes when they’re about to tell a story — like ‘you wait till you hear this’. The four of us are good storytellers in our own style. It’s just perfectly matched in that sense.”

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“Two women ... one brain.”

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With a career sharing the embarrassing moments of your life with up to millions of people daily, the women have developed an innate sense of knowing what’s okay to blab about on air and what’s not with each other.

“We’ve never had an instance of crossing boundaries,” Lise says.

“Never,” Sarah agrees. “We’re very clear with what boundaries we do and don’t have. I don’t say my kids’ names on radio, I don’t post photos of them. Lise knows that.”

“There’s a lot of situations where I’ve said something off air to a co-host and later thought ‘are they going to go there?’,” Lisa continues.

“Sometimes you get carried away in a story. That makes for a really nerve wracking environment. You just have to say to people, this is a no, it’s not for public consumption.”

They liken it to having a twin-like telepathy — although articulating that connection ended up in bursts of laughter.

“We were shopping at Pacific Fair the other day and the shop assistant asked ‘are you two sisters?’,” Sarah says.

“I think it’s because we just seem like … one brain. Two women, one brain — bloody hell.”

“Shivers, Sarah,” Lise laughs.

After five years of working together daily and likely many more to come, they still refer to each other as their best friend. It’s a fine line to draw, maintaining a relationship that’s affectionate, amusing and professional all in one, but they’ve never had a falling out — “touchwood” Sarah says.

Just don’t call them comedians.

“We hate that. We’re just friends who look at the light side of life,” Sarah says. “We turned our friendship into a career and we didn’t anticipate that happening.”

“I think we have had to navigate how to leverage a friendship for career purposes,” Lise says. “We have to protect the friendship but it’s also what gets us work.”