Hamish and Andy announce they will quit their radio show
HAMISH Blake and Andy Lee have announced on their last afternoon show of the year that they are quitting radio again.
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HAMISH and Andy are officially quitting radio for TV.
The duo have given listeners an early warning that 2017 will be their last year on the Hit Network.
“It’s a funny thing to call it a year out,” Hamish Blake said.
“It feels a bit like we’re making a big deal about dessert when we haven’t finished eating our entrees yet. For whatever reason there’s so much speculation about whether we’re leaving radio. This has been the first time we’ve known for sure what we want to do. So we wanted to let our listeners know so they can come on the ride together and it can be a really fun celebratory year and we can go out with a bang.”
The duo began their radio career with Fox FM in Melbourne in 2003 and have spent 13 years on national radio, mostly in drive time where they’ve dominated ratings across the country.
“In terms of going out on a high it feels right,” Blake said. “We’ve never loved doing radio as much as we love doing it now. That’s a perfect time to end — we’re not ending tomorrow, we’ve still got another full year, we can really savour it.”
“We were potentially thinking about ending on radio this year but we were just having too much fun,” Andy Lee said. “We just had to keep going.”
The pair will concentrate on their next TV show for Channel 9, which will launch in July.
They won’t return to radio until March 27 next year, with a retrospective series 10 Years in 10 Weeks airing instead from January 16.
However they’re staying silent about the theme for their next TV project, which will start filming in February.
“It’s not travel, it something completely different, it’s not another Gap Year,” Lee said. “People might dislike it at the beginning but will hopefully learn to love it.”
Their exit from Southern Cross Austereo will be a potential financial blow for the radio network, who are already struggling with Rove’s dire breakfast ratings in Sydney — the Hamish and Andy brand is a major magnet for advertisers and listeners.
“I doubt we’ll leave a hole in the network,” Blake countered. “We might leave a small tear in the flywire door. Nothing a bit of gaffa tape won’t fix. There’s a whole year left to work out what comes next, there’s so many talented people out there I’m sure there’ll be wondering offerings. And six months after we regret leaving and try and come back we won’t be able to!”
The pair haven’t closed the door to returning to radio some time in the future and are planning a “low-key” farewell party after their previous exit from regular drive radio saw them hold a concert where Bono was a special guest at their Thank You show in 2010.
“As a listener I’d say simmer down if we tried that again,” Blake said. “It’s only been three years since we’ve been back in drive.”
The pair also paid tribute Melbourne’s Channel 31 ahead of its closing — they cut their teeth on the community TV station in 2003 before making their commercial TV debut on Channel 7 in 2004.
“There’s so few ways you can get experience on broadcast TV and experience counts for everything,” Lee said. “Getting our flying hours on Channel 31 was so important. It’s just such an unnatural thing to do, looking into a camera when no one’s talking and they’re using their fingers to count you in. What we did on Channel 7 was pretty much exactly what it looked like on Channel 7 just with slightly more expensive cameras.”
“And what a hit that Channel 7 show was!,” Blake added.
“But without that training ground of Channel 31 we wouldn’t even have bothered trying to do TV. The whole benefit of going through that system is that you see it’s possible. It takes something like Channel 31 to give you that belief when you’re 19 years old. Rather than standing outside a TV network and wondering how you’d even get in there.”
Hamish and Andy ended this year’s radio show with their one-song-only band Cool Boys and the Front Man, featuring guests including Guy Sebastian, the Veronicas, Shannon Noll, the Wiggles and the Temper Trap.
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