Gold FM host Christian O’Connell celebrates 12 months on air

Radio host Christian O’Connell has revealed how he survived the first 12 months in the competitive breakfast radio market and why he now calls Melbourne home.

104.3 Gold FM"s Christian O'Connoll and wife Sarah at their home in Brighton. Picture: Michael Klein

Radio host Christian O’Connell has compared himself to a “fungus” growing on listeners after a tough first 12 months in the ferocious Melbourne radio market.

UK-born O’Connell moved from London to Melbourne, leaving behind a hugely successful radio career, to effectively start from scratch as a controversial appointment to Gold FM.

“If I look back 12 months ago I had no idea what was about to begin,” O’Connell said.

“I was so wide-eyed and naive about what I was getting in to.

“I had no idea how hard this was going to be. It was not until I started the radio show that I realised, ‘Oh, they are really not going to give me the keys to the city on show one’.

Gold 104.3 host Christian O'Connell with his dog Nisha.

“I could genuinely feel a lot of arms being folded and people sitting back going, ‘Who the hell are you?’.

“It was the accent, the fact they did not know who I was, and they did not ask for me.”

O’Connell, who has quickly become an AFL convert, said it took a month before he felt signs of life from his listening audience.

“It took four weeks and I still have the photo on my phone of the first time all the lines on the switchboard were jammed. That for me was the first time I knew it was going to be OK. It had taken time but I was connecting to them (the Melbourne audience) and they were talking to me.”

O’Connell said he had received some curious feedback from listeners who had been quick to judge him when the show launched.

“There are some people who have grown up on a diet of British comedy so for them I think they quite enjoyed hearing that British sense of humour and there are other people who don’t want to hear the Pommy accent at any time of day, especially in the morning,” he said.

Christian O'Connell with wife Sarah. Picture: Lawrence Pinder

“I think I have grown on them like a fungus. The nicest thing is I get these emails from people who say, ‘I hated you when you first started but now I like what you are doing.’

“I love the honesty.”

O’Connell, 46, celebrates the first anniversary of his Aussie radio adventure this week with his show sitting in fifth position in the FM breakfast ratings.

“I have been doing breakfast radio for 20 years and you know when there is momentum. You don’t know how long it takes for ratings to catch up with it but I have been around long enough to know we have momentum now just in the number of people we have calling the show and in the energy of the show there has been a shift.”

He has marked the pending milestone by investing in bricks and mortar in a Melbourne bayside suburb.

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His daughter now plays AFL rather than soccer and he is a paid up and proud member of the Melbourne Football Club.

“It is a really a big thing for us to buy a house because that is saying this is our home,” he said.

“We are not just visiting the country and Melbourne, this is our physical home.”