Amanda Keller’s biggest radio regret

As she and Jonsey celebrate 18 years of their radio show, Amanda Keller gives a candid interview about the harsh highs and lows of commercial radio, and one thing she’ll always wish she could take back.

After nearly two decades on breakfast radio, Amanda Keller admits she feels like something of a dinosaur, albeit one whose thousands of hours on air have provided succour, stability and several opportunities for self-reflection. In a candid interview with Stellar, the presenter reveals that, between the gags and the laughs with co-host Brendan “Jonesy” Jones, she has learnt how to be a better mother, discovered the power of banter to lift up listeners and felt her heart break, live and on air. As she says, “It’s not for the faint-hearted”

Despite decades as a broadcast personality, Amanda Keller can only laugh when thinking about the sage words (or lack thereof) she will pass on to her son, Jack, as he flirts with a media career.

“I’m the last of the dinosaurs where you have a breakfast radio show, and you stay there for 18 years where you have an audience established,” she says with her warm, trademark self-deprecation.

She offers by way of example Logan Paul, the American internet sensation who, along with fellow online star KSI, drew a crowd of more than 1000 screaming fans outside the Nine Network studios in Sydney last month.

“Most people my age had never heard of [Paul] because he’s on YouTube,” Keller, 61, tells Stellar. “This is the new guard, and their popularity is just as valid as anybody else’s.”

Amanda Keller celebrates 18 years on air as ci-host of radio show Jonesy & Amanda on WSFM. Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar.

Jack, 19, and his older brother Liam, 21 – Keller’s children with Harley Oliver, her husband of almost 33 years – can’t recall a time when their mother wasn’t on the air chatting about everything from reality TV to their latest family yarn.

That’s why her longevity – she and her co-host Brendan “Jonesy” Jones marked their 18th year on air together last week – is all the more impressive.

“I mean, when mp3 players came in, they said that would be the end of radio because everyone could now have their own music,” she adds with a shrug. “And then we realised that what you say between the songs is the thing that anchors an audience to you.”

As such, Keller understands that her listeners expect personal anecdotes when they tune in.

“That’s what is asked of you for breakfast radio,” she explains.

“When the kids were little, it was easier because they didn’t know what I was saying about them. But as I got older, that got harder and I’d ask them permission and then I’d be annoyed if they said no.”

Deciding how much to share is a constant work in progress, and Keller admits she doesn’t always get right.

“There was one time I was emptying Jack’s school bag and about 10 sandwiches, all squashed together, fell out from the bottom,” she recalls. “I put them all on the bench and took a photo and said, ‘Gee, I’d love to put this on Instagram’.

He said, ‘Please don’t!’ So, the next day, I found myself saying it on radio and I hated that I did.

Harley was in the car next to Jack [as it aired] and Jack just put his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes. Even just saying it now makes me want to cry. I was so horrified that I did that, and I came home and I said to him, ‘I’m so sorry. You should feel safe in your own home.’”

Amanda Keller: ‘there are so many times radio has saved me...’ Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar.

But now, without having to juggle the breakfast shift with co-hosting The Living Room and Dancing With The Stars, Keller can focus on her radio gig – one she says she will keep doing as long as her bosses keep renewing her contract.

“Look, it’s not for the faint-hearted,” she says. “You’ve got to be a robust person to do the show on the days you don’t feel like it, on the days where you don’t feel well, or the days where your kids are unhappy at home.

“Having said that, there are so many times radio has saved me, where getting up in the morning and having somewhere to go, someone to laugh with, to hear other people’s stories and [be] part of someone else’s life [kept me going].”

One of those times was during the late 1990s, when Keller was co-hosting the Triple M Sydney breakfast show while undergoing IVF treatment, and only her co-host Andrew Denton and their producer knew.

Even when she had to promote a contest where couples raced to conceive a baby that would be born closest to the turn of the century, she didn’t say a word.

“It was a stab in the heart, but I had to sit tight on that, as it were, and just get on with that being part the job,” she says.

The emotional toll meant that Keller only made their fertility struggles public years later, in part via her 2016 memoir, Natural Born Keller: My Life And Other Palaver.

Yet she is buoyed to know that her daily banter has brought others the same comfort she felt from being on-air in her darkest times.

“There’s a woman [who wrote me an email that] said her husband was riding a pushbike with their son and he fell off the bike and is now paralysed from the neck down,” she says.

“And every day when she drove up from Wollongong up to the Spinal Centre at the Royal North Shore Hospital, she was wondering what her life would be.

“And she said that when she heard our voices, she just knew that there was one bit of normality in her day.

“When you hear stories like that, about the role we play just being someone’s friend, being a regular thing in somebody’s life... I never take that for granted.”

Amanda Keller features in this Sunday’s Stellar. Picture: Simon Upton for Stellar.

Jonesy & Amanda airs weekdays from 6am on Sydney’s 101.7 WSFM and weeknights from 6pm across the Pure Gold Network.

Originally published as Amanda Keller’s biggest radio regret