Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O turned Melbourne’s radio wars wild in 2024
Big names, big mouths and bigger egos — led by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O’s local assault — dished up arguably the wildest 12-months in the city’s radio history. What did listeners make of it all?
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Sackings, scandals, surprises, big egos, big winners and even bigger losers; it has been a wild year in Melbourne radio.
The radio ratings year ended on Friday, capping a 12-month period where radio has not just broken stories but has been the story over and over again.
The Melbourne radio market in 2024 has been dominated by Sydneysider’s Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson’s much vaunted arrival in breakfast at KIIS 101.1
Sandilands vowed after their belated launch that his show would be Melbourne top FM breakfast program by the year’s end.
It wasn’t to be.
The Kyle & Jackie O Show is languishing in seventh place in the overall Melbourne breakfast ratings with a 5.1 per cent audience share.
The final ratings survey results of 2024 will be released on December 12.
In many ways radio this year has been a tale of two shows with Jase Hawkins and Lauren Phillips in one corner with the Jase & Lauren show and Sandilands and Henderson in the other with The Kyle & Jackie O Show.
Turning back the clock, the scene for 2024 was set in late November 2023 when Phillips and Hawkins were booted from KIIS FM breakfast (“we were told no one wanted to listen to us on the radio,” Phillips said) where they had amassed ratings of 9.1 per cent to make way for Sandilands to finally achieve his long held goal to broadcast his Sydney show into Melbourne.
As January dawned so did a radio landscape primed with rivalries, one-up-manship, splashing of cash and daring, surprise moves unlike anything seen in the local market in decades.
The year started without its biggest name; Sandilands’ show played a game of cat and mouse, not revealing for months when it would begin airing and instead leaving Byron Cooke to hold the KIIS fort until April as other FM shows steeled themselves for the Sandilands tornado.
Then out of the blue in early February, Nova pulled an audacious move, broadsiding the industry by throwing Hawkins, Phillips, and Clint Stanaway a lifeline and signing them for breakfast.
The move saw Nova’s breakfast incumbents Ben, Liam and Belle (Ben Harvey, Liam Stapleton and Belle Jackson) shunted to a national evenings slot on the network.
The Jase & Lauren show officially launched on Nova on March 8 and leaned immediately into Melbourne issues and stories, which is exactly what Fox’s FM consistently popular breakfast team of Fifi Box, Brendan Fevola and Nick Cody were also doing.
The Kyle & Jackie O Show finally landed in Melbourne on April 29 with an explosion of gratuitous, crass, porn riddled content that they claimed would mean the end of boring radio in Melbourne.
“I’m a fuel guzzling, ex f-boy, c**e sniffing asshole,” was the way Sandilands introduced himself to unsuspecting Melbourne listeners.
If they wanted attention, they certainly got it — just not the type they were after.
Having been a radio staple for more than 20 years in Sydney, Sandilands and Henderson can get away with just about anything in that market.
They have hundreds of thousands of rusted on listeners who have grown up with the show’s smuttiness and must have become anaesthetised to the crassness of their daily offerings — and the majority of Sydney media seemingly tuned out long ago to their carry on.
But their loud and obnoxious arrival in Melbourne meant a new audience was listening and it let out a collective ‘what the f**k is this?’.
The Kyle & Jackie O Show stunts included crashing Nova’s street level audience engagement activities with a giant KIIS bus twice in a week, lascivious on air segments such as naked dating, and endless sexualised and graphic content.
They played an expensive game of trolling Fox’s Fifi, Fev and Nick show.
Fox launched a $100,000 Secret Sound competition for breakfast listeners which KIIS countered by kicking off a $150,000 competition called The Sound.
Fox then lifted its prize to $150,000 before KIIS upped its prize to $200,000.
Melbourne was all but wallpapered with advertisements for Fifi, Fev and Nick, Jase & Lauren and most prominently, Kyle & Jackie O.
Unfortunately Sandilands could not be bothered to venture to Melbourne at all during the year, while Henderson made a couple of brief social visits.
Arguably the KIIS nadir came in August when Sandilands and the team took part in a pissing competition where the show’s male and female staff recorded themselves peeing and then played the audio on air as part of a game to guess who each urine stream belonged to.
They have struggled to grow their listening audience in Melbourne in any meaningful way over the course of the year and the show has been called out numerous times for its profane content, as well as being the target of a well run campaign by activist group Mad F**king Witches.
Sandilands regularly hit out at rival Melbourne shows, particularly Hawkins and Phillips, and even blamed Melburnians, he says in jest, for being pearl clutchers who did not get the program.
By November, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) chair Nerida O’Loughlin was being taken to task in a Senate estimates committee by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and asked to explain how the explicit content on Kyle & Jackie O was deemed acceptable breakfast content and why the content was not being looked into by the watchdog — or “watchpoodle” as Media Watch’s Paul Barry termed it.
Sandilands and co started to tone down their grubbiness late in the year — “that’s made a difference to the show, it’s made it more palatable”, according to Duncan Campbell, boss of KIIS’s parent company ARN — but it was too late.
They are going to need to start afresh in Melbourne in 2025 to try and tempt new listeners to sample their tarnished wares.
Last month Sandilands started doing call outs asking his Melbourne listeners to try and recruit one friend each to listen to the show in an effort to boost their audience and introduced a segment in which they tried to convert a ‘hater’ based in Melbourne into a Kyle & Jackie O fan.
Back to Nova, the little show that could, turned into the big show that did.
Starting the year as underdogs, Hawkins and Phillips topped the FM breakfast ratings in survey five, released in August, with a 9.9 per cent audience share at their new home at Nova.
Taking one for the team, Phillips even headed to Geelong to get a real life whiff of the intriguing and ultra stinky Corpse Plant in November.
They returned to the number one FM spot in survey seven, released on November 14, with an 11 per cent audience share.
Fox’s FiFi, Fev and Nick show was consistently strong with two promotions in particular getting great cut through.
The ‘bronze Fev’ was a life-size 3D printed statue of co-host Fevola which was unveiled in Narre Warren in March, moved to the Clocks bar at Flinders Street Station in April, sent back to Narre Warren at the decree of Premier Jacinta Allan in late July and then returned to Clocks at Flinders Street at end of August where it remains a late night ‘selfie’ attraction for footy fans.
The Underdogs promotion where Box, Fevola and Cody put together a team of kids who had been excluded from sports due to illness, bullying or lack of opportunity to play a curtain-raiser game of footy at Marvel Stadium in July was also a tear inducing winner.
Fox’s Fifi, Fev and Nick jostled for the top FM breakfast show crown with Nova and Gold all year.
The show hit number one FM in survey two with an 11.2 share and returned to the number one in survey six with a 10 share.
Gold FM breakfast host Christian O’Connell showed he was a team player this year, with his former number one FM breakfast show noticeably starved of a marketing and advertising blitz for most of 2024.
Gold and KIIS are both owned by the Australian Radio Network and breaking the Kyle & Jackie O Show in Melbourne has clearly been ARN’s top priority.
Billboards promoting O’Connell appeared at prominent locations around the city in the back quarter of the year, but by that time the clever and considered broadcaster had dropped from a number one rating of 11.9 in survey one to an 8.3 per cent share in surveys five and six. In the most recent survey his show had rallied to record a 9.2 per cent share.
O’Connell countered the lack of marketing and promotional spend on his Gold program in the first half of the year by getting large Christian O’Connell Show stickers printed and calling on his listeners to plaster their rubbish bins with them, essentially making a gutter led advertising campaign for his show. It was an excellent example of necessity being the mother of invention.
Across the dial, Triple M was not immune from upheaval.
The year kicked off with Marty Sheargold returning to Triple M breakfast after taking an extended break towards the end of 2023 citing mental health concerns.
His decision to give himself a break came after an allegedly unsavoury outburst at last year’s AFL grand final.
In July Sheargold announced he was quitting breakfast to “prioritise self-care and maintain a better work/life balance”.
Wil Anderson, Dale Thomas and Rosie Walton stepped into the breach to cover the shift until the end of the year.
Mick Molloy, Titus O’Reily, Walton and Nick Riewoldt will host Triple M Melbourne breakfast next year while Sheargold will host Drive from 4-6pm in the Sydney and Brisbane markets.
Former Footy Show favourite Billy Brownless and James Brayshaw continued to hold strong in the Triple M Melbourne Drive shift, so much so the show will expand into Adelaide, Perth and Hobart in 2025.
Not to be left out, ABC radio Melbourne sprang a raft of late in the year surprises announcing Sammy J (Samuel McMillan) would be departing breakfast after five years.
Former Western Bulldogs play Bob Murphy and experienced Channel 7 reporter Sharnelle Vella will host the ABC breakfast shift in 2025.
In the last days of his show, Sammy J started gleefully trolling Sandilands thanks to his ABC show outrating KIIS breakfast 7.4 per cent to 5.1 per cent in November’s ratings survey.
He mocked Sandilands saying: “When I retired from breakfast radio in 2024, I was rating better than Kyle Sandilands. Sadly for both of us this means he will never beat me and I will forever live in his head as his eternal, uncatchable tormentor.”
Sandilands naturally bit back calling McMillan a “deluded flog”, which led to the comic launching a GoFundMe page to raise money to pay to live in the KIIS shock jock’s head.
In reality the donations, which had soared past $8000 by Friday morning, will be donated to the Big Brothers Big Sisters charitable organisation.
Another big move by the ABC was to appoint experienced radio performer Brigitte Duclos as the host of Afternoons in 2025.
She replaced Trevor Chappell who will return to his role as Overnights presenter.
Finally, it was a big year for Melbourne’s talkback leviathan, 3AW.
It started the year with a rejigged daytime line up of Tom Elliott in Mornings, Tony Moclair in Afternoons and Jacqui Felgate in Drive.
Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft continued their extraordinary winning run in breakfast, absolutely dominating the market.
As Melbourne’s top rating breakfast program the duo recorded a 20 per cent audience share in the GFK ratings in November - miles ahead of their FM rivals.
Elliott had a big task on his plate replacing the legendary Neil Michell in Mornings, but he rose to the challenge scoring big ratings and growing his cumulative listening audience by 14 per cent.
And after a challenging start, going through a baptism of fire on air as listeners adapted to a fresh, younger voice in the hard news shift, Felgate became a news breaking machine in Drive.
Radio has been a rollercoaster this year, but don’t expect the ride to slow down in 2025. January marks the beginning of Sandilands and Henderson’s much talked about $200m ten year deal with ARN.
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