Wendy Harmer reveals which stunts she refused to do on radio

AUSSIE radio seems to get away with anything, but one of Australia’s top radio personalities thought these “stunts” were too outrageous to air.

Radio DJ equipment. Headphones. Microphone. Panel. Generic image.

WENDY Harmer dominated the weird and wacky world of FM breakfast radio for 11 years, constantly coming up with unique ideas that captivated Sydney’s 2Day FM audience. But there were a few ideas that even she considered too outrageous to put to air.

Joining the station in 1993, Harmer and co-hosts (Peter Moon, Jamie Dunn, Paul Holmes) were the number one rated FM brekky show for a staggering 84 out of 88 radio surveys.

“The best thing about rating well for so long is that you get to have a little room where you can lock the door and keep management out,” said Harmer to news.com.au.

“If you’re not rating well, they’re in your ear all day long saying, ‘Why don’t you do this?’”

Every now and then though the door would get left open and a radio honcho would walk in and pitch an idea, and boy, some of them were real “doozies”.

“There’s an old radio stunt where you get a paddock, you divide it up into squares, you put a cow in it and wherever it drops a cow pat, the person with that number wins a million dollars,” said Harmer.

Radio stars: Paul Holmes, Wendy Harmer and Peter Moon.

“When I was about to have my baby, a couple of people at 2Day FM thought that if I could just do that with my baby, it would be a great stunt.

“There were also a lot of times when they wanted us to give away plastic surgery, new boobs or a facelift. That was never going to happen, not when I was there anyway.”

Some of management’s ideas were deemed too offensive by Harmer and her co-hosts, some were considered morally wrong and others were just plain lame.

“They wanted us to send a listener into space and there would be a huge build up and then it would turn out that the listener was actually going to be taken to some anti-gravity training centre,” she said.

“It would have been the biggest let down ever and our audience would have killed us.”

Harmer and her co-hosts were able to brainstorm most of their unique stunts themselves, many of which are still being copied by radio stations around the country to this day.

It was actually Harmer who came up with the concept of Two Strangers and a Wedding, which is the basis for Channel 9’s Married at Sight.

“That thing that really caused a big ruckus at the time,” said Harmer about the 1998 content spike.

State of the art equipment there from the look of it.

“We married two listeners, Glenn and Leif, off in a commitment ceremony and it was huge. Fred Nile was jumping up and down and all of these other religious types. Stan Grant from Channel 7 followed them to Paris for their honeymoon and it made it into papers all over the world.”

And in case you were wondering how it turned out ... “Glenn and Leif didn’t ever consummate their relationship and the first time Glenn ever saw Leif in the nude was when she posed for Playboy,” laughed Harmer.

“They also repeated the stunt in Adelaide and the bride ran off with a TV cameraman.”

Naturally, in her 11 years at 2Day FM there were some stunts that went wrong ... well ... horribly wrong actually.

“I remember our man on the street, Frank Vincent, he was in this stunt called Dash for Cash. We pinned money all over him and sent him out to a park and the idea was that you had to catch him to win the cash.

“But there were a lot of highly trained athletes who rocked up and they caught him within 20 metres and they almost killed him.”

In 2003, after 11 years at the top, Harmer left 2Day FM and said goodbye to her reported $1 million a year contract.

Although she rarely listens to FM radio these days, she occasionally tunes in and is sometimes disappointed by what she hears.

Wendy Harmer was farewelled by thousands of fans in Sydney in 2003.

“The one thing I think is pretty boring is the over-reliance on celebrity interviews,” said Harmer.

“Celebrities are OK but they’re just the icing on the cake. You should be making the listeners the stars. I mean, who cares about some Hollywood celeb when you can turn Carol and Brian from Beaconsfield into the real stars?”

For example, after all these years she still chuckles when recalling what a listener said on air during a talkback segment called, ‘How did you catch out your lover having an affair?

“This woman rang up and said, ‘My husband told me that he was going out for a night on the town with his mate Brian, and I knew that wasn’t true, because I was in bed with Brian at the time.’”

Gold.