Wil Anderson and Andy Lee discuss their long-running feud

They’re two of the biggest names in Australian showbiz, but for years Wil Anderson and Andy Lee didn’t get on. Now we know why.

Wil Anderson and Andy Lee have opened up about their long-running feud in a brutally honest interview.

Andy is the most recent guest on Wil’s hugely popular podcast, Wilosophy, and it didn’t take long for the TV and radio star to bring up a touchy subject with the host.

“I want to raise something with you which is pretty confronting,” Andy said. “Hamish and I didn’t like you for a very, very, long time.”

The bad blood between Andy and Wil dates back to the early 2000s when Hamish and Andy landed a spot on a Channel 7 TV show.

Andy Lee and Hamish Blake in 2004.

“We were the last cast members of what was meant to be a sketch show called Big Bite,” Andy said on the podcast.

The cast included Andrew O’Keefe, Chris Lilley and Kate McCartney, some of whom were friends with Wil.

Just before the show’s launch, Channel 7 decided to name the show Hamish and Andy instead, a move that upset the cast.

“As 21-year-olds in our first gig, to step out and see everyone in there looking at you going, ‘You’ve just stolen our f***ing show’, we tried to talk to people, and it turned into a train wreck,” Andy said. “It was an awful experience.”

The other cast members were so angry at Hamish and Andy they started dissing them to their friends, Wil included.

“There was a whole bunch of people who you guys had been foisted upon,” Wil said on Wilosophy. “You guys were young, and you were put into a show where I knew a whole bunch of people who were involved in the show, and some of them were not happy that these two young people had been thrown into this show, so I was getting a lot of stories.”

The sketch show was axed after just six weeks, and Wil, who was hosting The Glass House on ABC and a Triple J radio show at the time, started mocking Hamish and Andy on air.

The Glass House starred Corinne Grant, Wil Anderson and Dave Hughes.

“What was the hard thing for Hamish and I at the time was we were really trying, and then the shows that I loved and listened to, I was becoming a regular punchline on,” Andy said.

“One day my mum rang and said, ‘What did you do to Wil Anderson?’ I said, ‘Mum, I’ve never met him’. She said, ‘He really doesn’t like you’.”

Andy and Wil eventually met for the first time at a restaurant in Sydney, but it didn’t go well.

“I said, ‘Hey, I’m Andy from Hamish and Andy’. And you said something along the lines of, ‘Oh yeah, when I show people through my house, I say this is the Hamish and Andy kitchen for the amount of money I’ve made off jokes about you two’,” Andy said.

“I was like, ‘All right, cool, nice to meet you’, and left. I rang Ham(ish) and said, ‘Wil is as big a f***head as you would ever possibly imagine!’”

The feud intensified when Wil was announced as co-host of Triple M’s national drive show alongside Lehmo, meaning he’d be in direct competition with Hamish and Andy.

“Ham called me (after the announcement) and just said, ‘We’re gonna absolutely smash these guys!’” Andy recalled.

“Which you did, by the way,” Wil added.

Wil and Lehmo hosted the national drive show on Triple M.

Looking back on the bad blood, Wil said: “I know that I behaved like a di**head.

“I thought it was funny, I thought I was being really smart … For me it felt like I was punching up, I thought I was making fun of commercial TV whereas in retrospect I understand … you were just guys trying to do a good job and trying to work hard that were being punched down.

“I’d forgotten that Hamish and Andy were actually people, not a brand or a symbol of something but actual people,” Wil said.

The comedian, who currently co-hosts The Hot Breakfast on Triple M in Melbourne, told Andy he changed his opinion of him when he started to see first-hand how hard he worked.

“The big thing that came to me was the realisation when I started listening to your radio show that you weren’t what I had heard you were,” Wil told Andy. “I just kept hearing how hard you worked, and if there’s one thing I admire, it’s hard work.”

Hamish and Andy’s radio show was arguably the most popular and successful in Australian history.

Wil admitted he was apprehensive to invite Andy to appear on Wilosophy given the way he’d treated him in the past, but ultimately, he found the interview to be cathartic.

“For me it’s something I’ve carried around for a fair while, and I’ve always felt despite the fact we are now friendly, we have not been able to become friends because we had not had this conversation,” Wil said.

You can hear the full interview with Andy Lee on Wil Anderson’s Wilosophy podcast