Kate Langbroek: ‘At some point, I will be cancelled’

In a very candid conversation, comedian and television host Kate Langbroek opens up on the very real risk of speaking her mind on air, and looks back on the topless TV scene she filmed more than 30 years ago but still can’t seem to live down.

“I like energy. I find it very attractive in people and very unattractive when people are missing it. I hate those people who make no effort. I really don’t like them,” says Kate Langbroek. Picture: Sam Bisso for Stellar

On this week’s Stellar podcast Something To Talk About, the comedian and television host talks candidly about the risks in speaking her mind on air, the rumours of a Hughesy radio reunion, and always bringing the energy “like a cyclone”

On what life has looked like since she signed off from her KIIS FM radio show The 3pm Pick Up at the end of 2022: “It’s kind of flown. I’ve had a good break, and I’ve been doing more television. I also have four children, and I’m immersed in our family life, so I don’t think so much about my career as much as the immediacy of getting people fed, clothes washed and getting people where they have to be at certain times, and also trying to enjoy my life. We like to talk about ‘quality time’ because that’s a comfort to us but I actually don’t think there’s such a thing. There’s only time and you can’t always make that available – that’s one thing we can’t spin, we can’t buy, we can’t weave, we can’t magic it to us. I think my priority changed when I first had a year off work in 2013, when Hughesy [Langbroek’s long-time friend and co-host Dave Hughes] and I finished doing Nova breakfast in Melbourne after 12 years. That was the start of [me] going, ‘Oh there’s a different way to live.’

My second bite was when we moved to Italy and I stopped working after the six months Hughesy dragged out of me [Langbroek continued to co-host the pair’s drive radio show Hughesy & Kate from Bologna, before going off air in July 2019, drawing their 18-year radio partnership to an close]. I had the next 18 months off and we went into lockdown over there. That kind of shifted something in me, so when we came back to Australia [at the end of 2021], we were like, ‘Let’s run the ship ourselves.’ I grapple with it all the time – I love it and I resent it and I hate it and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.”

Read the full interview with Kate in this weekend’s edition of Stellar, with Delta Goodrem on the cover.

On her role with The Project (which Langbroek co-hosts on Tuesdays) and how the on-set energy changed after her friend and former co-host Carrie Bickmore departed last year: “It was obviously going to be significant because she essentially was that show. She started that show. She was the only original member on the panel. These things take time. Transitions are always hard. There was probably an uplift of energy on my part, although I apparently always come in – as Hughesy goes – ‘like a cyclone’. I like energy. I find it very attractive in people and very unattractive when people are missing it. I hate those people who make no effort. I really don’t like them. I guess I did step it up a little bit. And it’s actually been so great.”

On published reports that she and Hughes may reunite for a new gig: “Not in the immediate future. We’re very close; I guess we’re family. We’ve spent 18 years in each other’s lives. The question is more about whether or not, creatively, you still have a connection with someone. In partnerships, people can grow apart. Radio, in particular, is full of duos who can’t bear each other, and we were never that. So I’m not saying no to anything.”

Listen to the full interview with Kate Langbroek on Stellar’s podcast Something To Talk About below:

Addressing the fallout from a story she told earlier this year on The Project, wherein she recalled discovering that she was being paid 40 per cent less than Hughes at the height of their radio show’s success, and subsequent reports that it had caused a rift: “It’s always really hard to talk about it if you have a high-profile, front-facing job in the media because of course we’re ridiculously well paid. I was happy with what I was getting paid, but I knew I wasn’t getting paid what he was getting paid. We had built that show together from the ground up, it was the Hughesy and Kate show. [If] the metrics are who’s got a higher profile or more Instagram followers, that was inarguably Hughesy in a solitary capacity. But when it came to the radio show, I was an equal until it came to getting paid. That’s really the point. And he was so mortified, so devastated. But then I did say to him – because you can always have a frank conversation with Hughesy – you don’t get to be the person who

got paid 40 per cent more than me and also get to be the person who I have to comfort because you’re so devastated when it comes out. But he’s an honourable, generous person, and we navigated that and came through better than ever.”

On her acting role in the early ’90s soap opera Chances, in which she appeared topless: “Every team I’ve worked on, there is a day in which you come in and the men are sort of giggling and they’ve Googled it. It’s not hard to find. I did it in its dying days. I think the first day I turned up to set it got axed. And I was devastated because, as I weepingly explained to my then boyfriend, I was happy to take my clothes off for six weeks, but not for two weeks or whatever it was, right? Strange actress logic. I think it rated a two, which meant it was only at 11pm on a Tuesday night. But I tell you, take your clothes off on a poor-rating TV show and you find out exactly how many people watch it. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell my brother in Queensland. I’m like, I don’t want anyone knowing

that I’m doing this. [And] they all saw it.”

On the public’s interest in her decision to move to Italy for two years in 2019 with her husband and four children: “It touched a chord. People talk to me about it all the time. I didn’t realise how significant it would be for me. [Italy is] a country that prioritises family and beauty and time and warmth and good food. And since Hughesy and I were talking about Bologna every day virtually for six months on our show, and since I wrote [the 2021 memoir Ciao Bella! Six Take Italy], Australian tourism [to Italy] is up by a quantifiable amount.

I don’t know if I should apologise to Bologna. We’re all there eat, pray, loving our way… but they’re so generous and fantastic and also slightly irritated, the Italians. They’re just a fantastic combination.”

Originally published as Kate Langbroek: ‘At some point, I will be cancelled’