Behind the Media: Network Ten and 2Day FM funnyman Ed Kavalee

For Network Ten and 2Day FM funnyman Ed Kavalee, live radio is not a performance but an unveiling | PODCAST

2DayFM breakfast announcer Ed Kavalee. Picture: Hollie Adams

For Ed Kavalee, live radio is not a performance but an unveiling.

“You can’t hide who you are if you do breakfast radio for long and if you do you’re going to do a shit job,” the Network Ten and 2Day FM funnyman tells The Australian’s Behind the Media podcast.

“People don’t know why they don’t like some things but I can guarantee you nine times out of ten in radio it’s because they feel there’s a falsity attached to it.”

The 2Day FM breakfast slot — which is peak time in radio but a graveyard in the ratings since the Kyle and Jackie O Show defected to KIIS FM five years ago, crippling the station and prompting a high rotation of hosts — is inching upwards under Kavalee and Gold Logie winner Grant Denyer.

There comes a time for every FM radio broadcaster when they have to have a serious conversation with their partner and that conversation is this: everything is copy.

Kavalee had it long ago with his then-partner, now wife, TV presenter Tiffiny Hall.

“One of the more serious conversations we had when we were getting more serious was hey, our life is now copy.” Hall had been unhappy that Kavalee had gone on air with an anecdote without her permission.

The night before we meet, Kavalee and Hall, who gave birth to baby Arnold in September last year, had a rare date night Sydney’s Rockpool restaurant when a funny incident occurred.

An inveterate note taker, Kavalee got out his phone. “I immediately I picked up my phone and she knew. I just wrote it in my notes. And she’s like ‘tomorrow?’”

Kavalee replied: “Probably 6.40am”. “And she’s like ‘okay’.”

As Nora Ephron wrote in Scribble Scribble, her excellent anthology of columns for Esquire magazine: “Everything is copy”.

Kavalee puts it another way: “What radio does (is) it make you alive in your own life. So things that would have normally have passed you by, you suddenly stop and go, hang on a second, that’s content.”

He was once with Andy Lee at a concert when an incident occurred. The pair looked at each other and Kavalee said: “You can have that”. Lee and Hamish Blake immediately used it on their show.

And while Kavalee, a former driver of FM radio Black Thunder promotional cars, is strong about the need for authenticity, he admits that he got his break in the industry because he lied to comedian Tony Martin, telling him he was an experienced radio panel operator. So Martin offered him the job on his comeback radio program, which included a guest appearance by Fifi Box.

“The first thing I did was delete an interview that the football guys have done for the weekend by accident and then Tony said ‘you are not a panel op’,” Kavalee confessed.

“And then there was a moment we’re standing there, I’m standing behind the desk. Tony’s an exact human. Tony knows what he wants, it’s one of the great things about him.

“He said, ‘all right, come around here you can be co-host’.

“And I walked very symbolically around the desk from the panel where there wasn’t a microphone to where there was a microphone and sat next to him and that was it.

“Boxy was the guest and the look on Boxy’s face was ‘the f*** is going on?’”

Not just a comedian, Kavalee is a media nerd, enthusiastically referencing BBC programs I haven’t even heard of.

“I think that media likes to think that it’s reinventing itself all the time. If you go to a conference, everyone’s wearing cool sneakers and standing in front of a Steve Jobs ripped-off presentation talking about the future of media. Yes, things change and yes, outlets change. However, engaging an audience is all it’s ever going to be.”

During 40 minutes, Kavalee riffs from a wicked Alan Jones impersonation to a funny bad podcast impersonation, yet manages to tear up emotionally when talking about his wife.

As well as Martin, Kavalee owes his career to Melbourne production company Working Dog, formed by HYBPA host Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, Santo Cilauro, Rob Sitch and producer Michael Hirsh. Key tenets of their philosophy are “mucking around” and giving space for the performer to try and fail.

In many ways he feels indebted to them still. While very confident and knowledgeable on air, as an interviewee he is at pains to check he is not coming across in the wrong way.

“I never want to appear to be talking above my station, because there are people who are smarter and better at this than I am.”