Mitchell’s part-time dream

3AW morning presenter Neil Mitchell is contemplating radical change — going part-time.

Radio host Neil Mitchell in the 3AW studios. Picture: David Geraghty

With his contract about to expire, 3AW morning presenter Neil Mitchell is contemplating a radical change — going part-time.

“I reckon if I could do a four- day week I would work for ­another 10 years,” Mitchell says from an outside broadcast studio where he has just finished a 3½-hour shift for 3AW, the Melbourne AM radio talkback institution.

With its 14.8 share, the station is easily the most listened to in the Victorian capital and wins every timeslot.

Mitchell, who is 65 and has one hand in a brace after an over-­enthusiastic handshake went awry, enjoys radio “enormously”.

“It is addictive,” he says. He rises at 4am each morning but don’t call him a workaholic — “that’s too negative”.

“I find by mid-afternoon I am stuffed. It is draining, it is intense. If you are doing it well you are living on the edge. If we don’t finish a program feeling exhausted we wonder if we have done well.”

Mitchell seems to rarely flick the off switch. In the evenings his production trio, senior producer Heidi Murphy, Samantha Lowcock and Michael Hilder, congregate digitally on the message service WhatsApp, throwing ideas and news tips at each other before arriving at work by 5am the next day.

“We do it differently, we actually try and chase stories and break stories. It is not the same as writing an editorial and going on air.”

3AW has been No 1 unbroken for 13 years. And Mitchell has had 175 career No 1s since he started in mornings in the early 1990s. Alone among his commercial peers, Mitchell refuses to do live reads, having always refused to complicate the journalistic role by accepting payment for ads.

“It has never been a popular approach with my management,” he says dryly.

It doesn’t take long before Mitchell concedes the four-day week is fantasy. “That’s not possible and it wouldn’t happen anyway because it would get to my day off and there would be something big happening and I would be in. I very rarely get through a holiday without coming in. One time I came back because we changed prime ministers.”

Mitchell is in a post-show contemplative mood, but mention politicians and the mood changes. “They insult the audience by trying to con them, talk around ­issues. They go away after an ­interview and the board will be full of people saying, why do you bother?”

Politicians are “over-managed, over-advised” and it is getting worse.

“There was one very senior politician — I had better not name him — who used to leave the studio and go back to his ­office, whose media analyst would sit him down and abuse him. Go through what he had done wrong and stuffed up. What does that do for your confidence?”

He seems quite concerned for the politician, but also the polity and the negative impact this is having. When Mitchell was wet behind his radio ears (after a very successful newspaper career) he aped the strident talkback tone more often heard in Sydney than in Melbourne.

But he quickly learnt that it wouldn’t work. “I can remember being on air very early and going on and on,” he recalls. His first caller had some blunt advice: “Neil, get your hand off it.”

“Hilarious and right and a lesson,” Mitchell says, his voice brightening. The lesson learnt: “You can argue the point without being pompous.” Some radio broadcasters would be irate about getting a call like that. “Yeah? Well I love it.”

He once travelled to Sydney to spend a week listening to 2GB’s Alan Jones, and admits he found the program baffling.

“I don’t think we take ourselves quite so seriously and I preface it by saying I don’t criticise.

“They know their markets. Look at Jones and the dominance he has had for so long. And Hadley’s figures.

“I have opinions but try to be impartial, and don’t pick and stick, and judge issues as I see them. As I have always done as a journalist.”

The 3AW attitude, he says, is “with you, rather than at you”.

Mitchell reveals he changed his style because of the impact of his colleague Ross Stevenson, who hosts the breakfast shift along with John Burns.

“Ross Stevenson by any definition has got to be the most successful broadcaster in Australian history, if you look at his figures. For 25 years he has been on those kinds of figures — I remember getting 20 per cent once and he got cross with me. That was before he did.

“He changed the dynamic. The program he did was very self-deprecating. It was not on a pedestal; it was down on the street.

“I was what he was sending up in a sense.”

On his rival Jon Faine, firmly established on ABC Radio Melbourne, he praises him as tough competition: “He is a good operator, he is not my style of broadcaster, but he is tough competition. He interviews very well and he is a long-term survivor.”

Thirty years ago, Mitchell’s jump to radio was “accidental, like most things are”. He had a successful career at The Age, was appointed editor of The Herald, one of the youngest in Australia, although he confesses he was “failing” in the role.

One day in 1987 he was at lunch with 3AW presenter Derryn Hinch (now an independent senator) when the news came through that Rupert Murdoch had bought the paper, along with the rest of the Herald & Weekly Times group.

“Hinch said — ‘well you’re stuffed. I am going on holidays in a month, come and fill in for two weeks’.”

Mitchell resigned, filled in for Hinch and then took over the weekend breakfast slot. “Nothing against Rupert, he offered me the job back a couple of years later, but I was having too much fun with radio.

“People said, ‘How could you go from being editor of the Herald to a pissy little weekend radio job?’ I did it because it was good fun and I loved it.”

But that was then and while there seems little doubt that Mitchell will renew his contract, he realises the industry is not what it was. “My son wanted to be a journalist and I spent a long time talking him out of it. I said to him at the time I think the industry is dying. He’s not a journalist, he sometimes wishes that he was.”

Mitchell nominates the cost of living as the hottest issue at the moment. “People are struggling; I don’t think that there is any doubt. I think the politicians are starting to twig to that.”

After 30 years behind the microphone, Mitchell is rarely wrong-footed, but is temporarily nonplussed when asked what the dream is?

He turns to his producer: “What have we got for tomorrow?”