Amanda Keller: Queen of the Dags

Amanda Keller is in radio’s elite million-a-year club, but don’t expect her to be cool and edgy.

Live wire: Amanda Keller. Picture: Harold David

“Look, that’s attractive.” Amanda Keller holds up a commemorative shot glass featuring Camilla Parker-Bowles, pre-makeover. She has plucked it from a sideboard groaning under the weight of royal kitsch and other atrocities and it’s hard to say whether it’s any more or less appealing than the chipped Charles and Di mug that competes for space with the Queen Elizabeth-shaped jelly mould.

Incredibly, these are not the tackiest of the tchotchkes cramming the home that Keller, 53, shares with husband Harley and sons Liam, 14, and Jack, 12, in the Sydney beachside suburb of Coogee. The place is a shrine to uncool. ­“Usually the uglier the better with these sorts of things,” she says, steering me beneath the Michelle Obama lightshade and past the wall-mounted plastic deer head that’s eyeballing a life-size fibreglass zebra out by the pool. Soon she’s digging through a drawer brimming with souvenir mugs that look as though they’ve ­accidentally been through the dishwasher. She’s looking for “the nice ones” for our tea.

Keller is one of the country’s most enduringly popular media personalities. She’s logged more than three decades in entertainment, with stints on Ray Martin’s The Midday Show and Beyond 2000 as well as appearances on Denton, Good News Week, Spicks and Specks and Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation. She hosts ­Network Ten’s breezy lifestyle program The ­Living Room and, for the past 10 years, has co-hosted Sydney ­station WSFM’s top-rated breakfast show Jonesy and Amanda with the lanky, Harley-Davidson- riding Brendan “Jonesy” Jones. Last year, after the duo was crowned Australia’s best on-air team at the ­Australian Commercial Radio Awards, Keller signed a contract that saw her become only the second woman (after KIIS FM’s Jackie “O” Henderson) to join radio’s elite million-dollar-a-year club.

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that the most popular female radio announcer in the country is also Queen Dag. The two things are not unrelated. “There is almost no difference between the Amanda on the radio and the Amanda you meet,” says her old university friend Andrew Denton, who partnered Keller for a successful five-year stint on Sydney’s Triple M in the 1990s. “Her dagginess is genuine, her humour is genuine, she is genuine and there’s a lot to like about that.” Mikey Robins also shared a mike with Keller at Triple M and says her widespread appeal is down to her frank and unaffected manner, as well as the fact she is “just a very funny person”. Jones describes his long-time radio partner as “vivacious” and “instantly likeable” with an “amazing work ethic”. “Oh yeah, and she’s a big dag,” he says.

Keller revels in this dagginess, rolls around in it like she’s a cat and it’s clover. She uses words like “poncy”, “palaver” and “cripes”, is terrified of “posh people”, loves chardonnay, bum jokes and junk TV. Even a health scare at a movie premiere last year which led to a night in hospital was explained away as something “very daggy and normal”: too-tight Spanx. “It takes a lot of class to be as daggy as Amanda,” Denton says. “This is not just casual dagginess; she has refined it to a brilliant, shining point.”

At least she has her previously wayward ­fashion sense under control. “She used to wear earrings you could see from the moon, in the 1980s,” Denton adds, warming to his theme. “She had shoulder pads that Jarryd Hayne wishes he had playing for the NFL. She’s had hairdos that should be on Interpol’s most wanted list.”

There’s something about Keller that invites mickey-taking, in the way a royal wedding calls for commemorative china. Less a professional comedian than a person who just responds to life in a funny way, she has a keen sense of the ridiculous and a huge appetite for laughter. Friends and colleagues (often one and the same) show their affection by relentlessly giving her stick and putting her in awkward positions they then delight in watching her squirm out of. But don’t worry: Keller gives as good as she gets.

She also has a happy knack of provoking strange and inappropriate behaviour. “It’s as if she goes out every day with an advance party of people setting up situations that are either going to embarrass her or she’s going to embarrass someone else,” Denton says. “Did she tell you about going to see Barry Manilow with her best friend and they were taking a photo with him backstage after the show when he farted? That’s what I mean – stuff happens to her that doesn’t happen to anyone else.” Ah yes. Barry Manilow.

There’s an unwavering line defining Keller’s life and it doesn’t speak of million-dollar radio contracts, TV stardom or red-carpet premieres. It is a feather-haired, baroque-nosed, soft rock-singing constant that doesn’t so much speak of uncool as holler it from the rooftops.

As a teen growing up in the northern Sydney suburb of Beecroft in the 1970s, Keller had a smorgasbord of bell-bottom-clad pop idols to crush on, from Leif Garrett and Scott Baio to the Bay City Rollers. She preferred the smooth caress of Barry Manilow. “I picked him because he wasn’t a spunk,” she says now, settling in against a cushion embroidered with images of Charles and Di. “There are certain girls who get the attractive guy – I think they’re entitled to him – whereas Barry suited where I saw myself in the food chain. As if any of us would ever get a crack at any of them, but you sort of knew your level. If you were aiming too high, it was never going to happen.”

Keller was reminded of the intensity of her feelings for the patron saint of lonely hearts when she unearthed a diary written by her 15-year-old self a few years ago. She had started the diary as a way to process the death of a friend from leukaemia, but the daily musings soon turned to boy crushes, homework woes and fantasies about “snuggling with Barry on the couch wearing matching knitted sweaters”.

She wound up reading some of the “turgid” prose to her radio audience and the hilarity of it all provided a jumping-off point for her new memoir, Natural Born Keller. The book is a light-hearted frolic through a life she describes as “lucky”, beginning with a contented Brisbane childhood marked by “sunshine, picnics and stability” with her mother, father and Cameron, her older brother. Cameron was the first victim of her penchant for “stirring”, a lifelong compulsion that would define the professional relationships she went on to form with everyone from Denton and Jones to her Living Room co-stars Chris Brown, Barry Du Bois and Miguel Maestre.

“It’s funny, sometimes we’ll do something and I’ll think, ‘Oh, that sounds a bit sincere’, so we’ll take it out and just slag each other off,” Keller says of her mates on The Living Room. She detonates one of her explosive guffaws. “We’re half supportive of each other and half slagging each other off, which is the nature of all the relationships I have in my life, including with Harley and the kids. That’s what I love about the safety of those relationships – even when you’re slagging each other off, you know you love each other.”

Keller was a particularly awkward teen. “As teenagers I don’t think it ever occurred to me or my friends to try to be sexy,” her memoir records. “I could barely manage ‘female’.” Case in point: she once went to a fancy-dress school dance as Kamahl. Another time, in the final year of high school, she and her friends embarked on a trip to Manly, which involved catching a complicated sequence of buses, trains and ferries. At its conclusion, not realising one had to walk through the Corso to find the beach, they spent the day swimming in the oily waters of the ferry terminal. “I doubt you’d find such a gormless teen now,” Keller says.

Her outrider status is, says Jones, a large part of Keller’s charm. “For Amanda in the ’70s, it was all that Puberty Blues era – all those girls who were so quick to lose their virginity and go off with strange men, smoke and hitchhike and go against their parents and Amanda wasn’t like that,” he says. Although she wasn’t considered “cool” in the style of the sunburnt, crocheted-­bikini brigade of that era, she has, he says, emerged a winner. “My daughter, who’s 18, looks up to Amanda,” he says. “Thankfully, as I’d rather have a daughter like Amanda than someone from Puberty Blues.”

Keller’s family lived modestly (she remembers one year her brother’s Christmas gift was a pillow) and she was encouraged to make sensible career plans. “Part of my dream, when I was a kid, was I wanted to be an actress,” she says now. “But I knew that was unrealistic so I channelled that into journalism, thinking that was my family’s version. We weren’t a family of theatrics in any way, and we weren’t a go-and-pursue-your-dreams family. It was, ‘Get an education and then see where it goes from there’.”

In 1980, she enrolled to do a Bachelor of Arts in Communication at Mitchell College in Bathurst, NSW. She arrived with a wardrobe of Knitwit outfits her mother had sewn for her and soon befriended a “hilarious” and “incredibly sweet” student named Andrew Denton. Keller first spotted him “dancing like a dervish” at the campus bar. They immediately formed a mutual admiration society. “I remember fairly quickly being drawn to her because we had a shared sense of humour and she was a very out-loud, blowsy woman who was and has become over the years increasingly eccentric and colourful in a very suburban way,” Denton says. “We’ve spent the last 30 years trying to make each other laugh and trying to shock each other and if either of us can score a shot from the other we consider it a great victory.”

There were a few hiccups at uni. Joining the Claret Club was a mistake. So was the time Keller attempted to impress her writing teacher, Peter Temple, who would go on to become a celebrated author of crime fiction and win the Miles Franklin Award – by inexplicably penning an essay about her love of salt and vinegar chips.

Upon graduating, she landed a job as a research assistant with the popular kids’ show Simon Townsend’s Wonder World! before moving on to a producer’s job on The Midday Show. It was Ray Martin who suggested she have a go in front of the camera. Keller still marvels at how she ever got on TV, recalling her “Flock of ­Seagulls hair” and what can only be described as a series of deliberate wardrobe malfunctions, like the oversized man’s jacket, white socks and bowling shoes she once teamed with a pair of brightly painted ping-pong ball earrings. “It wasn’t me trying to be unusual in my choice of clothes,” she says now. “Sadly, that was how I negotiated my way around.” Even now, Keller is not comfortable with looking unnaturally polished. “I don’t want to look like a newsreader,” she says. “I don’t want to look like a middle-aged woman wearing a blazer. I push back if I start looking like a TV version of a groomed woman.”

In 1985, Keller joined the globetrotting cast of the popular science show Beyond 2000. It was there she met her husband Harley Oliver, who was working as a video editor. She jokes now that the reason she and Oliver were married is that she felt it would be impolite to say no, but their 25-year marriage, along with their two sons conceived through IVF, are the bedrock of her existence. “She’s a mum and a wife first and foremost and an entertainer second,” says ­Robins. “She loves her kids; she loves Harley.”

Oliver, 11 years her senior, clearly shares Keller’s eccentric sense of humour. Working from home now as an artist and freelance editor, he makes a series of wry asides about the décor as his wife and I sit chatting on the couch. Keller tells me he is responsible for the series of paintings titled Inappropriate Nudity, featuring the likes of Queen Victoria and Dame Edna Everage, and for the framed pair of Harvey ­Keitel’s Y-fronts in the hallway. As he leads the family’s sheepdog Minnie outside to throw a ball around, Oliver mutters something about putting a flamethrower through the lot.

“Does she still have that giant pair of oak underpants I had carved for her 50th birthday?” Denton asks. The “statue” is an inside joke relating to a conversation Denton and a star-struck Keller once had on-air with Barry Manilow ­during an interview for Triple M. It doesn’t look out of place in Keller’s lounge room.

Denton “retired” from TV in 2013 and has turned his hand to cartooning with a series for literary journal Going Down Swinging. He was the first person to recognise Keller could be funny for a living and is responsible for steering her career in a new direction by inviting her to appear on the Seven Network’s Denton in 1994. “We made each other laugh all through our uni days and we’d been friends all along, and when I left Beyond 2000 he said, ‘You’ve shown you can do that, it’s time to show you can do this’,” Keller says. “It was Andrew’s belief in me and he had to convince other people I was funny and I had to convince myself and an audience.”

Keller’s quick wit resonated; the partnership continued on radio, where they became one of Australia’s leading breakfast-radio teams. “Often I was terrified when a side door was opened,” Keller says. “I’d think, ‘I wish they hadn’t asked me to do that’. Of course, once I’d step through the door it was the best thing I could have done. But I’m not by nature an adventurous person and sometimes I had to push myself to accept the offers I was given. I always wanted to say, ‘No, that’s too scary’ but if I said no to everything that was frightening I’d never do anything.”

It took some special coaxing from Jones to convince Keller to join him at WSFM in 2005; with two children under four, a breakfast radio job was a big commitment. She planned to stay for two years and sock away some money for the boys’ schooling. Ten years on, Jonesy and Amanda has overtaken The Kyle and Jackie O Show to become Sydney’s number one FM breakfast show. Keller says she’s “never loved a job more”.

In October last year, she and Jones signed three-year contracts each worth a million dollars a year. Still, she says, “I’m a very normal person. I’ve got two children and I take the dog to the park and I yell at the kids for not taking the dog to the park. This is my real life and I talk about my real life. Other people can relate to that. Maybe the key to people feeling they know me and like me is because I’m just like them.”

Keller’s biggest failing, according to her peers, is her unflagging devotion to a singer whose very name is a punchline, but she refuses to apologise for her Manilow obsession or her lack of edge. “It’s all right to celebrate being very normal and being very ordinary – they’re ­universal traits,” she says. “I think a lot of ­Australian families would relate to that. I wear it proudly – I’m quite happy to be a dag.”

Middle-of-the-road is not such a bad place to be. Barry Manilow lives there. Eighty million records sold worldwide; 25 Top 40 hits. He may not be hip, but he sure is popular. On June 17, his 72nd birthday, the sultan of schmaltz performed the final show of his One Last Time tour before a sold-out crowd in his home town of Brooklyn, NY. Wearing a shimmering blue jacket, he ­sashayed across the stage a tad gingerly, the result of a few hip surgeries, but his voice, crooning 40 years’ worth of hits, was still silky smooth. Keller was there, excitedly waving a glow stick, along with her old school friend and fellow Manilow enthusiast, Melanie.

“If someone had told me we’d go to see him when I was 53, I would have pictured us in an iron lung or something, going up the ramps,” Keller says back in Sydney, taking a sip from her Fergie and Andrew mug. “All those questions we had as teenagers – who will we be, will we find love, will life be OK, what’s going to ­happen – and there we were, Mel and I linking arms, and so far it’s all been OK. That was the overwhelming feeling I had when I saw him.”

Even the fact that Manilow had married his long-time manager, Garry Kief, in a quiet ceremony at his home in Palm Springs, California, just months before, seemed to Keller to be just about right. She had moved on with Harley, and now Bazza had found Gazza. The perfect end bracket to a dream.