The worst radio host in Australia
And why it was me.
The ABC’s job offer came through while I was on a lunch break. I was just about to step into the rain and make my way back to the office when I heard my mobile ringing. Juggling my phone, a coffee and an umbrella, I managed to pick up the call.
“Good news,” the woman on the other end of the phone said. “Even though there was a more experienced candidate, we’ve decided to give the breakfast host position to you. We’d like you to be in Broome by the beginning of next month.”
It was the most tepid of endorsements, but that didn’t stop me from being excited. This was the job I was meant to do. My whole professional life had led me to this moment, I knew it.
In lieu of training, the ABC gave me style guides as thick as bibles, a 1990s textbook on radio hosting, and impressed upon me the importance and dignity of the position. Flicking through these documents - they were so boring surely no one actually read them - it became clear the ABC didn’t just want me to ramble on about the esoteric things I found interesting. They, quite unreasonably, wanted me to “serve the community” with “localised content” which was “actually interesting”.
A minor creative difference of opinion, I thought. Something we could both overcome.
I arrived in Broome on a Saturday, watched the Monday and Tuesday shows go to air, and then with no further training, time to acclimatise, or help integrating into the community, was hosting the breakfast slot on Wednesday. Predictably, it went quite badly.
Things didn’t improve much from there.
I quickly learned that the Kimberley is a beautiful part of the country where not much happens. Great if you have a normal job and like fishing. Terrible if you’re trying to squeeze out an hour and a half of hyper-local radio every single day.
As a result, I spent much of the year sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, staring at an empty rundown for the next day’s show. It didn’t matter if there was nothing left to say. Or that I was a deseeded vanilla pod of a woman, a husk scraped clean of all ideas. At 6:30am there was a soundless void which had to be filled and I was the person responsible for doing so.
When I found myself with nothing to say and in complete despair (as I often did) my first go-to was to pray for a crocodile sighting at Cable Beach. On the lucky days where a tourist caught a flash of scales between the red and yellow flags, I would get a local ranger on the show. The questions were the same every time: I’d ask them how big they reckoned the croc was, what they were doing to track it down, and how long they would have to close the beach. This sounds like three minutes of radio at most (especially considering the rangers were largely a monosyllabic lot) but I would somehow spin the interview out to fill an entire 20-minute spot.
If there were no crocodile sightings, sometimes I’d call up the rangers to be sure. You haven’t seen any? Have you checked? Can you check again? Could we maybe bring one down from Darwin?
If the crocodile gods were not smiling down at me (or is it up at me? Do crocodile gods also swim around in tourist beaches?) then I would scour the local Facebook pages. I would liken this to wading through a septic tank in the optimistic hope that someone had eaten, and then shat out, a diamond ring.
Did I ever find that sparkling treasure? No. But I did attempt to polish a few turds. Like the time a woman came home to find that someone had broken into her yard and stolen the automated cleaner from her pool. ‘Keep an eye out for it please,’ she’d asked the community. It didn’t take long for me to track her down and line up an interview.
The subsequent interview I recorded, next to the crime scene of the pool, was perhaps the most bafflingly boring and inconsequential five minutes of radio put to air that year. I presented the story like it was a fun, kooky mystery, and not a fairly obvious case of some kids in the mood to make a bong, but lacking the requisite materials.
“According to the homeowner, someone also stole a pump out of the neighbours fish pond,” I wrote in my script. I had hoped the addition of a second boring stolen item would double the intrigue. I was multiplying negatives.
“What’s the most bizarre thing that’s ever been stolen from you? Send us a text”.
I solicited for text messages every 15-minutes or so when I was on air, desperately hoping for a skerrick of audience interaction. But my plaintive requests were always ignored. Well, except for one time when my mother and her friend were plastered in Scotland and listening online. That morning I got a stream of only moderately-coherent messages that were quite obviously written by a drunk parent. This was particularly embarrassing because all the ABC radio stations in Western Australia shared the same text line and read each other’s messages. Also, it was 6:30 in the morning.
At least I knew that day that there were two people listening. If there was a larger audience, I neither saw nor heard any evidence of them. I often thought that if the entire station went off air, it would be weeks before I noticed. Perhaps it never was on air. Was it all just an elaborate art piece on human solitude? On shouting into the abyss?
Sometimes this line of thinking got the better of me. If no one was listening (including my boss) why was I trying so hard to do the right thing?
This emboldened me to do weirder stuff. One time I did a whole talk break about hitting up different crepe sellers at the local market in an attempt to hide how many I was eating. Alcoholics, I’d been told, did the same thing with bottle shops. Does this mean I have a problem, I asked? I received no reply. I suppose I already knew the answer.
Another time I joked at length about waiting out an alien invasion in the Kimberley. This was (I thought) a funny riff off the back of a junk news article about UFO sightings. Unfortunately Media Watch didn’t get the joke. They somehow found that segment and played the audio next to my name and a headshot they’d pilfered from Linkedin.
That discouraged me. For a week or so.
Then I put significant time and effort into tracking down a woman from Perth who was working in America on a cattle station. Why? Because she was also called Stephanie Coombes. It was a giggly interview where I used her full name as often as I could. I remember listening back to the audio, thinking ‘this is utterly, unforgivably shit’, and then playing it anyway the next morning. Did the audience even know my name? Almost certainly not. What a surreal and terrible listening experience for everyone who was not me.
But still, the phones never rang, the textlines stayed empty and I got bored. So bored, that I then didn’t prepare much at all.
What exquisite stress it is to be sitting in front of a live microphone with absolutely nothing left to say. More than once I had played all the songs, read all weather forecasts (twice), used all the ads, pre promoted the next show, and then stared up at the clock, realising I still had three minutes until the news.
What did I say in those three minutes? Who knows. I’m quite sure it was not content that served the local community.
The pressure was constant. At night, I would dream of being in a studio without clocks and trying to use sound desks with no buttons. On the weekends I’d wake up as though someone had sent a jolt of electricity through me. I would throw myself out of bed, heart racing, because it was light outside, and if it was light outside, I’d missed my alarm and I’d missed the show, and the void had not been filled. But it would never be filled. The job was Sisyphean.
Radio, I decided, might be a bit much actually.
The ABC offered to extend my contract just as the wet season started to roll in. Would you do another twelve months, they asked? I would just need to commit to spending more time writing posts for the Facebook page. It was very important to their strategy, you see. There are so many hungry maws to feed in media.
It was with no internal conflict that I declined their offer. I packed up my one-bedroom rental just as the first big storm of the season was rolling in. A small plane, old enough to have ashtrays in the arm rests, was taking me to Perth. From there I would fly home to Sydney. I looked out the window, and thought the gathering clouds looked particularly ominous. But the further south I flew, the clearer the skies became. I had no reason to look back.
By the way I’m in Vietnam at the moment! I’ll be re-posting some articles from the archives, but back with new stuff very soon.
Kyle Sandilands exists….. you have a loooooooooong way to go to be the worst radio host in Australia….
I am smiling. And you survived! That's a win-win.