In the end, KIIS FM breakfast presenter Jackie “O” Henderson took the nuclear option. She walked away from her radio partner of 27 years, Kyle Sandilands, on Tuesday, prompting their bosses at ARN Media to end her contract, part of an astonishing $200 million, decade-long agreement for the pair to present The Kyle & Jackie O Show until December 2034.
Rather than being annoyed with Henderson, ARN, which owns the KIIS and Gold networks, offered her another show, and placed Sandilands, who has grown immensely rich by styling himself as radio’s ultimate bad boy, on the naughty step.
The company’s stilted statement told the sharemarket, after trading hours, that: “Ms Jacqueline Henderson has given notice that she ‘cannot continue to work with Mr Kyle Sandilands’.”
The company then gave the highest-paid person in Australian radio a humiliating two weeks to remedy his “act of serious misconduct” after his infamous February 20 on-air criticism of Henderson. If he doesn’t, ARN will tear up his contract and send him packing.
To my mind, it’s the biggest, most consequential bust-up in Australian media – ever.
For decades, radio was immensely profitable – if you got the settings right. All you needed was a couple of microphones, a record (later CD) player and a couple of mouths. Audiences came for the music or the news and stayed for the talk and the chat. Compared with a fully staffed TV studio, overheads were low.
But that was then. Now we can get all the music we need from streaming services, and nothing entertains like a TikTok meme or a cat video on Instagram. ARN revenues and share price are down, advertisers are wary of Sandilands’ brazen sexual repartee and big brands are no longer devoted to mass market advertising.
Many will see the Sydney program’s expansion into Melbourne two years ago as the beginning of the end for the show. The adventure started with a Kyle and Jackie O flourish as the prime minister phoned in for an interview and the show’s team took to the airwaves to discuss their tiny penises, vaping from vaginas, sleeping with their cousins and extra-long foreskins.
So far, so gross, but the distasteful formula had worked in Sydney.
The Age summarised the program’s impact on Melbourne as though a spaceship from Planet Porno attempted to crash through ingrained media parochialism, but instead it just crashed. Ratings were abysmal and Melbourne celebrated its wholehearted rejection of the brash Sydneysiders in much the same way it celebrates the Sydney Swans losing an AFL grand final.
The failure of the southern incursion by the Emerald City slickers was all so predictable.
Exactly the same thing happened in 1987 when Fairfax (then the owner of this newspaper), bought Channel 7 stations in Melbourne and Adelaide, axed local shows and staff and networked programs from Sydney. Ratings plummeted as Melburnians switched off in protest.
Now, the future of Sandilands and his absurdly long 10-year contract hangs in the balance. The breakfast program won’t work without a female foil. Sandilands cannot be left alone to present. He needs a partner, a gang, to spark and spar off.
It remains to be seen whether Sandilands, now 54, is too proud to – in the parlance that would not be out of place on his radio program – “eat the shit” required of him by ARN management, now run by former Nine ad sales executive Michael Stephenson.
Henderson had stuck with Sandilands through dozens of incidents before this one, from a stunt that ended in a teenager disclosing she had been raped to a contest to guess the sound of the pair’s colleagues urinating. All the while her salary went up and up. Only Stephenson is likely to be able to guess what the full cost of her walking away will be now.
And insiders say Sandilands will be too proud to accept the remedy. Plus he’s caused his co-worker to walk. How popular with audiences and advertisers will he be now?
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Stephen Brook is a special correspondent for The Age and CBD columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously deputy editor of The Sunday Age. He is a former media editor of The Australian and spent six years in London working for The Guardian.Connect via X or email.
