There’s a famous saying that goes “heavy is the head that carries the crown”. After a couple of decades covering radio personalities around the country, I think that could evolve to “odd is the head that carries the headphones”.
There is something inherently strange about someone who pursues a career whereby they must believe that whatever they have to say is valuable enough to be broadcast to hundreds of thousands of people every day.
Here in Australia, there are two tracks to radio stardom.
On one track you have those who come up through appearances on television, usually some kind of reality television program like Chrissie Swan, Ryan Fitzgerald, Ricki Lee Coulter and Kate Ritchie.
The other track is for people who have pursued radio as a vocation like Kyle Sandilands, Jackie O, Tim Blackwell and now, Christian O’Connell.
For those that arrive on our airwaves via the second track, the radio persona and the real life persona are often worlds apart from each other.
Kyle Sandilands, for example, is warmer, more charming and much funnier in person than you’d ever imagine listening to his (former?) show on KIIS FM.
Christian O’Connell, however, is exactly the same. In fact, sitting with him for lunch is like having the radio show performed live for you over the course of what ended up being several hours.
Even as the walls that usually separate an interviewer and interviewee come down, O’Connell remains the same bloke Melburnians have fallen in love with and, no doubt, so will Sydneysiders.
After following the less-trodden path that most people take of tossing in his top rating British radio show to have a crack down under, O’Connell took Melbourne’s Gold FM breakfast show to No.1 in just 18 months.
Now, eight years later, he is having a crack at doing the same in Sydney.
What is immediately striking about O’Connell is all the things you could write off as “bits” for the radio are, in fact, really just how he talks about things.
His notorious self-deprecation, for example, isn’t just a bit. He actually finds the less glamorous and less “celebrity” elements of his life genuinely amusing.
For example, his retelling of the struggles he has making friends.
“When you’re middle-aged, when do you actually hang out with your friends? Let alone recruit a new friend. You stop hiring, your positions are closed,” he says.
He goes on to recount a story where he was getting along well with an Uber driver and, at his wife’s encouragement, decided to swap numbers with him.
“A couple of hours later I text him to say I’d enjoyed the chat and would he fancy going out for a beer … he never replied,” O’Connell says.
“Bad ratings were the lowest point, that was the lowest point, if I can’t even get an Uber driver to come for a beer with me, I’m f***ed here.”
A second lowest point came when he received a text from his hairdresser who invited him to catch up along with some of his friends.
“I was having a lovely time, third glass of wine, and I go ‘thank you so much for inviting me’ and he goes ‘oh your wife said you were really lonely’,” O’Connell says.
It all sounds like a serious chat about the loneliness epidemic but O’Connell and I are howling with laughter as the staff at Forrester’s deliver my sensational steak and his chicken curry.
It was a sweltering day in Sydney and, despite sitting by a window, it was still steaming hot – too hot, O’Connell said, for a steak.
Why he opted for a curry, then, goes unmentioned.
O’Connell is a radio veteran. He began his broadcasting career in 1998 in Bournemouth in the UK and has presented on BBC Radio 5 Live and XFM before landing at Virgin Radio (later Absolute), where he was one of the most well-known broadcasters in the country.
But, in 2018, he opted to toss in the much bigger market of London radio for a little station in the colonies.
“My wife and I reached our mid-40s and I just suddenly realised where we were. Our daughters were a year or two away from becoming teenagers. I was like, wait, they’re going to leave in a couple of years’ time, they’ll go to college,” he says. “And does that mean like the adventurous part of our life is over? Does that mean that now I’m looking back at the really wild times of my career, the making it, now it’s just maintaining?
“That’s really depressing. I’d worked for the national show, the ratings were the highest I’ve had in my career. Two and a half million listeners. But I just felt like I lost my mojo a bit. There was just no challenge anymore.”
So he faced the challenge of being an interloper from Old Blighty, replacing a reasonably popular local show in Jo Stanley and Anthony Lehman, head on.
In his first stand-alone survey at Gold FM Melbourne, he saw the single biggest drop of any show in the slot. But 18 months later he was No.1 in FM (like in Sydney, the talk format is unassailable in the ratings).
Now he is staring down the barrel of possibly a bigger challenge.
His show has been syndicated nationally and he will go head-to-head, maybe, with rating behemoth the Kyle and Jackie O show.
The experience of syndicating Kyle and Jackie O into Melbourne has been an unmitigated disaster for ARN, which also broadcasts Gold FM.
When O’Connell and I sit down for lunch, the Sandilands’ presence still looms large.
At the mere mention of his name, O’Connell reaches for his glass of wine (he told me I had to write that).
“In the UK I went up against some of the very best to ever do it, forget about just saying they were the best in the UK, the very best in the world,” he says “It’s not like I’m going up against Kyle, that’s not really a thing. People keep saying that to me, but I find it quite childish.
“I am going up against so many different things now – mobile phones, YouTube. But it’s so exciting. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s the thrill of the game.”
On Tuesday he will find out how the latest move he is making in the radio game is going when the first survey of the year is released.
At the top end, he will be looking to beat Ben Fordham’s dominating 14.9 point share and, at the very least, he will be hoping to at least sustain Jonesy and Amanda’s 9.7 point audience share.
How Sydney will take an interloper from Old Blighty broadcasting from Melbourne, will be a test that could not only embarrass his radio rivals, but potentially carve a path for successful syndication well into the future.