Writing about the return of cancer in June<\/a>, he reflected on his decision not to have the major surgery and said there were risks associated with either path.<\/p>\n“There may be debate as to whether the full removal might have prevented this, but given that the initial tumour may have been there for a while, undetected and asymptomatic, there’s every chance that cancer cells have been out in my body for some time, looking for a place to call home, and the full surgery would not have prevented their spread,” he wrote in June.<\/p>\n
“I’m not that concerned about that, the how, the why, the might have been.”<\/p>\n
Audience embraced ‘crazy ideas’<\/p>\n
For over 20 years, Valentine has kept listeners company during the early afternoon.<\/p>\n
Unlike the frenetic energy of Breakfast or the news-oriented agenda of Mornings, the Afternoons program gave Valentine the freedom to experiment.<\/p>\n
“The audience of Afternoons was so giving, so happy for me to try all these sorts of things,” he said during his farewell on Monday.<\/p>\n
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Valentine, a talented saxophonist, was performing gigs up until last year.\u00a0 (Supplied: James Valentine)<\/p>\n
Less interested in listeners’ opinions on the latest public policy decisions, Valentine preferred to have fun with segments that explored social dilemmas or allowed callers to vent about their pet peeves.<\/p>\n
He thanked listeners for sharing personal stories, embracing his “crazy ideas” and for the laughs they enjoyed together.<\/p>\n
“I could ask callers to make stuff up, to invent stories, to go with any sort of fanciful notion of the city that we had going on,” he said.<\/p>\n
“What a huge buzz of enjoyment I got when you called in, in response to something I’d suggest.”<\/p>\n
‘Keep it in my head’<\/p>\n
Before joining ABC Radio Sydney, Valentine spent his early 20s in rock band Models and continued to play the saxophone, performing with jazz bands up until last year.<\/p>\n
While he was presenting an ABC children’s television show in the late 1980s, he decided to try local radio.<\/p>\n
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Valentine first joined the ABC in 1987 as a presenter for ABC children’s television.\u00a0 (ABC)<\/p>\n
The then manager of ABC Radio Sydney, known as 2BL at the time, Peter Wall, gave Valentine his first opportunity.<\/p>\n
“The chances of finding a gig that suited me so perfectly were vanishingly small. Really, the reason that it did suit me so perfectly was, I think, the audience that suited me.”<\/p>\n
A self-described “show off”, Valentine often did his daily three-hour show with no notes.<\/p>\n
“I would often look like I wasn’t really doing anything. After my first few years, I didn’t write much down.<\/p>\n
“I felt I could think it and keep it in my head and bring it out again during the show.”<\/p>\n
The brilliance of Valentine’s program was recognised internationally, picking up a Bronze Award for Best Two-Way Telephone Talk\/Interview Show at the 2020 New York Festival’s Radio Awards.<\/p>\n
Pushing talkback into new territory<\/p>\n
Valentine said he saw every listener as a potential caller and challenged himself to figure out what would make them ring in.<\/p>\n
“If I did something like a storytelling competition about the worst wedding you’ve ever been to, that’ll get the attention of someone listening who’d been to a real shocker.<\/p>\n
“And then somebody else will go ‘Oh I went to one that was much worse than that’. That would make them want to call [in] as well.”<\/p>\n
Among his most popular talkback segments were Rant and This is What I Live With.<\/p>\n
During the program’s segment This Is What I Live With, Anna Minns, the wife of NSW Premier Chris Minns, called to complain about her husband’s habit of pausing television shows after a funny joke.<\/p>\n
A music segment, Soundtrack of Your Life, once caught the attention of Iva Davies, lead singer of Icehouse.<\/p>\n
As the discussion turned to songs that remind people of winter, the iconic Australian singer rang in to suggest River by Joni Mitchell.<\/p>\n
Listeners will have the chance to enjoy Valentine’s banter once more with a two-hour retrospective on 702 ABC Radio Sydney Afternoons on Friday.<\/p>\n
“I wanted to capture what we made in those 25 years, look at the ways in which we pushed talkback into completely new territory,” Valentine said.<\/p>\n
James O’Loghlin has been presenting Afternoons since June, but a permanent replacement is yet to be announced.<\/p>\n
Valentine has this advice for his successor: “Come and have a go at this marvellous shift and do what you can with it \u2026 that is just what’s so beautiful about Afternoons \u2014 no restrictions. It’s kind of infinite.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Veteran ABC radio presenter James Valentine has announced he will not be returning to the microphone after his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453030,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[234033,234032,2655,82277,234028,234030,234031,234038,64,63,234040,134,234039,234029,206806,234026,234027,234041,234035,234034,2733,234036,234037,26184],"class_list":["post-453029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-702-abc-radio-sydney","tag-702-am","tag-abc","tag-abc-radio-sydney","tag-abc-radio-sydney-afternoons-program","tag-afternoons-host","tag-afternoons-presenter","tag-afternoons-program","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-broadcastor","tag-entertainment","tag-interviewer","tag-is-james-valentine-leaving","tag-james-valentine","tag-james-valentine-leaving-abc","tag-james-valentine-steps-down","tag-jazz-musician","tag-leaving-abc-radio-sydney","tag-leaving-afternoons","tag-nsw","tag-radio-host","tag-radio-presenter","tag-writer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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