Why Melburnians celebrate the failure of Sydney's ‘Vile Kyle'

The Age

03-07-2025

Sandilands ('Vile Kyle' to his detractors) and Jackie Henderson, his microphone partner, are supposed to be receiving about $10 million a year each over the next 10 years as reward for drawing in advertisers excited by smutty stunts.
Their $200 million deal – a sum that would have left even old 'Golden Tonsils' John Laws weak at the knees – was drawn up on the presumption that their peculiar popularity in Sydney (where they get ratings of about 16 per cent) would sweep all before them as they took their breakfast show, modestly titled Hour of Power, to the other state capitals, starting in Melbourne.
Oops. The Hour of Power Sydney toilet-jokes format on KIIS caused the pair to take a colossal gutser in Melbourne from the start.
A year on, their latest rating is a measly 5.1 per cent, placing the show eighth in Melbourne's breakfast slot.
For context, number one is the familiar Ross and Russ show on 3AW, where Melbourne locals Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft hold a mighty 20.6 per cent share of the city's breakfast audience, largely by avoiding insulting listeners' intelligence.
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Radio 3AW is owned by Nine, which also owns The Age.
Meanwhile, Australian Radio Network, which owns KIIS, is taking a mighty bath. Advertisers have fled and ARN has 'let go' 200 employees, who must be deliriously happy to have sacrificed their jobs to keep Kyle and Jackie O in their multimillion-dollar Sydney trophy homes.
It's an old story.
In the late 1980s, the Fairfax media group bought Melbourne HSV7 TV station and tried to meld it into its two other channels, in Sydney and Brisbane. It failed spectacularly because Melbourne audiences saw it, quite correctly, as a Sydney try-on.
Soon after, Fairfax, having lost several millions of dollars on its Melbourne bet, sold its TV interests to dodgy Christopher Skase's Qintex Group. Skase later went bankrupt and fled Australia.
Sydney shock jocks Stan Zemanek and Alan Jones both tried and failed to transfer their loudmouthed fame to Melbourne. Southern audiences just never warmed to Jones' dreadful braying, and the late Zemanek's flashiness lasted only a year on 3AW.
Paul Keating earned scorn when, trying to broaden his appeal while launching his campaign to topple Bob Hawke as PM, he flew himself and several reporters to Melbourne to barrack for Collingwood at the MCG. No one was fooled that he had any serious interest in the Australian game, let alone Collingwood.
Keating was also famed for his reported view that, 'If you're not living in Sydney, you're just camping out.'
Even he knew it wouldn't fly among southern voters, and strategically disowned the comment during a visit to Melbourne in the lead-up to the 1996 election.
Asked about the 'camping out' observation by broadcasters Dean Banks and Ross Stevenson on 3AW in October 1995, Keating declared: 'No, somebody falsely attributed those words to me. I love Melbourne, the garden city of Australia.' Six months later, Keating and his government were booted out and he retired to his beloved Sydney.
Even Sydney's criminal milieu could not cut it in Melbourne.
My colleague John Silvester relates the amusing story of Sydney crook Stan 'The Man' Smith's abortive attempt to expand his criminal pursuits into Melbourne decades ago.
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'When he arrived at Tullamarine airport, waiting police miraculously found a matchbox full of hashish in the top outside jacket pocket – usually only used to display a decorative handkerchief,' Silvester wrote.
'Smith is said to have cried out, 'I'm being fitted up', no doubt a reference to his dapper, tailor-made suit. When he returned home (after serving one year), he vowed to never return to Melbourne because 'the cops run red-hot down there'.'
The fact that Melburnians have rarely bought Sydneysiders' pretensions was long attributed to Melbourne wearing a chip on its shoulder because Sydney was the first city established in Australia, and was blessed with greater natural beauty.
A friend has a more nuanced view.
Melbourne, she proposes, has always had to try harder to build itself a beating heart because it was not blessed with Sydney's astonishing natural loveliness.
How could Melbourne and its Yarra and its tame bay compete with Sydney's glorious ocean beaches, the great sweep of its harbour, its cliffs and river gorges and the Blue Mountains hovering away to the west?
The answer, of course, was to get serious and accomplished. About food, conversation, architecture, education and sport, for starters.
Sydneysiders could afford to play in the sun and the surf and merrily flaunt their wealth.
Melburnians hunkered beneath often leaden skies and worked at building a relatively sophisticated, relatively civil society, replete with marvellous restaurants and the nation's oldest and most visited art gallery, named (immodestly) the National Gallery of Victoria.
The naked flaunting of wealth, though increasingly common, remains a bit embarrassing in Melbourne, where it is still sport to take the piss out of ourselves.
And when vulgarians like Kyle Sandilands try to shoulder their way in, scorning the idea of taking a ride on a tram or choosing a footy team ('we're not gonna march into town and try all this hokey local rubbish', Sandilands spat during a radio interview a couple of months ago), Melburnians turn off, knowing imported coarseness is just not worth their while.
And anyway, it's enjoyable – if a bit smug – to make a big-mouthed Sydneysider squirm.