On Air And Out Of Your Mind

I want Kyle Sandilands to punch me in the throat.

Or at least give it a red-hot go. (For those of you not aware of his particular 'style', this is how he threatened a detractor a while back.)

The good and the great are rushing to condemn the oxygen-thief right now, and fair enough. For those of you not in Australia, or those who’ve been living in a cockerel’s boot, he acquitted himself with his usual aplomb when, after a 14-year-old girl tearfully admitted live on air that she had been raped two years ago, he treated it as a normal sexual experience and kept on pushing the topic. From the ABC news site:

After initially sounding uncomfortable with the questioning, the girl started crying and said she had been raped when she was 12.

Then Kyle Sandilands replied: "Right ... is that the only experience you've had?"

For Grey Area readers, my dislike of the radio 'personality' is well travelled territory. If you put his name in the search field on the right, you’ll see that I’ve had a consistent opinion about the guy - this isn’t just Johnny-come-hately for me.

His response to criticism is often to threaten the messenger. His ethics are questionable (his wife, a singer, unaccountably received a lot of air-play on the station he infests) and he is entirely too ready to let everyone know how damn good he is. He comes straight from the venal breeding grounds that gave us Laws, Jones and Price.

It’s very rare I actually get to write about something I know anything about in these posts, but I know a little about radio. The excuse he trotted out for this fiasco was that he panicked, but if you don’t know where your dump button is after years of on-air experience, you’re an even bigger pillow than I had previously suspected.

As a former broadcaster, I can say three things with authority.

Firstly, start with the mother who put her daughter on the spot. Start with her good and proper.

Then, go to the producer. What was the producer doing putting those two to air? That’s exactly what producers are supposed not to do. They’re supposed to find interesting material that‘ll make good radio and, you know, do it without setting people on fire or publicly putting lie detectors on teenage rape victims.

And then finally, we can take to Kyle Sandilands, who didn’t know where his dump was.

For those of you who haven’t been broadcasters, live radio that involves the public calling in usually happens with a delay. At the stations I worked at, the delay was traditionally about seven seconds. I cut my teeth broadcasting in the lean, mean hours of the night where I also panelled myself. (As well as doing the talking, you drive the technical bits - sliders and buttons and stuff.) If you didn’t have one digit hovering over the dump button, you weren’t saying the right things.

If someone called in and said something that was going to land everyone in jail, you dumped it, lost the last seven seconds of broadcast, cut to an ad break, built your delay up again and pushed on like nothing had ever happened.

I hesitated to even write about this, because you just know that Sandiland’s radio management, while wringing their hands in public at the unfortunate event, are clapping their hands with glee behind the boardroom doors. You can’t buy this sort of PR. I didn’t want to fall for it and give it any more attention. But, as I mentioned, I do actually know something about this. It’s really simple. THE DUMP BUTTON, DICKHEAD. IT’S THE BIG RED ONE OVER THERE ON THE RIGHT! You don’t even have to think that fast. Count out seven seconds and ask yourself if you could recognise danger in that time.

And he pouts for photos. ‘Nuff said.