Source : THE AGE NEWS
Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson took a lift to the 17th floor of a vacant North Sydney tower block. When the doors opened that day in July 2023, the pair had arrived on cloud nine.
Awaiting them at the new offices of their employer ARN was the radio network’s chief executive, Ciaran Davis, and chair, Hamish McLennan, along with a DJ, a light show, flowers, bottles of champagne, an extravagant buffet and television screens playing a film about their decade at the company. Outside, a plane wrote the words “KIIS is KJ” in the sky, linking the pair in the heavens with the radio station they dominated.
Then they were each handed a Louis Vuitton briefcase containing lucrative new contracts, locking them into another 10 years at ARN.
At the time, Sandilands and Henderson were the undisputed king and queen of Sydney talk radio, a market ruled for decades by conservative shock jocks. For the first three GfK Radio Ratings surveys of that year, they’d beaten 2GB’s Ben Fordham. Their 17.9 per cent share of the audience in Sydney was unprecedented for a commercial breakfast duo, their best ever.
So it was no surprise that Sandilands and Henderson got everything they wanted out of their contract negotiations: $10 million a year, each, and the opportunity to expand the show beyond the Harbour City’s horizons, with Melbourne first in their sights. Their $200 million deal was the biggest play made by ARN since Davis, an Irishman, had helped lure the pair over from SCA’s 2Day in 2013. It accounted for two thirds of ARN’s outlay for on-air talent.
Fast forward to 2026 and KIIS is no longer KJ.
The ostensible final straw was Sandilands’ hectoring spray on Friday, February 20, on air and to his co-host’s face. “Everyone in the building,” he said, thought the same thing about Henderson, his co-star for so many years: “You don’t give a shit.” She was brought to tears and did not return to the studio the following Monday.
Late on Tuesday, ARN released a statement to the ASX informing investors that it had terminated Henderson’s contract after she had determined she could not “continue to work with Mr Kyle Sandilands”. He was suspended; she was offered a new show.
But after 27 years together with plenty of similar disparaging remarks by Sandilands, the question remained: why had the pair splintered now? While there were controversies, the two have been widely praised for their unmatched chemistry, humour and longevity, presenting the gruelling breakfast shift for more than two decades together. Love them or loathe them, their spat has been a seismic event in Australian radio.
Late on Friday, the mystery deepened. Henderson issued a statement saying she had not quit or resigned and that she had been “deeply saddened by the events of the last week and the possibility of the show ending”. “This has come as a shock to me as it has to everyone else.” She said she was unable to say anything further as the matter was in the hands of lawyers.
In the early 1990s, 18-year-old Jackie Last, Henderson’s maiden name, phoned into a radio program on Sea FM in the Gold Coast hoping to win Guns N’Roses tickets, and ended up striking a friendship with the host “Ugly” Phil O’Neil, then aged 30.
The friendship blossomed into romance, and the pair were married within two years. Without Ugly Phil, a goateed radio journeyman who now hosts Overnights on 2GB, there probably wouldn’t be a Jackie O. “Ugly Phil is an absolute class act and I wouldn’t be where I am now [if it wasn’t for him],” she said in 2022.
Last followed O’Neil to Canberra and then Adelaide, where she began answering phones while her husband was working nights at Triple M, occasionally joining him for on-air segments. One of those moments was overheard by a visiting network consultant, who insisted she get her own segment. By 1993, the pair were co-hosting Phil O’Neil’s Hot 30 in Adelaide, although their relationship was kept a secret from the audience.
Henderson was initially known as “Jackie the phone tart”, a moniker she understandably hated – a forerunner of her later treatment by Sandilands. By 1996, the show was a big enough hit to move to Melbourne, where it was rebranded as the Hot30 Countdown. And Henderson got a new name – Jackie O. The show was soon syndicated nationally and relocated to Sydney.
By 1999, Jackie O and Ugly Phil’s marriage had fallen apart, and he moved to London. To replace O’Neil alongside Jackie O, their network, Austereo, plucked a brash, blond bogan nobody from the backwaters of Brisbane to step up in the nation’s biggest radio market. Station manager at the time, Jeff Allis, later told The Australian he wanted someone “with fire in their belly”. In Kyle Sandilands, that’s what he got.
Sandilands would later credit Allis, who in 2000 co-founded Boost Juice with wife Janine, as the matchmaker responsible for the Kyle and Jackie O partnership.
Sandilands might’ve been a nobody, but he was positively burning with ambition. It had already got him further than many expected.
Sandilands’ fairly standard suburban childhood was upended by his parents’ divorce, which sent the teenage Kyle spiralling. After throwing a particularly debauched party at age 15 while his mother and stepfather were away at a bowls weekend, Sandilands was sent to live with his father, Peter Sandilands, who refused to take him in.
Sandilands Jr would tell the ABC’s Andrew Denton in 2007 that he’d spent time living on the streets and bouncing between friends’ houses before an aunt in Townsville, Jill Stevens, agreed to house him. Sandilands Sr, who died a decade ago, said his son never spent more than a night or two on the streets. “He always did have a home but he couldn’t get on with his stepfather and his behaviour at that time went from bad to worse,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2009.
Sandilands’ early forays into the jobs market did little to inspire confidence. He was fired from an abattoir, an electronics store and a chocolate factory, before landing a gig at Townsville radio station 4TO after lying on his résumé by saying he’d worked at Triple M, according to a 2005 Herald profile.
Initially hired to drive the station’s promotional car, Sandilands managed to swing gigs in Cairns and Townsville and, finally, Triple M in Brisbane, where he won the attention of Allis, who decided to take a punt and bring him to Sydney for Hot30.
It was, for the first two nights at least, a disaster. Sandilands twice hung up on Spice Girl Mel B (he didn’t know who the band was) and he couldn’t work the phones. Henderson was about to tell management to pull the pin. Instead, “he suddenly came good on the third night”, she said in a 2007 profile.
Australia’s longest radio partnership was born. From there, the duo’s rise was swift. By 2005, they’d landed the coveted breakfast slot at 2Day FM. Within a year, they’d taken 2Day FM from fifth to first in the ratings. The millions followed. So did the scandals.
The pair hit on a winning formula that relied on a truth they discovered – that millions of Australians wanted their breakfast and morning commutes with a side of raunch.
This was the key reason for their success, says Ben Willee, executive director of media and data at media agency Spinach Advertising. They lived on the edge. “The edge of the rules, the edge of good taste, the edge of what people were prepared to listen to in their cars, and if you look at Australian radio, there is a lot of sameness, and they were distinct and people really like that,” he said.
For years, Sandilands’ brash, unapologetic approach has been a selling point for the duo, with Henderson the kinder, more acceptable face.
While his offensive comments rubbed many up the wrong way, Henderson has always brushed it off. Sandilands referring to her by terms such as “annoying bitch” appeared not to trouble her.
In 2022, at the Australian Commercial Radio Awards, for example, the pair were inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, arguably their crowning moment. But on stage, Sandilands put their success down to the fact that he didn’t want to have sex with her because of her weight. “I thought Jackie was my best mate, but there’s obviously going to be no sex there because she’s stacked on the kilos,” Sandilands told the crowd.
Sandilands, who weighed about 140 kilos last year, brushed off criticism of the remarks by saying they were “both fatties”, but his comments about women and their appearance never rankled Henderson enough to force her to break their lucrative series of contracts.
“Yes, he annoys me because, yes, he says things I wouldn’t say, but I don’t know, overall, he’s a really great person,” she told Nine’s Karl Stefanovic in 2020. “And I love working with him.”
In 2023, she committed another decade of her life to Sandilands in return for $100 million.
To justify that price tag, ARN didn’t need the show to be liked by everyone. The station only required that it be popular enough to make advertisers feel like they were missing out if they did not commit dollars to promote their products in its ad breaks.
But ultimately, the pair’s entry into the Melbourne market, which was supposed to be their moment of national domination, turned out to be their downfall. The sums behind the $200 million contract would “only work” if the show was a national success, a rival radio executive says.
When they arrived, Willee says advertisers in Melbourne realised the duo’s crass content was actually “worse than they thought”. This, matched with a campaign from activist group Mad Fucking Witches, named after an insult made by Peter Dutton towards News Corp political journalist Samantha Maiden in 2016, turned out to be a perfect storm.
Their initial launch into Melbourne bombed. Sandilands made scant effort to pander to the new audience. The breakfast show KIIS had dumped in Melbourne, Jase & Lauren, shot up the ratings at its new home, Nova.
The Kyle and Jackie O Show ended the year in eighth place in Melbourne. The national rollout was put on hold.
So when an opportunity came to end the cripplingly expensive contract and claw back listeners in Victoria, it appears ARN pounced. “ARN would be delighted that there’s been a blow-up,” Willee says. “Because a good crisis is an opportunity for them to have a circuit breaker.”
Over the years, publicity stunts have been Kyle and Jackie’s modus operandi. Their personal lives – from her drug addiction to his brain aneurysm – were mined for media coverage. So when the latest on-air spat came around after another set of poor ratings, some were sceptical it was serious.
One former confidant of Jackie’s says, “worse things have been said in the past”, but now Henderson is “clean and sober”.
ARN’s declaration that Henderson said she could not work with Sandilands has apparently left both unable to fulfil their contractual obligations. He is preparing to sue, company sources told this masthead this week.
With Kyle and Jackie temporarily off air, ARN has been touting short-term deals for advertisers that had previously excluded themselves from the show, industry figures say.
While Davis, the chief executive who signed off on the $200 million deal, has left, the company’s chair, McLennan, a former advertising executive-turned-Murdoch loyalist known as “The Hammer”, remains.
Without Jackie O, however, what would Kyle do? KIIS might opt to keep him. “I think they’ll try and negotiate with Kyle for Sydney only, back to $5 million [a year] and shorten the term,” says one former radio executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
It’s not clear what Henderson’s future would then hold; could a move to rival Southern Cross Austereo (where the pair’s show used to air on 2Day FM) be on the cards?
Kyle and Jackie O’s dominance in the Sydney breakfast market has meant Triple M and Hit Network have had to struggle for audience across the entire day. Now those listeners are up for grabs. “It’s very hard to get people to change their mind to find a new radio station, ever,” one experienced talent manager says. “But now they’re up against, at least for the next two weeks, the radio equivalent of a test pattern.”
On the Game Changers Radio podcaster this week, industry insider Craig Bruce said he believed Jackie O would be on 2Day FM in 2027. Cathy O’Connor, who just joined the board of Southern Cross Austereo, is close with Henderson’s manager Gemma O’Neill.
But rival executives say there will probably be one, if not two settlements made, which will include non-competes to prevent them turning up on another network in the short term.
Assuming The Kyle and Jackie O Show ceases to exist, it will almost certainly mean KIIS returns to separate programming for the Sydney and Melbourne markets.
“I can’t see anyone attempting a networked show again for a very long time,” says a senior entertainment industry player. “I think in Melbourne they’ll go for the most Melbourne team they can find.“
The need for a different breakfast line-up in Melbourne could mean the door is open to some “legacy” talent – comedian and broadcasters Dave Hughes and Anthony “Lehmo” Lehmann have been mentioned.
“They could make a play where they get someone from a whole other world,” the source says. “It could be podcasting. It could be someone who has a high social profile – I don’t just mean social media, but you’ve seen media interest in Bec Judd, Brooke Blurton, people like that.”
One thing is for sure, the days of $10 million contracts are over.
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