Like an alien spaceship from Planet Porno, the arrival of Sydney breakfast shock jocks Kyle and Jackie O on Melbourne radio this year was an attempt to crash through ingrained media parochialism. Instead, they’ve just crashed. The latest ratings, released on Tuesday , are abysmal.
According to ratings agency GfK, the pair, who have ruled Sydney FM breakfast radio for years with a mix of celebrity, sex, scandals and contests, dropped to eighth in the Melbourne breakfast market, sinking to a 5.2 per cent share, down from 6.1 per cent in the previous survey.
Meanwhile, their audience dropped from 491,000 daily listeners in July to 420,000 in September. Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson are failing to cut through with Melbourne listeners. Credit: Instagram Yet in Sydney, the pair returned to the top of the ratings with a 13.
7 per cent share, raking in the ad dollars and accruing enormous salaries (the duo are reportedly on a combined $200 million 10-year deal ). But the centre cannot hold. The national rollout strategy of the duo’s parent company, ARN, is in crisis, and the program itself is in jeopardy.
Despite both being born in Queensland, the pair are quintessentially Sydney. But nationally networking their show is a failed attempt to go against Australia’s natural order: rampant geographic separatism. Loading There’s a fundamental inability among some Sydneysiders to understand the rest of the country, or indeed to even give it a passing thought.
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