radio still rules

Happy Anniversary to 3AW -- which went to air for the first time 75 years ago today.

As I said on Remember When? on Sunday night… I wonder where Bruce Mansfield worked BEFORE AW started.

Seventy-five years, and this week, this station, this program were again voted by you as Number One in Melbourne.

It got me thinking about radio about forty years ago. I was living in New York. And people once again were writing the obituary of radio. Television would surely kill it off, the same way movies hadn’t. Then in the Sixties came HBO – what we call pay television and Foxtel. In the U.S. it was Home Box office. It would kill radio. It didn’t and hasn’t.  And there was a catchy jingle that said something like ‘Who listens to radio? Only 160 million people. That’s all.’ Or some such figure. Back then I had no idea how much of my life would be devoted to and consumed by radio.

I was a newspaperman. A Foreign Correspondent. I started doing news reports from America for Macquarie National News. It was 1969 and I covered Apollo 11’s launch from Cape Canaveral live. In those days we broadcast to more than fifty stations across Australia. Then came daily with Brian White on 2GB – and he become boss of 3AW in LaTrobe Street years later when I was doing mornings there.

With Paul Barber as my producer and Darren James as a young soundman we did the first ever live radio broadcast from Beijing. Broadcast from Ethiopia, Hong Kong, London, New York, Washington, the Sudan, Los Angeles, covered the Chicago convention. And along the way interviewed everybody from Sophia Loren to Harrison Ford, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Teddy Kennedy, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and every Australian Prime Minister along the way. One political interview I turned down was with a bloke called George Bush Senior because I thought he wasn’t going anywhere.

I went to jail trying to protect kids, got a couple of laws changed including the media blackout before elections and a 300-year-old rape in marriage law. And got fired a lot. But always came home. To 3AW. Because, as John Howard would say, it is a very broad church.

Different program hosts have different opinions. And we’re not above criticising each other. The biggest compliment anybody can pay 3AW is that it is YOUR radio station. In times of crisis – like Ash Wednesday and the recent power blackouts – people know that they’ll be kept up to date with good news and bad right here.

And we’ll try to help. One of my fondest memories is when a woman with a problem phoned the Hinch program for help. It was a complex issue. She was told to call the Ombudsman. Her reply: ‘I did that. They told me to call you’. Happy Birthday AW.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007