Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O: The real reason the KIIS FM breakfast show is over after 25 years on radio

If you live in Sydney, you couldn’t ever get away from Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “Jackie O” Henderson.

No matter how distasteful you found their radio show, it was ubiquitous. Their faces were staring down at you from the back of buses and from billboards, while every third Uber driver was dialled into their station.

For 25 years, they were a formidable partnership. At the height of their power, prime ministers and premiers kissed their ring, magazines put them on covers and they were recruited to front TV shows.

Audiences tuned in, laughing along at the duo’s many stunts and scandals, often instigated by Sandilands but enabled by Henderson. In the Sydney radio market, they reigned on FM and dragooned 12.7 per cent of all of its radio listenership.

A divisive presence, it was as if Sydney was cleaved down into two parts – those who loved Sandilands and Henderson’s no-limits, brazen style of broadcasting, and those who couldn’t stand the pair and were nonplussed about their popularity.

There was no middle ground. You either thought their gold and bedazzled microphones were boss or you thought they were gauche.

Their brashness was never without consequences.

While some celebrities happily (or begrudgingly) bantered with them, others also steered clear.

It was well-known within the industry that many celebrities’ agents and publicists wouldn’t let their clients anywhere near the show – you never know when you’re going to be asked for your pubic hair, as Robbie Williams had been, and obligingly supplied.

As of this morning, the Kyle and Jackie O Show as we know it is over. Finished. Kaput. Dead.

ARN, the parent company which owns the KIIS FM network, released a statement to the ASX last night (it’s noteworthy that this was a considered market-shifting development) that Henderson had told she can no longer work with Sandilands and that Sandilands has been given 14 days to remedy his “act of serious misconduct”.

The show was taken off immediately, and this morning, presenter Kent “Smallzy” Smalls filled in in the high-profile breakfast timeslot.

The “act of serious misconduct” referred to a segment during the February 20 broadcast in which Sandilands berated Henderson for being “off with the fairies” because of her interest in astrology. She has been off-air since.

In past times, this might’ve been a semi-light-hearted exchange, almost a mock intervention. It’s why more than a few people thought, at first, it was a publicity-generating stunt.

But it evolved into something much uglier. If you listen to the back-and-forth between the two, it sounds like a domestic – he was on the attack, she was trying to defend herself but without saying what she really wanted to say. Newsreader Brooklyn Ross was occasionally interjecting trying to defuse the situation, like an adult kid of soon-to-be divorced parents who just wanted the fighting to stop.

While the focus has been the astrology-based catalyst – she had tried to say something about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s star chart and he was having none of it – the more interesting part is actually what Henderson didn’t fully say.

Sandilands had accused her of having a poor work ethic that had been noticed by everyone else in the building, and that it was impacting the show. Witness this exchange:

Henderson: “You make out, like you sit there like you’re perfect, there are many things you don’t do and I would never bring them up and I would never bring them up.

Sandilands: “What do you mean that I don’t do? Feel free, this is an open forum.”

Henderson: “I don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat.”

Sandilands: “Because there’s nothing. What do you have a problem with?”

Henderson: “I don’t have a problem but if I brought up the things that people say…”

Sandilands: “People say in the building about the ins and outs of how the show is produced?”

Henderson: “No, not that.”

Sandilands: “What are you talking about? Personal insults? I don’t care about those things”.

Henderson: “It’s just around, you know, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to do that.”

Sandilands: “Because there is no example.”

Henderson: “There is, actually.”

Sandilands: “Well, feel free to spit it out. I’m being honest. I’m not tippy-toeing through this bulls..t for another couple of weeks.”

Henderson: “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Sandilands: “I’m not doing it for fun.”

Henderson: “I just don’t understand why you did.”

Sandilands: “Because it’s affecting the whole sound of the program.”

Henderson: “And you don’t think the things you do affect us? You don’t think there are times when that affects us?”

That’s the rub there. The things that Sandilands have done that “affect” the rest of the program.

Henderson doesn’t say what she’s referring to, and it’s an all-too-familiar fight dynamic where one person is holding back on firing all the ammunition they have because they know there’s no coming back from it.

She may very well have been thinking about internal issues the listening public is not privy too, but for everyone else outside of ARN who was listening, there was only one way to read between the lines.

Sandilands has been a controversy magnet for almost his entire career. His many breaches of decency – not just broadcast standards but human standards – are well known.

It’s a laundry list of incidents, including the time he called a journalist a “fat slag” and that he was going to “hunt her down” because she had written an article which mined negative social media reactions to Sandilands’ TV show.

Or when he said Magda Szubanski, whose father was in the Polish Resistance movement during World War II, should be placed in a concentration camp to lose weight.

There was the incident when the show attached a 14-year-old child to a lie detector machine to interrogate her on her sex life, and it emerged she had been raped when she was 12.

And how about when he was watching the Tokyo Paralympics was “horrific” and disparaged disabled athletes.

We all know the scandal sheet backwards by now, and while the program has been fined and reprimanded and advertisers have pulled out (albeit they often just moved their ad spend elsewhere on the network, and sometimes only temporarily), they’ve always managed to get away with it.

There have been more censors employed, sensitivity training and the rest, but the Kyle and Jackie O Show was always the Kyle and Jackie O Show.

Maybe Henderson was referring to all the public responses after Sandilands’ many, many misdeeds, but on February 20, just as before, she never harangued him publicly.

Perhaps she was an advocate for a different style behind the scenes, and if she was, that story hasn’t ever really leaked. They were always packaged as being, more or less, in lock-step with each other.

So, it is notable that the “act of serious misconduct” seems to be more an HR nightmare about feuding co-workers than any of the previous scandals where Sandilands went after external people.

Maybe it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

That load has been heavy for a while now, and it’s not churlish to think that if this had happened five years ago, if it would’ve been smoothed over.

When an influential figure goes down, it’s always because their power has been on the wane. There’s always more context than they finally “went too far”.

Sandilands, who by many accounts is supposed to be a nice, affable and personable man off-air, seems to have suffered the same fate as so many powerful men, who’s misdeeds finally catch up to them when they are no longer the all-powerful mogul they once were .

Sandilands and Henderson were also vulnerable, and ironically, it was that unprecedented lucrative $200 million contract in 2023 that put them in that position.

The money was huge, and so were the deliverables. It was hinged on successful expansions into other metro markets, but they couldn’t even nail Melbourne.

Melbourne just never warmed to them and KIIS is now eighth-placed in the breakfast slot, lower than under its previous presenters who were sacked to make way for Sandilands and Henderson.

It was an embarrassing hit to ARN’s ad revenues, which resulted in mass redundancies across the network, while they couldn’t catch a break in the PR cycle.

And all the while, Sandilands and Henderson were still cashing those enormous pay cheques.

Don’t kid yourself, if the Melbourne expansion had worked, and had been followed by their planned entry into the Brisbane market before the rest of the country, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.

Maybe Henderson had finally had enough, but if it had been in everyone’s commercial interests to work it out, ARN would’ve moved heaven and earth to make it happen.

This is not an ethical reckoning, a moment of just desserts for a controversial personality who finally found the ceiling on his on-air behaviour. The rusted-on fans, that 12.7 per cent of radio listeners in Sydney who revelled in the outrageous stunts, don’t care how many times the show breached the ACMA code.

This all blew up because it was no longer worth keeping Sandilands and Henderson on air together.