Peter Saxon finds out just how close he came to quitting 3AW and joining MTR

While he gets his fair share of press in Melbourne, he achieves nowhere near the national notoriety ‘enjoyed’ by his Sydney counterparts such as Alan Jones and Ray Hadley. Yet, after 25, “or is it 26 years?” the 61 year old Neil Mitchell is every bit as much the King of Melbourne Morning Radio as John Laws ever was in Sydney, with an audience share roughly on par with Ray Hadley’s.

But there’s a difference between the two cities and their brand of talk, “Melbourne in my mind has a journalistic history in talk radio,” says Mitchell, who spent 16 years with The Age and at one point was its Editor. By contrast, the big rating Sydney talk hosts describe themselves as entertainers.

To be on air by 9am, Mitchell wakes at four, “Don’t remind me,” he says. “I get up and check my emails, have a quick look at the papers online, have a shower, come into work.” All up he works 50 – 60 hours a week.

radioinfo: How has social media impacted your workload and your show?

Mitchell: I was one of the first to set up a facebook page years ago as an experiment, but I let it has lapse. I find twitter useful. I get a lot of stories out of it. People sending me little tips. I know you are not supposed to, but I use it promotionally to say I have got X, Y and Z on today. It is bitter and nasty and threatening at times, but that is what twitter is, so I make allowances for that.

Having a website is certainly time consuming but we are finding it adds an extra dimension – the different things you can do with it. People are  regularly sending us photographs and videos. It is a rare week when people won’t send us half a dozen photographs of things they consider newsworthy like there was one of a car crash the other day – car in flames and things like  idiots driving along with their feet out the window of the car and that sort of thing.

I am trying to develop that and I will formalise that in the next few weeks, we are just putting the mechanisms in place. I really want to encourage that because I think it adds a whole new dimension to radio.

Even today we had this case of this bloke being bashed by NSW police at the Mardi Gras. Bung that online- talk about it – get some reactions and then we end up getting swamped by other things. That’s the sort of thing people will have a look at and ring in and react to what they see on the website

radioinfo: When you’re not working, how do you unwind?

Mitchell: I cook. I exercise a bit. I read a bit. I’ve been in journalism for over 40 years and I don’t think I have ever had a hobby.

radioinfo: Do you have a signature dish?

Mitchell: I don’t think I’ve got one. I am not that fancy. I just like cooking. I cook a lot of fish, some reasonable pastas and I have been getting into slow cooked meat recently. There is a beautiful lamb you can cook with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. You cook it for about 6 hours and it is beautiful…with a lot of garlic.

I don’t cook anything that is good for me.

radioinfo: Do you at least get out of the city?

Mitchell: I have got a little place at the beach which I have had for many years and I tend to escape down there a bit. And, believe it or not, I enjoy mowing paddocks. It is a very ordered thing to do. You start off and there is a messy paddock and you finish an hour or so later, and it all looks neat and organised. Not like my work life. You get a result, where as radio is not that structured or organised, that is the beauty of it.

radioinfo: A few years ago, you were being courted by MTR, which was 2GB’s tilt at setting up shop against your station in your city. How close did you come to jumping ship?

Mitchell: I thought seriously about it because they offered me ridiculous money, and although money is not my main motivator, it was hard to knock back. It was a very, very generous offer and they behaved impeccably in the way they dealt with me. 3AW management didn’t help their cause when I told them about the offer, they told me, “Well, fuck off then.”

radioinfo: Well, why didn’t you then?

Mitchell: That’s a really interesting question. I think that part of the problem was that I didn’t think that MTR would work. That sounds smart arse now, but I really didn’t think it would I work. I didn’t think they had the right concept for it and I did feel – I said this on air at the time – I felt a sense of loyalty to the audience… which is a strange thing. I couldn’t quite articulate it.

I certainly didn’t feel any loyalty to management, but I felt that I would almost be dudding  the audience if I did it. Which is putting tickets on myself, I suppose because within a week, they would’ve got somebody else.

But seriously, one reason was loyalty to the audience and the second was I am not inherently a risk taker. And I didn’t think that MTR was a good idea the way they were doing it.

radioinfo: If you had gone, would it have made enough difference for them to succeed?

Mitchell: I think it would have been different if I had gone there as I was supposed to have some role in programming as well. But some of the programming decisions they made when they went to air surprised me. I wouldn’t have been part of that.

radioinfo: They obviously felt that you could take your 3AW audience with you over to them in the way that Alan Jones and John Laws have done in the past. Were you tempted to test the water and see if you could do it too?

Mitchell: I was tempted. In the end, I didn’t believe I could. I thought it through and I thought if I do go… what was I rating then about 16 or 17… I wouldn’t have thought that I could take 10 points with me.

If I had gone I was aiming for something like six or seven in a year or so. AW is so rusted on it has been here for so long. Also it is such a different style in this town. I don’t think that anybody can really transport audience like that. Ross Stevenson might be a chance, but it depends who they put in against him.

But I don’t think that the audience would transport as easily, or as readily for that matter, in Melbourne as it does in Sydney.

radioinfo: Ultimately, why do you think that MTR got such little traction and barely laid a glove on 3AW?

Mitchell: I think it focused our minds a little, which is a good thing, and we probably lifted our game and we did a pretty good job and that helped.

As I said, there were some program decisions that baffled me a bit. I thought that the particular structure of breakfast was a bit unusual. I thought that long segments with guests like Sam Newman, Jason Akermanis and Andrew Bolt and things like that – that is not my idea of breakfast. I think that Melbourne doesn’t want to be told, “you are going to get right wing radio.” I mean you might get right wing radio but for these sorts of people to label it in that way, it is a bit blokesy, a bit aggressive. I didn’t hear a lot of it in the end, but what I did hear was a bit sort of … well… it wasn’t Melbourne. It wasn’t Melbourne.

In part two, Neil Mitchell discusses how he sees the difference between talk in Sydney and Melbourne and the influence that presenters have over their audience. He also tells of his public disagreements with management and colleagues and why he still refuses to do live reads.

Peter Saxon