Also looks like Saturday Night Live is going to come from 4BC now hosted by Brent James in the NRL off-season.
Saturday Night Live with Brent James is four hours of variety and entertainment. Music from the 60’s to today; special guests and music features. SNL is focussed on light Saturday entertainment with the emphasis on music.
Brent James has been compiling and producing music specials in Australia for 25+years for various major record labels; in addition to being Music Director for 4BC and its leading Breakfast Show with Laurel, Gary and Mark, he hosts his own national program Saturday Night Live.
Contract probably finally expired? SJ was a hangover leftover from the previous nine radio failed formats and they had to wait it out until they could part ways to save the coin.
Sam McClure is now on holidays after co-hosting Sportsday Victoria on Monday and Tuesday this week, and it looks like he won’t be back on air until the new Wide World of Sports radio show debuts on 3AW on November 3.
In the meantime, the likes of Shane McInnes, Bruce Eva and Matt Granland will host Sportsday until the end of October.
So, he is using the 2GB phone number 131 873, but the SMS number ends in 882 which I would think is the 4BC SMS number. The email address is saturdaynightlive@2gb.com and when he mentions the websites it’s 2gb.com and 4bc.com.au (why 2GB doesn’t have .au at the end of their domain I don’t know, always found that odd). He’s saying “2GB, 4BC and on network stations across New South Wales and Queensland”.
I did notice in the 1st hour that all of the callers that identified their location were from Brisbane and surrounds, there was only 1 caller where the location wasn’t mentioned either by the caller or Brent.
The music’s been pretty good and also good to hear Brent doing a show on the radio again.
Also one thing to note (and I don’t normally listen to 4BC so I don’t know what’s happened in previous years but I think this is new), it seems like even though Daylight Saving starts tomorrow, 4BC have decided that their local shows won’t be shifting an hour forward and they’ll just drop the 1st hour of Ray Hadley and John Stanley’s shows instead.
I guess with the ratings that Laurel, Gary & Mark have brought in that it would probably be wasteful to have them start their live show at 4:30am and finish up by 8am.
Looks like Weekdays will look like this:
3:00am-4:30am - Wake Up Australia (live from Sydney)
4:30am-5:30am - Best of Laurel, Gary & Mark (pre-recorded)
5:30am-9:00am - Laurel, Gary & Mark (live from Brisbane)
9:00am-11:00am - Ray Hadley (live from Sydney, but first hour not broadcast)
11:00am-12:00pm - Bill McDonald (live from Brisbane)
12:00pm-3:00pm - Sofie Formica (live from Brisbane)
3:00pm-6:00pm - Neil Breen (live from Brisbane)
6:00pm-7:00pm - Wide World of Sports - (live from Brisbane [I assume? website says it’s a Queensland edition of the show])
7:00pm-8:00pm - Money News (delayed from Sydney)
8:00pm-11:00pm - John Stanley (live from Sydney, but first hour not broadcast)
11:00pm-3:00am - Overnight (live from Sydney)
From memory it has changed over the past couple of years.
The 2020/2021 summer, they brought the local schedule forward an hour in most cases. Meaning Breakfast began at 4.30am, Ray Hadley at 8am etc…etc… however had Bill McDonald and Olympia Kwitowski do a 2pm local hour to cover the finish of then Deb Knight afternoons until Drive at 3pm.
In the 2021/2022 summer, they started doing Best Of’s at 4.30am each day (including 5am on weekends) to fill the overnight stop gap. However at 11am they had Sofie Formica start, essentially making Afternoons a 4 hour program until 3pm.
Would be great if 9 Radio had a national news hour at say 11pm each day. Maybe with a Natalie Peters type and someone from the Melbourne newsroom. And just whip through all the stories of the day using 9 news reports from across the day.
Or even half an hour from 10:30. Call it 9 radio late news.
Really feel we lack that kind of product on Australian talk radio.
6PR really screwed things up after Basil’s departure.
Millsy should never have been moved from Breakfast, Gareth was decent on Mornings and Simon Beaumont was perfect for Afternoons. Moving Simon to weekends was such a slap in the face in my opinion.
It was obvious none of this would work but they knew better. Just admit this failed, restore Millsy and Simon to where they belong and get someone new for Mornings.
Don’t forget Chris Ilsley’s highly successful evening shift, by far the best of the station, was also cut and replaced by a crony of the then new Nine management.
I had forgotten about Chris but yes the decision to send him packing made even less sense than the other changes. I can’t understand the thought process at all.
Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes but history suggests they won’t.