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The Chaser’s Craig Reucassel will take over Breakfast, James Valentine will return to Afternoons, and Indira Naidoo will hand over the reins of the Evening show to her producer Renee Krosch as ABC Radio Sydney’s weekdays line-up undergoes a major shake-up in 2024.
The moves, revealed on air on Wednesday morning, come two weeks after high-profile Afternoons host Josh Szeps announced he was leaving the ABC at the end of the year to concentrate on his subscriber-based podcast business. And that has triggered a major reshuffle of the deck.
Craig Reucassel will take the reins of Breakfast from January 2024.Credit: James Brickwood
Reucassel, who has produced three seasons of War on Waste for ABC-TV since 2017, last held down a regular radio job almost 20 years ago, when he co-hosted Triple J’s drive show Today Today with fellow Chaser member Chris Taylor.
More recently, he spent a week filling in for Richard Glover in Drive, an experience he describes as “insanely busy”.
“You look at so many screens, press so many buttons, you have about three seconds to change from one interview to the next,” Reucassel says. “I enjoyed it, it was really stimulating, but when you get to the end of a three-hour show you feel like you’ve run a marathon.”
From January next year, Reucassel will be running a couple of hundred such marathons a year.
“There is some trepidation,” he admits. “But what I love about radio is you have the capacity to just talk and explore so many different topics, from local to national, global, whatever. Every day, it’s going to be finding out new things, and I think that sounds quite fun.”
Though he made his mark as a satirist, Reucassel says any comedy on his show will only be incidental.
“I don’t think people should turn on expecting to hear a sketch show. I think the humour will be whatever comes naturally to it. It’s going to be a local news show covering what’s going on in Sydney, what’s going on in people’s neighbourhoods, and what’s going on in national politics and otherwise.”
What he’s not looking forward to is the early start, which will, he says, “probably have a three in front of it”. But he’s already in training.
“The last week, I’ve been getting up about six. I’m slowly going to push that back and back. I’m going to try and cycle in as much as I can. I think it’s quite a good way to just wake up, to be honest.”
Reucassel is good friends with Robbie Buck, who co-hosted Breakfast with Wendy Harmer before Valentine moved into the slot in early 2022. He hadn’t revealed the news to him, or anyone else, for fear it would leak, but he is seeing Buck this week. “And I hope his advice isn’t, ‘Craig, I wouldn’t do this’.”
Valentine at least knows what he’s in for with Afternoons, a show he hosted for 22 years before moving to Breakfast.
When Valentine’s imminent move from Afternoons to Breakfast was announced in October 2021, he had just recorded a 12.7 per cent share of the audience. The breakfast team of Wendy Harmer and Robbie Buck were at 15.7 per cent, and the ABC’s overall share was 13 per cent.
In the most recent survey, Szeps’s Afternoon show held a 5.3 per cent share of the Sydney radio audience, Breakfast was at 8.4 per cent, and the station’s share overall was 7 per cent.
James Valentine is moving back into the Afternoons slotCredit: James Alcock
Those 2021 results were skewed by the impact of COVID on talk radio, but station management will nonetheless be hoping audiences embrace Valentine’s return to his old stomping ground, and the other changes across the day.
“People have missed his laconic sense of humour in the afternoon hours,” Steve Ahern, manager of ABC Radio Sydney, says of Valentine. “The audience for his style of afternoon radio is strong.”
Indira Naidoo will remain with the ABC, as host of the Compass TV program, a role that, the ABC claimed in a statement, “will include some international travel and longer-format interviews. She will also be working on a new book that will involve some overseas travel”.
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