Fashionably late

Larry Schwartz taps into the wonderful world of the late-night radio community.
IF IT’S close to midnight, chances are Trish, of Essendon, is getting ready to tune into 3AW’s midnight-to-dawn Overnighters program.
She has a problem with her eyesight. So she finds it difficult to concentrate on TV and is fond of host Keith McGowan. “Sometimes I’ll go to bed early and I’ll set my alarm to quarter to 12 to listen to him,” says Trish, 57, a pensioner who worked as a nurse until a decade ago.
If it’s 1am, chances are 85-year-old “Harmonica” Mavis is propping herself up in bed with a pillow preparing to ring McGowan in a weekly call to recite a poem, or play the small instrument she learned as a child in northern Tasmania.
She was 12 when she borrowed her brother’s harmonica – he declined to show her how – and “accrued my own style”. She once played in the Coburg City Harmonica Band. “I haven’t got the breath to play a double reed,” she says. “So I just play a small tin-hole now.”
Trish and Mavis are part of a loose community of night owls who turn to radio when most of us are asleep. “People on the road, people working late or rising early, fishermen, shift workers and of course insomniacs,” as Trevor Chappell, host of the ABC national Overnights program has characterised the range of his listeners in a similar slot.
There is a camaraderie. Some meet each other’s voices on air and get to know each other at Christmas and other functions, travel to meet each other interstate or exchange letters or emails. Queenie, of Bayswater, as she is known on air, is sometimes recognised by her distinctive voice. “A lot of people around here, I don’t know them, but they say, ‘Mmm. You wouldn’t be Queenie on 3AW?’ I say, ‘One and the same.”‘
Harmonica Mavis hasn’t slept through the night in the 30 years since her school caretaker husband, Albie, died in her arms in the early hours after a massive heart attack. She has three sons, seven grandchildren, a great-granddaughter – and a favourite host. “Well, to me he is a lifesaver,” she says of McGowan, who this year celebrated his 50th year in radio. “I have my family. But the night hours are when I can’t sleep and I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have him.”
She is among 1.7 million Australians who listen to radio an average 312 hours each week between midnight and dawn, a survey has shown. The Nielsen Media Research survey on commercial radio in Australia, found that 30 per cent of overnight listeners (516,000) were 55 or older. The numbers were increasing in this and other age groups, with the next highest group (447,000) aged 40 to 54.
If it’s past 2am, chances are former truck driver Mark Dorman is listening to Trevor Chappell, who has been ABC national overnight host for the past seven years. “I find him amusing, entertaining and informative,” says Dorman, who first heard the Overnights program somewhere in the middle of the Nullarbor on a 48-hour trip, transporting a semi-trailer of electrical cables from Melbourne to Perth. “When I was driving a truck, his programs would make such a long night short,” says the 45-year-old who was injured carrying a heavy load.
Now he listens online while simulating flights on a computer in his loungeroom in Melbourne and googles answers for questions by other listeners. He has been researching information for a blind Brisbane woman in her 80s on her great-great-great-grandfather who came to Australia in the early 1800s. “I never miss it now,” he says. “My body clock wakes me up telling me Trevor is on.”
The survey recorded a 5 per cent increase in a year in the number of people aged 40 to 54 listening to commercial radio between midnight and dawn, and 8 per cent aged 55 and over.
“People call it the graveyard shift,” Chappell says. “With the changing nature of radio, there are many people out there listening that never did before.”
MCGOWAN, just as dismissive of the graveyard tag, says Melbourne is a 24-hour city and the midnight-to-dawn is “very much an alive shift”. “The reason it’s alive is anyone who’s listening to you at that time, they’re listening. They haven’t got kids tugging on them. They’re not cooking meals. They’re not ironing. They’re not rushing to get a husband (off to work) or kids off to school. They are just possibly in the dark, or with a little light on, listening to you and it’s very personal radio.”
So personal indeed that several listeners specifically mentioned their delight at hearing about his wife, Angela. They married more than a year ago and he occasionally talks to her on air. “The interest in my marriage is quite extraordinary,” McGowan says. “Angela is a bit over 50 and I’m a bit over 60 and it showed lonely people out there that somebody our age could find a partner and (have) a life revitalised. I was a lonely man; divorced.”
McGowan started out as office boy at 3UZ when he was 14.
He regards it as an advantage to broadcast mostly to Melbourne. “Sydney’s 2UE goes out to three or four states in Australia,” he says. “Sixty or 70 radio stations. That sounds great. But if you’ve got an audience in Brisbane, they’re not really going to be interested in my (tram) ride down Bourke Street, getting off at Elizabeth Street, walking across to whatever.”
He insists he doesn’t take competitors lightly. “One of the music channels, I think Fox FM, usually run second to us.”
And Trevor Chappell? “Well, who’s Trevor Chappell?” McGowan wonders.
Trevor Chappell declines to comment on other programs. “I dip in and listen to Keith every now and again because it’s important to know what other people are doing,” Chappell says. “I could feel it’s a slightly older audience. But at the same time, people who range from 18 to 92 phone in and join us. People ring in on satellite phones who are out prawn trawling. Miners in WA. Truck drivers from everywhere, through to older listeners in nursing homes.”
He was raised in West Australia and worked on mines and wheat bins, as a builder’s labourer and pulled beer in a pub in Broome. Now 46, he has been a youth worker and an actor. Chappell is on air, broadcasting around Australia, from 2am, with overnight producer Michael Pavlich nearby; McGowan, who broadcasts mostly to Melbourne, is alone in the studio from midnight. Both go off air at 5.30am.
Chappell says the program is a bit lighter than during the day. There is some talkback and reminiscence. But there are also interviews and he says the show was first to feature Major Michael Mori, the US officer appointed defence lawyer for David Hicks.
“There are people who can’t sleep and there are people who set their alarms for two o’clock to make sure that they’re here. People have to muffle their laughter so they don’t wake their partners or wear headphones. They feel they are part of the program even if they don’t ring in and participate. That’s what encourages me most. It’s like if you go to a dinner party, there are people having a conversation. You can sit on the outside and enjoy it and if you want to chip something in, you can.”
He’s been surprised by the intensity of the audience response. “I don’t think you realise the effect that you have,” he says. Listeners send him paintings, old books, knick-knacks. “You develop a huge relationship that unless you work in the field you don’t understand exists,” he says.
McGowan regards a poem recited by Harmonica Mavis as the highlight of a CD of recitals he released. She is among several to have become stars of the long and lonely hours on 3AW. Retired truck driver Harry Coxon, who has since died, would place the receiver of his phone on the yellowish vinyl seat of a stool in his Yarraville loungeroom and play electric organ and sing an old Irish song.
June, of North Melbourne, still remembered by many, has also “gone to God”, as one put it. “You’ve been fagging again,” McGowan told her at 3.26am when I once sat in on his program. “It’s none of your business,” June shot back.
McGowan’s abrasive style is not to everyone’s liking. “To some people I am the biggest mongrel on radio,” he says, “and to others I am a lovely gentle man. I must be somewhere in between.”
“He knows when to cut people off and when to shut them up,” says Norma Anderson, 83, who ran the kiosk at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for 18 years to 1992. “I admire that.”
She laments the loss of good friends in recent years including Margaret Wales-King murdered by her son, Matthew, with her husband Paul. She enjoys the “meaningful” classical music – he plays some contemporary music including recently Bruce Springsteen’s live album in Dublin – and comedians. “Keith doesn’t realise it because I haven’t said it,” she says. “But he has kept me going when I’m feeling very down.”
Queenie, of Bayswater – a war widow who asks that we don’t mention her age – has been listening to Philip Brady and Bruce Mansfield on 3AW’s Nightline for many years and keeps the radio on for McGowan later “if I’m having a bad night”.
“I don’t often have nights like that,” she says. “But I’ll often ring in.”
Queenie says some listeners are lonely or depressed and have “somebody to talk to during the night”. “One night, a fellow rang in and he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for 35 minutes here and I was just about to hang up.’ I rang in and I said, ‘I hate your show and I’ve been waiting for 16 years on the phone.’ They (Brady and Mansfield) got a big laugh out of that.”
She’ll happily wait her turn. “I’ve got a phone near my bed and it doesn’t matter. I can wait. I just take the phone away from my ear, if they’ve got too many ads on, and if it’s funeral ads, I turn them off altogether. People don’t want to listen to them when they’re lying in bed sick, do they?”
Trish, from Essendon, 57, likes to tease McGowan. They talk about their respective footy teams – the Bombers and Saints. She’ll send him “love letters” from her tortoiseshell cat, Missey. They’re poorly spelt, “in cat language,” she says.
She’s come to know some of the callers personally through Christmas parties and other functions he has held and met one from interstate while on holiday with her husband, Charles. “People say he (McGowan) can be nasty,” Trish says. “Other people say he’s a very gentle man. I’ve always found him to be the latter.
“Charlie’s often on the internet at night,” she says. “We haven’t got broadband. He has to get off when I want to ring up. Then he gets back on again. I ring in every Sunday night-Monday morning because we discuss the football.”
She switches off before dawn. “The radio goes off when Charlie comes to bed. He can’t sleep with it on. I’ve got some headphones I’ll put on sometimes if I’m interested. But if we’ve got an appointment the next day, I’ll turn it off and go to sleep.”

The Age 06-Sep-2007