After 35 years and a million opinions, the battler’s friend signs off
Top Australian radio host and commentator Alan Jones has concluded his final breakfast program and retired from the airwaves after 35 years.
Broadcaster Alan Jones during his final breakfast show for 2GB from his home at Fitzroy Falls in the NSW Southern Highlands. (Photo: AAP Image/Dean Lewins)
Jones, 79, called time on his 2GB radio slot at 9:00am on Friday and played his decades-old theme song ‘Gloria’, by the late US singer Laura Branigan.
Broadcasting from his Fitzroy Falls home in the NSW Southern Highlands, Jones dedicated his final program to his “loyal, supportive and sometimes critical” army of listeners.
Jones also spoke with NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller, who thanked him for his support of his officers and public safety, as well as Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
The former Wallabies coach announced this month he was retiring on the advice of his doctors after decades of 2am-3am morning starts to prepare for his show.
“It’s an extraordinary career by any estimation and beyond that, there’s a broader contribution to public life on so many issues,” Morrison said.
“Enjoy a bit of time off – I’m glad you’re taking the medical experts’ advice, I’ll be doing that later this morning and later again today at the National Cabinet.”
NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro phoned in to tell Jones his support for the regions would not be forgotten and he was “a champion for Team Australia”.
“What keeps me up at night is that there are people falling through the cracks and if it wasn’t for you, Alan, they would never be identified,” Barilaro said.
Others to call into the program on Friday included ex-Socceroo Mark Bosnich, ex-Australia cricket star Matthew Hayden and ex-Canberra apparatchik and Jones’s Sky News TV co-host Peta Credlin, who described the broadcaster as “the ombudsman of life”.
A 2GB audio reel of Jones’ most significant guests – including Australian prime ministers over the past 35 years, Donald Trump, Jane Fonda and Lionel Ritchie – and radio moments was also played.
In his many years on radio, Jones became the self-appointed and sometimes outrageously dogmatic voice of the battler, feared and courted by politicians.
Jones’s radio career began at 2UE in 1985 and moved to 2GB in 2001, where he delivered a record 226 wins in rating surveys and drove the station to No.1 in the Sydney market.
He is expected to continue his roles as a columnist for News Corp Australia’s newspapers and on an evening TV show on Sky News, and will be replaced in the 2GB breakfast slot by Ben Fordham, currently on the radio station’s afternoon slot.
-AAP