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‘He said don’t try and be Alan Jones’
It’s a little after 6pm and Ben Fordham is in a standoff with his three-year-old daughter, Pearl. It’s her bedtime yet she’s outraged by a sudden lack of stamps in her possession.
The popular Sydney radio personality has won verbal stoushes over the years with prime ministers, powerful CEOs and other high-flyers. He takes a soft, yet direct approach with his beloved toddler. Sixty-seconds is all he needs to talk things through. It’s a skill that’s served him well for decades.
The former sports and political reporter first met Jones as a 15-year-old work experience kid on the Alan Jones Breakfast Show on radio station 2UE.
It was 1992 and he would make coffee and pick up sandwiches for staff while Jones was the station’s golden goose, steadily topping the breakfast show ratings.
“The truth is, the thing that really amazed me was the swearing,” Fordham tells nine.com.au of his early memories at the radio station, referring to the sports department.
“As I ventured around towards the sports department you always heard language and laughter coming out of that room like I’ve never heard of my life. I can remember thinking ‘wow’. So, I gravitated towards the sports department.”
The early years
After a week of work experience, it was suggested Fordham put his hand up for a regular Sunday shift.
Despite being told he was too young, he had the smarts to know they were somewhat desperate. The weekend was fast approaching and there was no-one to fill the shift. Not long after, the job was his. It was his second job, after running a lawn mowing gig with his brother.
“I got $60 every Sunday and my job was to make coffee, answer phones, buy lunches and listen to other radio stations to know that we were crossing more to the scores around the grounds than anyone else,” he said.
Fordham continued his work experience with the sports department at 2UE through his high school years, writing “little bits and pieces” where he could.
In 1994, during his final year of school, he was asked if he could work for two weeks to help cover the Commonwealth Games in Canada from the Sydney office.
He was keen, his parents had other ideas. They had instilled in him and his siblings a strong work ethic. He would stay on to complete his schooling.
The station’s sports boss would offer him a cadetship after he finished his exams. The first story he covered was the students who topped the HSC. Fordham is quick to add, he was not one of them.
“I think I decided early on that I wasn’t going to go do any schooling beyond Year 12. You know because I’ve had a taste of what working life was like having a job,” he said.
“I grew up listening to a lot of radio and watching a lot of TV. I think the thing that stuck out for me from a young age when I used to watch the TV news and listen to the radio, I seem to be studying more than I’m listening to it in that I would have my favourites.”
He names veteran 2UE reporters Robert Kinney and Justin Kelly among his radio standouts. Veteran TV reporter and foreign correspondent Hugh Riminton was another who made a big impression on a young Fordham, particularly his coverage of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.
The young reporter was so taken by Riminton’s reporting he memorised his TV script, unwittingly knowing he would recite it word-for-word back to him in person less than a year later.
The phone call
It was about 1am on Thursday July 31, 1997 when Fordham’s phone rang. He had not long gone to bed, having too many drinks at his work farewell as 2UE’s political reporter in Canberra.
Fordham, now 20, had agreed to the post for 12 months and was celebrating his promise of a return home. The removal trucks were arriving at 9am, yet, the phone call would offer a different turn.
The voice on the phone was former 2UE station boss Greg Burns. He told Fordham to head to the New South Wales snowfields of Thredbo.
Something had happened, but no one knew exactly what.
He finally found a sober reporter. He, Fordham and two others, one a photographer named Mike Bowers, piled into a car.
“So, it’s like it’s one sober guy and three drunk people. All I told them was ‘you just gotta trust me’. There’s emergency services going from everywhere towards Thredbo and that’s all we knew,” Fordham said.
“On the way we learned what had happened. They think it’s a landslide. There could be people trapped.”
Just hours earlier, at 11.35pm, 18 people were killed when 1000 tonnes of earth and debris destroyed the Bimbadeen and Carinya Lodges at Thredbo Alpine Village.
When Fordham and his group arrived outside Thredbo village, a NSW Police roadblock was stopping media from entering. He phoned in live reports back to 2UE explaining what had happened.
The owner of local radio station 2XL had been listening and phoned 2UE for Fordham’s mobile number. He phoned with an extraordinary offer to access the Thredbo site.
He said if Fordham could get past the coppers his wife would pick him up in a red BMW. The offer was immediate.
Fordham walked up to Bowers and laid it all out. He knew not all of them could pass the police roadblock. He told Bowers it was just the two of them, not the others, not even the reporter who drove them. Bowers reluctantly agreed.
“We walked up to the police, and it’s like it’s in the middle of nowhere, and I said ‘we’re gonna go up the hill and get a better reception’. They went okay so we just walked off into the darkness,” Fordham said.
“And then after a while I said I think we should start running… And then out of nowhere these headlights came up and there’s a red BMW.
“The next thing we end up in Thredbo. So, when the sun came up the next morning, we were able to tell the story to everyone about what happened.”
Fordham describes the scene that befell him at Thredbo as though someone had taken a massive chunk out of the side of a mountain like a massive digger.
“It was a full-on story to cover. I remember reaching a point after a couple of days, or certainly what felt like a couple of days, I spoke to my dad that night and I said to him I think I should get home from here,” he said, recalling how senior reporters, including Justin Kelly, had arrived on the scene.
“I was seeing the things they weren’t showing on TV which was frozen people being pulled out.
“And my dad said to me, mate I wouldn’t be leaving because you never know, someone could be alive under there. I had no experience to make a judgement call like that clearly… then my dad was right. They found Stuart Diver under there.”
‘Don’t give false hope’
Fordham said he was sharing a hotel room with Kelly when a local report rang out from the room’s clock radio that a noise had been heard down at the rescue site.
Kelly jumped on his microphone and hit record, thrusting it towards the radio and the voice of local MP Peter Cochran. Kelly phoned through to 2UE and urged to be put live to air.
He broke the news that someone had been found alive amid the debris. It was a risky move, Kelly had no confirmation.
Fordham said a phone call from their then boss, Julie Flynn, and her words stayed with him his career – “you better not be giving out false hope”.
“She was like it could be a dog, it could be a bird, it could be anything. So, the run down to the site from our hotel room was the worst of our lives because Justin’s just gone on hearsay,” he said.
“He was right. It was right. But it was one of those lessons.”
Fordham and Kelly’s reporting would win them a prestigious Walkley Award, making Fordham the youngest winner in the award’s history.
His reporting would also see him meet with Riminton where he did recite his script back to him. Much to, Fordham says, Riminton’s surprise.
Fordham would gain a better understanding of the power of the image when Riminton marked footage of a fridge flattened to a pancake in rubble.
“It was a big thing to cover it an early age. And it was a bit of a theme of my career that I have had a habit of being in the right places.”
Pop the question
He includes meeting his wife as one of these instances. He had long admired the work of a reporter named Jodi Speers. He had told Burns of her talents as a police reporter.
Burns had asked if he had met Speers in person. Fordham had asked why.
It would six months later when Fordham met Speers at Burns’ 40thbirthday that he finally understood the question. Fordham and the accomplished reporter and Seven News presenter began dating almost immediately.
By 1999, Fordham had left radio and was working for Channel Nine as a lead reporter for A Current Affair, senior reporter for 9News and a reporter for 60 Minutes. He spent nine months at Sky News learning the TV ropes.
In 2010, after years together, Speers was offered a job in Canberra as a political correspondent. Understanding the importance to her career, Fordham urged her to take the role.
“I saw her on TV and I was like ‘Oh my god what have I done? I’ve told you to go to another city. This is ridiculous I need to pop the question immediately,” he said.
With Speers in Canberra, Fordham’s luck for being in the right place again came into play.
Darren Wick, his news boss at Nine approached him and offered him a job filling in for veteran Nine political editor Laurie Oakes in Canberra. He ran with it.
He and Speers were soon running through the halls of Parliament House chasing after Julia Gillard and then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd during what would become one of the most tumultuous times in Australia’s modern-day political history.
“We’ve kind of always had a bit of a bond of news and politics. At least I was smart enough to chase her to Canberra,” he said.
The big decision
After returning from Canberra a second time, Fordham took up a regular role with Nine’s Today show while he was also working as the host of Drive for 2GB. He spent four years alongside Karl Stefanovic, Lisa Wilkinson, Georgie Gardner and Richard Wilkins, ultimately choosing a return to radio.
Fordham spent almost a decade behind the microphone as 2GB’s Drive host where he regularly reported on breaking news and shared listeners’ stories of happiness and loss. As has happened many times in his life, a single phone call would change everything.
“I just got a phone call and I was just asked whether or not hypothetically speaking if I’d be prepared to change shifts into breakfast,” he said.
“They just explain to me that there was a health issue involving Alan and that’s how it was gonna be making an announcement and that they needed to know whether or not I would be in to do the shift and I said no.”
Fordham believes he said no to Jones’ job six times before eventually accepting it.
“I’d always said if anyone ever suggested I’ll take over from Alan Jones I always had a standard response which was I would never be that stupid.”
“But then I kinda had that feeling creeping in … it sounds like this is one of these moments where if you don’t, you know where you need to step up.”
Fordham said his bosses at 2GB want him to bring the style he had with Drive to the morning show – so he expected to still hear breaking news as well as a few “whispers and rumours”.
He said he’s also planning to adopt “an open-door policy” for all guests – whether you’re an everyday listener, or the Prime Minister – the call line will be open to all.
Fordham said he didn’t make a decision about the role without Speers weighing in. He said her response was a bit like his response to her Canberra role, that he had to take the opportunity.
Changing of the guard
Alan Jones walks through the rooms of his luxurious country estate in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales pointing out photographs to Fordham of his great niece and nephews riding horses. He’s beaming with pride.
“He’s got some phenomenal love for his great nephews and niece,” Fordham said of Jones.
The pair shared a meal together, along with the Jones family, last week at Elizabeth Farm in the Southern Highlands. Fordham loses $50 to a dinner game card trick with Jones’ niece.
It’s almost 30 years since Fordham was that teenage work experience kid, yet he happily agreed to travel to the estate and sits in on one of Jones’ final shows of his career.
“The best advice he gave me, he said don’t try and be Alan Jones, be yourself,” Fordham said.
Source: 9News
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