Steve Price slams "buffoon" Kyle Sandilands over move to Melbourne airwaves
The radio waves have been rocked once again after Steve Price, a man with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, dubbed fellow radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands a "grubby buffoon".
The saga unfolded as Sandilands and his radio partner-in-crime, Jackie O Henderson, inked a deal reportedly worth a staggering $200 million. Yes, you heard that right – $200 million.
But the real kicker as far as Price is concerned? The show is expanding to Melbourne next year, leaving the current breakfast hosts, Jason Hawkins and Lauren Phillips, with a one-way ticket to radio oblivion.
In a tearful farewell on their Melbourne morning show, Phillips lamented: "This is certainly not the way we wanted to bow out."
Price, the unsolicited guardian of Melbourne's radio sensibilities, didn't hold back in his assessment of Sandilands, calling him a "grubby buffoon" and then backpedaling to settle on "just a grub".
“Kyle’s a grubby buffoon," Price said to the bemused panel on a recent episode of The Project. "And I don’t think grubby buffoons work in Melbourne. I probably shouldn’t call him a grubby buffoon. He’s just a grub.”
Price also predicted that Melbourne might not be ready for the explicit nature of the Kyle and Jackie O Show. “Some of the sexually explicit material is off-putting," he explained. "Sarah [Harris] would know better than anyone else that it’s school drop-off time for kids. You don’t want people talking about anal sex at breakfast time, in my view. That’s what they do on that show.
"Melbourne people are not going to embrace that. Look, the company that is putting them on the air has a different view to that, and I may be proven to be completely wrong, but that doesn’t happen very often.”
Despite Price's dire predictions, Sandilands remains unfazed, his ageless charm apparently defying the laws of time. Given that the $200 million deal extends for the next ten years, that would put Sandilands well into his sixties – quite a challenging age for a "shock jock" to remain relevant.
“Can a 60-year-old be smutty?” Price was asked by the panel. “I don’t think they can, and that is part of the problem,” he replied. “But Kyle seems to be ageless. I don’t know how, with that unhealthy lifestyle he has. But he doesn’t seem to age much. So perhaps he can, at 62 . . . You can’t imagine he’s going to be appealing to the 18 to 28-year-old demographic that the radio station is paying him to drag in. I find that really puzzling.”
So brace yourselves, Melbourne: the radio waves are about to get a whole lot grubbier, buffoonier and possibly more explicit. It's the Kyle Sandilands extravaganza, and no amount of Price's disapproval can stop the buffoonery.
Images: KIIS FM / Network 10