The night Bohdan took Triple R off air
From ‘Radio City: the First 30 Years of 3RRR-FM’
BOHDAN was never going to go quietly.
At a time when the station was at one of its lowest ebbs, an attack on Stephen Walker was the last thing it wanted. Until the night when Bohdan made his spectacular exit from the airwaves, few listeners had been aware that Lucille Rogers had gone, leaving the station without a manager, or that it was in such a precarious financial position. Suddenly, the internal wounds had been exposed in the most public of ways.
By the mid-90s, Bohdan had been a Triple R broadcaster for almost two decades. Emerging from the Melbourne punk scene in 1978, he was as much an institution at the station as anyone could claim to be. Over the years his show had become increasingly idiosyncratic, and his slurred English accent was one of the most recognisable voices on air.
Programs and presenters came and went, but Bohdan remained entrenched in his 7pm timeslot — perhaps the last of the squattocracy Stephen Walker had fought so hard to overthrow when he became program manager.
Bohdan had become increasingly politicised by the advent of Jeff Kennett, often delivering on-air tirades against his government’s policies. His musical tastes had also become darker and more hard edged, leaning towards death metal and industrial gloom.
Bohdan’s legendary status had been enhanced by his peripheral role in one of the most bizarre episodes in Melbourne’s history: the 1986 theft of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ from the National Gallery of Victoria. The painting had been missing a week when Bohdan received an off-air call at about 8.15pm on Friday, August 8 from a member of the group that stole the painting, the Australian Cultural Terrorists.
“There were a few of us in the studio, a few of the lads, having a bit of a laugh and we said on-air ‘Whoever’s got the Picasso, give us a ring’,” he told the Trip magazine in 1997. “Anyway we were playing music and this bloke rings up and he goes [the special code which police were using to ascertain that they were dealing with the real terrorists, a code of which Bohdan was unaware at the time].
“And I said, ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ and he said we’ve got the Picasso and we’re going to burn it. I said ‘What a load of rubbish’ and hung up on him. Then we thought about it and asked him to ring back which he did. I commented on his English accent, which he ignored, and he said ‘I want you to tell the police we’re going to burn the painting because nothing’s being done about our demands.’ I rang the police on the special number after the show but couldn’t get through.”
Bohdan gave the story as an exclusive to Helen Thomas, the ex-RRR broadcaster who was then working for the National Times on Sunday. He suddenly found himself in the middle of media frenzy, chased down the street by television cameras.
“The first thing was Stephen said there will always be a place on Triple R for Bohdan, we don’t want to get rid of Bohdan.”
After so long on air, people at the station were asking whether it might be time for a change of shift for Bohdan. The problem was that he felt he owned the prime Friday evening slot.
Bohdan, who had trained as a horticulturalist, had been living near Ballarat for several years on a rural block he had bought, and the Friday night trip into Melbourne was the highlight of his week. He could drive into the city at dusk, do his show, and then party on in town, driving back home before dawn the next morning. A car accident when he had fallen asleep at the wheel and narrowly missed driving into a house had been rude awakening, but he still loved his Friday night slot.
Late in 1994, the subject of Bohdan came up for discussion at a programming committee meeting.
“The first thing was Stephen said there will always be a place on Triple R for Bohdan, we don’t want to get rid of Bohdan,” recalls [station chairman] Geoff King. “But maybe the slot he’s in on a Friday night, it was getting a bit tired and we thought, maybe if we moved him back on a Friday night 10 to 12, a new timeslot might give him an injection of enthusiasm back into his show. And that was really it, that was the discussion.”
Walker concurs that there had never been a second’s thought about axing Bohdan’s show.
“What happened was there had been some discussion about how we could get him to up the ante a little bit and not to be so lazy . . . It was about lifting your game,” he says. “I felt he had charismatic talent as an interviewer and sometimes was incredibly hilarious but I’m not sure he was even aware of it. I remember one interview with a Japanese band that spoke no English and had a translator, and Bohdan’s grip on English was pretty minimal as well, but it was great radio.
“And also musically that he at least made an attempt to keep up and I thought encouraging him to listen to Triple R and Breakfasters [to keep up]. But Bohdan being Bohdan it was always going to have to be the right time and the right place [to tell him].”
Meetings of the programming advisory committee were confidential, but somehow the news leaked to Bohdan that the station was thinking of nudging him to another shift. Both Walker and King has always suspected that [station manager] Lucille Rogers was the source of the leak during one of her regular Friday night drinks sessions in the office with Bohdan before his show.
“The problem was I left this girl who’d done one training session in there, so there was only 30 minutes of dead air.”
Relations between Bohdan and Walker — two equally strong personalities — had never been great, but this was the last straw. Bohdan had no intention of switching times. They wouldn’t sack him — he’d quit. But he’d do it in spectacular style, with a punk flourish. Premeditated sabotage was Bohdan’s plan, and Friday, January 27, 1995, was the date.
Angrily, while the mic was on, he denounced Walker and the rest of management, the programming policy, and the relationship between the staff and volunteers.
He then pressed ‘play’ on the Cosmic Psychos’ ‘Custom Credit’ and walked out of the studio. He waited for the CD to finish, switched off the station’s power, locked the door and walked off into the night, which fittingly was in the middle of an electrical storm. There was only one flaw in his plan.
“The problem was I left this girl who’d done one training session in there, so there was only 30 minutes of dead air,” he says. “My idea was to keep it off air all night until morning when someone came along who had a key and could get in. But, alas, I should have chucked her out, but left her in there after I did my bit.”
Amazingly, the programming committee asked him to come back. He’d have to apologise to Walker, which Bohdan refused to do — “He’d been such a prick and I thought, stuff him”.
After 17 years, it was over, although Bohdan would never completely disappear and continues his Dirt segment today on the weekend breakfast show, ‘Vital Bits'.
Publicly, Walker brushed the incident aside, telling the Age there had been a misunderstanding and Bohdan had chosen “to take a break rather than take a timeslot move”.
“A punk going out in a blaze of glory is more consistent with Bohdan’s style than a quiet retirement,” he said.
But no amount of spin could overcome the perceptions of a station at war with itself. In forensic detail, a major article in the Age outlined the series of problems besetting it:
The politics of public radio have erupted: staff and volunteers are fighting over timeslot changes; old egos are clashing, the programming policy has been attacked and the station manager of six years, Lucille Rogers, has left. All the time, the station has been under a dark financial cloud.
The article infuriated Geoff King and [broadcaster] Neil Rogers, who fired back a letter sticking up for Walker and addressing “some of the half-truths, deliberate misinformation and ancient score settling”.
“It is simply laughable to suggest that the station is in turmoil,” they said. “The program manager is not the station’s Stalin.”
But the damage had been done.
This is an extract from chapter 18 of Radio City: the First 30 Years of 3RRR-FM, published by The Vulgar Press (2006).
