“We are different to day people.” That is how Trevor Chappell explains the bond between an overnight presenter and the people who stay up with him. After 26 years of ABC Overnights, the 65-year-old will host his last show on Thursday, July 30.
Chappell has been a familiar voice for shift workers and insomniacs since 2000. He says the relationship runs both ways. “It’s not friendship, it’s companionship. You get to know people,” he said. “You get to know their history, what makes them laugh.”
From mines to the microphone
He worked in mining, trained as a teacher and tried acting school, which he quit when he realised he could never remember the lines. Radio came from a pamphlet he found on the coffee table of his Melbourne share house. It sent him to the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts to study broadcasting. One lecturer told him never to underestimate the relationship with listeners, “because they know you far better than you know them”.
The Overnights job followed a stretch as a producer and roving reporter. His first night on air in 2000 was a fright, with paper and tightly written scripts all around him. Pamela, from Queensland, was his first talkback caller. “She was so kind and welcoming that it made it so easy,” he said. He later visited her on a trip to Queensland. When she moved into a nursing home, calling became too hard.
The regulars
There is Simon, who calls in and always says “box of birds”. There is Don, who used to ring every year to request the same song for his wedding anniversary. One caller keeps notes on everything Chappell got wrong since their last chat.
Some listeners have been there from the start. “There would be truck drivers who have been with me since the beginning,” he said.
Not all the memories are light. He has lost listeners, among them June from Portland and the show’s royal correspondent, Barry. He has cried on air more than once. A widow who had nursed her husband through Alzheimer’s rang to say loneliness had kept her up, and Chappell had to play a song to compose himself.
Other moments were funny. He once insisted the werewolf’s hair in Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London was purple, until he looked up the lyric and had to apologise on air. A listener texted that he sounded like “a eunuch in a wind tunnel”. Another time he asked gardening expert Sabrina Hahn for advice on using “kar-le”. She laughed and told him he meant kale.
Colleagues weigh in
Red Symons crossed paths with him for years at ABC Southbank while presenting 774 ABC Melbourne Breakfast. “Trevor and I were two lonely, old guys who bumped into each other in the night,” Symons said. “He was always pleased to see me because it meant that he was nearly finished.”
Michael Pavlich, who worked with Chappell as a producer at 774 in the 1990s and later ran his studio, recalled one favourite show. Chappell crossed live from the roadside in the Pilliga Forest in northern New South Wales, a spot listeners had nominated as one of the scariest places in Australia. Pavlich called him “a gifted communicator” with “an even temperament and great respect”. John Standish, the day producer, said he was not sure how Chappell kept his good humour after decades on the graveyard shift.
Chappell is no relation to the cricketer of the same name, the bowler of the underarm delivery against New Zealand in 1981.
Why now
Chappell says he is proud of the show and has no changes to suggest. “If I was making the decision purely by heart, I wouldn’t leave,” he said. “I love doing the job and talking to the people, but the head says it’s enough.”
He credits his wife Cathy and his producers for getting him this far, and says he has not worked out how to say goodbye. “I’m trying not to think about it. It will be really sad. I’m going to have to try really hard to hold back the tears.”
Sources
- ABC presenter Trevor Chappell to hang up mic after 26 years
- Trevor Chappell to leave ABC Overnights after 26 years
