The social media hashtag for the farewell for Jon Faine after 23 years hosting the ABC’s morning radio program was #FFS – Faine farewell show. There were gags about the tag’s usual meaning and by the end of the three-and-a-half-hours broadcast from Melbourne Town Hall, there were a few whispering that the ABC may well have set a new bar for self-indulgence.
That may be churlish. The almost 2,000 people at the town hall – mostly baby boomers like the 63-year-old Faine – hollered and cheered and roared at every in-joke, and perhaps listeners at home did the same.
There was the one about Faine’s disheveled appearance – he was once named one of Melbourne’s worst-dressed men. Faine’s tendency to declare just about anything “astonishing”. Faine’s penchant for tinkering with old cars.
Jeff Kennett was invited to be a guest on the last ever Faine show and was unavailable but we got to relive his testy interview with the then premier before the 1999 election, when he asked questions most of the Melbourne media dared not.
“Keep going – I’ll just sit here and drink my tea,” Kennett said with supreme arrogance in a performance that some Liberals thought cost the party power. “You are pathetic, absolutely pathetic.” Faine told the story of getting sacked by an ABC manager back in 1994, who told him, “whatever your future is we don’t think it’s on the radio”. We all laughed along.
Nostalgia is surely justified after such a stint. Twenty-three years of 4.15am alarm clocks – he gleefully stomped on one on the stage. He’s seen out six premiers, eight prime ministers and six ABC managing directors. Faine insisted that the last thing he wanted was a “big showy public performance” to mark his departure but it seemed a little hard to believe.
The real admiration for Faine, who friend and former producer Chris Uhlmann affectionately noted was an “incredible pain in the arse”, was because he was an incredible pain in the arse to everyone, or at least everyone with power.
Ask anyone around Melbourne what they think of Faine and you will hear “insufferable” and “pompous” more than once. But you also hear “respect” and “tough” and “across the detail” and Faine told his last audience that if it was a choice between being liked or being respected, he’d choose respect.
He’s been informed that he has been subject to more official complaints than any other ABC presenter across the country, something he considers a badge of honour – of course.
Every so often, Faine had guts when it would have been much easier to let it slide. He has recalled that he knew that if Kennett was re-elected in 1999, he’d be out of a job because he would have no access to the premier. But he felt that if he didn’t ask the tough questions, he wouldn’t deserve the job, so he was toast either way.
It was Faine who dared to criticise former ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie before she was dismissed – not after. The current managing director, David Anderson, turned up at the town hall and mentioned that he had risen to his position from his first job in the ABC mailroom. “I don’t think Michelle Guthrie knew there was a mailroom,” sniped Faine. He can’t help himself.
He can’t help taking on the ABC’s critics, either. “We should not use our lives to make ourselves look good or to show off,” he said. “The ABC can leave that to the worst of the shock jocks and the tabloid monsters, those narcissists who use the media to tell people how to live their lives and what to think.”
A panel of five current and former premiers and one opposition leader came together to talk about Victoria’s challenges, and to play to the audience with pronouncements of how progressive Melbourne is, how the state leads the nation and how it embraces multiculturalism. They noted Faine’s contribution, how he held them all to account. The state Liberal leader, Michael O’Brien, put it best: “You’re the greatest devil’s advocate Melbourne has ever seen”.
There is, perhaps, only so much pissing in pockets one can take. We had Sue Howard, the former ABC director of radio, explain how she talked Faine out of taking on a government job, offering him more money and a five-year contract. We had former producers, including Uhlmann, Glen Bartholomew and his first producer, Prani West, telling us that Faine always said his radio show was a marathon not a sprint. There was a big hug for his successor, broadcaster Virginia Trioli.
We had mayor Sally Capp speak of “this room full of possibility and warmth and love for you Jon”. His regular contributors turned up, as well as a surprise visit by the former early morning presenter Red Symons, who never pisses in anybody’s pocket.
And we had gorgeous music, including Clare Bowditch singing Imagine, a special request from Faine “because basically I’m just an ageing hippy”. The crowd sang along, waving their arms, while Faine rocked on his chair, his face full of emotion.
The line between tribute and self-indulgence is a fine one. Radio is an intimate medium, and listeners can feel like they know the presenters, that they are part of their lives. But in most workplaces, hours of tributes are left for boozy private lunches.
Did any news happen on Friday morning? Only on the hour, when we learned that the UN Security Council had met to discuss Turkey’s offensive against the Kurds and that Israel’s supreme court had overturned a decision to release alleged child sex abuser Malka Leifer to house arrest. On this day, for three-and-a-half hours, it was as though the only news in town was that Faine was leaving the ABC morning show and, in insular Melbourne, perhaps that was true.
Towards the end, Faine noted his hardest stories, including leading the ABC’s coverage of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, and the pledge to the communities “that we would not just descend upon them, grab their stories, use it as media fodder and then move on”.
He remembered the murder of ABC employee Jill Meagher in 2012. “The killing of women just going about their business has not stopped and we must somehow, we must, make our community safer.”
He thanked just about everyone, but especially his wife Jan, who he often mentions on-air. His voice wobbled when he paid tribute to “my wonderful, funny beautiful and always sensible Jan, the soul of our family, my best friend, my sounding board, my grief counsellor. As simple and as complicated as it is, I love you.”
Everyone was tearing up by then, but there was more. Musician Casey Bennetto had written a song for the occasion called, inevitably, Jon Faine. As around 60 people gathered on the stage to form a choir – producers, researchers, authors, celebrity food journalist Matt Preston and various Melbourne notables – Bennetto had them all singing: JON FAINE! JON FAINE!
“He might have been impertinent/the scourge of half past eight/but in his way, he brought about/a better wiser state/And we may never see his like again. JON FAINE! JON FAINE!”
Even Jon Faine seemed startled, “overwhelmed”, as he put it.
Others might have put it another way, with affection: #FFS.