Walking
around Richmond before 5am is a pretty surreal experience. By day, what is one
of the densest suburbs of inner Melbourne, is eerily quiet. Within a corporate
building on a residential street, the radio is blasting throughout an office,
and there’s an energy slowly building around a studio that looks out over the
city.

Christian
O’Connell, the English radio veteran, recently moved his whole family from
London to Melbourne to take on the challenge of being an unknown in Australia.
He arrives at the studio just after 5am and the team eases into gear.

There’s a
rawness to each player on the field, but everyone is used to being around each
other at what the nine to fiver would consider an un-godly hour of the day.

Christian
carries himself in a reserved manner when he arrives, speaking quietly, and
moving straight into the on-air studio as if to psych himself up for 4 hours of
live performance.

I wouldn’t
dare utter a word of complaint about being up so early. 30 year veteran
newsreader Patrina Jones has been awake since before 3am, reading the news
since 4. She greets you warmly as she marches back and forth between her studio
and the newsroom, and you can’t help but feel relief that you had a lie-in to
4:30am.

Christian’s
sidekick Jack Post, of Hamish & Andy fame, makes a later arrival, touting a
backpack and Macbook in hand. His arrival seems to be the daily event that
begins to pull Christian out of his meditative morning mood as they begin their
back and forth banter. Rarely do they discuss the upcoming show, as the
production team scramble to prepare audio, guests, run-sheets, and a broken
printer.

No one
likes a camera between 5 and 6am, especially while being under the pump. It
takes a relationship built on spending so many of these mornings together to be
able to click away.