Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
Kyle Sandilands said he had no regrets in his first TV interview since his dramatic sacking from ARN and the Kylie and Jackie O Show.
The controversial shock jock appeared on Sunrise for the first time since losing his $100m contract after claiming his former co-host Jackie “O” Henderson was “off with the fairies” and “unfocused”.
Reflecting on his departure from the show, Sandilands told Sunrise co-host Nat Barr there was a telling moment that indicated the program was on its way out.
Sandilands said he and Henderson would often “overstep the mark” on and off the air, prompting Sandilands to apologise afterwards.
“I’d sent Jackie a message that night on the Friday. It was just saying, ‘Hey, if I overstepped the mark at all today, sorry. You know, if I hit a raw nerve…’,” he said.
“I didn’t hear back from her for a few days, which was strange because we (are) usually pretty communicative.”
Looking back at the recent challenges he had faced with his radio show, Sandilands said he had no regrets, adding some of the things he said had been “perceived to have been bad”.
He conceded some of his messaging was “genuinely bad” and he said some “stupid things”, but he also claimed the media was responsible for “twisting’ his words.
“It’s more like when I’ve done things, and a lot of these things have been perceived to have been bad,” he said.
“Some are genuinely bad or mistakes or stupid things that I’ve said – and other things are can be twisted.
“Once it gets to AM radio, the narrative changes when it gets to talkback, and they sort of take away all the joining words to make it sound more dramatic.”
Sandilands said it was common for him to make an offensive comment and “take it as a learning lesson”.
“Then you just get back up the next day and keep working. I’m certainly not having conversations with myself in the mirror or big reflections,” he said.
Sandilands said his job was to host a “comedy show”, only to hear that listeners found some of the comments offensive.
“People say, ‘Oh, you offended this and you offended this’, but they’re really just jokes,” he said.
“And then someone is offended, and it only takes one person to be offended in this day and age, and then the whole world has to stop.”
Sandilands said there were “no real complaints” about the show, instead claiming they were “forced”.
“We thought we were actually obeying the law, but when you get a group of 70-year-olds all sitting around the table that work for the government and they’ve been charged by a Greens senator in Adelaide to find a problem with the show,” he said.
“Magically, they found a problem with the show, but no one actually really complained. There was no real complaints about any of those things. So it was just … they were forced.”
The Kyle and Jackie O Show faced a barrage of complaints during its 20-year on-air legacy, making up 45 per cent of overall radio decency complaints between the 2023 and 2024 financial year.
In October 2025, the Australian Communications and Media Authority found 12 breaches of the Commercial Radio Code of Practice and decency rules.
Other complaints included a segment where the hosts would guess which staff member was urinating in an audio played live on air, with other segments discussing a female staff member’s genitalia and comments about oral sex and menstruation.
“The Kyle and Jackie O Show has repeatedly and deliberately aired content that is vulgar, sexually explicit and deeply offensive,” ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said last year.
“Even after previous breaches and the employment of additional censors required by the ACMA, the program continues to broadcast content that is unacceptable to the community.”
