NOVA’s Ben And Liam Talk Building Success And Hosting With Your Mate

Following the latest set of GfK Radio Ratings released last week, B&T caught up with Adelaide’s own Ben and Liam to discuss their friendship and the success of their breakfast show.

Co-hosts of NOVA’s Adelaide breakfast radio show, Ben Harvey (pictured left) and Liam Stapleton (pictured right) have been working their way up in the local ratings and currently sit third overall in the timeslot, having made up a full 1.5 per cent share since the previous ratings were released.

That growth in listenership hasn’t instilled any nerves in them, however. “I think, coming up to 10 years together, if we were stressing about how many people were listening it’d be a bit of a worry!” joked Stapleton. “But I suppose that main thing is trying to keep them sticking around longer, and that can be sort of tricky sometimes with a format built for quicker runs. That’s always been a thing that we’ve tried to improve – to try and keep people listening for longer.”

“It’s nice that the ratings say we have lots of listeners, but sometimes at 6:10am when you do a callout and you get no calls it doesn’t feel like you have any listeners,” quipped Harvey.

Having listeners is obviously important to maintaining a successful radio show, but the two were quick to admit they would be less than thrilled to see live numbers in the same way one might have on a livestreaming platform. “If you were doing a live Facebook feed and you could see the people dropping off, or you have a little number that says you’ve got 600 people listening and you’re telling a story and it slowly starts to go down, I think it’d be disheartening,” said Stapleton.

The success of the show has a lot to do with the chemistry the two share, both as friends and having worked together for almost ten years to date. That said, you need more than two hosts to make a successful radio broadcast, and both Stapleton and Harvey described the support of having a great team around you as integral.

“The wider team around us – the producers, producer Belle, producer Andy – there’s so many people behind the scenes that keep things chugging along. We’ve got a really sweet team environment,” Stapleton said.

Harvey added: “We get along really well, on and off the air, and we’re lucky in that regard. We both have the same work ethic, same goals, so that’s why we have such good chemistry. That makes it makes it easy to have conversations.”

Both hosts were adamant that being friends off and on the show was a critical part of their ongoing success, but admitted it can create problems if they spend too much time together. “If there’s any advice you’d give to younger show, it’d be: it’s good that you’re friends, but you also want to give each other a bit of space. Because if you spend the weekends together, then you’ve got no content for the show. So we do hang out off air sometimes, but trying to keep it to not too much, because otherwise you’ve just got the same content as each other,” Harvey pointed out.

As for the future of the show? “If we can get more people on to the podcast, through TikTok and through Instagram, that’s probably where our heads are at,” mused Stapleton. “We’re constantly trying to try and learn, and that’s probably another thing that we’re trying to get better at, that TikTok style of packaging [content] up the right way so it’s easier for people to digest.”

Breakfast with Ben & Liam can be heard on NOVA 91.9 Adelaide weekday mornings from 6am.

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