40 BEN FORDHAM:
the new man in radio’s top job
In the last 12 months, Ben Fordham has scored the biggest job in radio, lost his much-loved father to cancer, and he and wife Jodie Speers have welcomed their third bundle of joy. They invite Samantha Trenoweth
into their home to recap a year of heartbreak, triumph and love.
Ben Fordham is old school. At 43, he might be the young gun on the highest-rating radio show in the land, but there’s something about him that reminds you of your dad, or your neighbour’s dad, or one of those universal dad characters on sitcoms you watched as a kid.
It’s 7am on a Saturday morning, and Ben and his five-year-old son Freddy have been up for hours. They’ve just rolled back in the door after helping a mate who owns a cafe to unpack crates of milk, and they’ve been rewarded with a double espresso (for Ben) and warm-from-the-oven almond croissants.
“I like giving the kids an understanding of hard work,” says the man who this month stepped into veteran breakfast broadcaster Alan Jones’s spot on Sydney radio station 2GB. “I was explaining to Freddy, ‘Look at all these people – they’ve been here since 3am working their backsides off so that we have nice things to eat when we wake up’.”
It’s not just his own kids (Freddy, Pearl, three, and Marigold, or Goldie, just 10 months old) who are on the receiving end of Ben’s life lessons. He’s supporting what he calls “the kid economy” all along this leafy suburban street.
It started three years ago, the day Ben and his wife, Seven Network news journalist
Jodie Speers, moved in.
“There were some kids out the front, jumping out of a tree onto a mattress that the former owner had left behind. They said, ‘Are you moving in?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m Ben, who are you?’ They told me their names and I said, ‘Nice to meet you, boys.’ Then they said, ‘Can we go in your pool?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if you want.’ So they jumped into the pool and Jodie came downstairs and said, ‘Who are those boys?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Jasper’s one of them I think; another one’s Kai.’ And they just kept coming back.”
That’s how Ben became king of the kids, and now he employs a bunch of them: Molly babysits; Max is on a year-long contract to water the garden and empty the pool filter, and Ben’s paid him upfront so he learns responsibility; there’s another kid who deletes
viewed programs on Foxtel when the memory is full.
The legendary Fordham work ethic was handed down from Ben’s mum and dad, Veronica and John, who ran a management agency and PR firm out of the family home.
“Mum and Dad believed that you started working as soon as you could,” Ben recalls. “So my brother Nick and I had a lawn-mowing business when we were about 10.
The moment we were allowed to operate the lawnmower, we had flyers everywhere… One time, the guy across the road knocked us back, and Dad said, ‘Just do it anyway.’ So we did and, sure enough, he goes, ‘All right, here’s 10 bucks.’ It was an unconventional approach to business.”
John Fordham ran a tight ship, and some of his disciplinary measures wouldn’t win him fans with child psychologists today, but Ben adored and admired his dad, who died at age 75 in November last year.
“Dad was…” he begins. “How do you summarise a human being who has lived so long and done so many things? First and foremost, he was a really good dad. When we were growing up, he was the only dad on the street kicking the footy and playing cricket with all the kids. Mind you, he never wanted to do the boring things. So if you were playing cricket, he’d always want to be bowling or batting – never fielding – which was a bit embarrassing. But now I see myself doing the same, so I forgive him that.
“He was a passionate, loyal and strong character. He was a strict dad – there was no escaping that – but he was loving and caring. He was affectionate, but he let us know that we weren’t to be running amok.”
Ben’s older sister, Sarah, mostly managed to stay out of harm’s way, but Ben and Nick weren’t so lucky.
“Occasionally Dad would get word about something we’d done wrong, and he’d ring and go, ‘I’m on my way home.’ That was a sign for us to run into his walk-in wardrobe and remove the thickest belts! There was a thick white one and we’d get rid of that for starters. Nick sometimes put on an extra pair of undies to lessen the blow on the bum.
“That wasn’t a daily or a weekly thing – it was reserved for when we needed it. And it’s funny, as much as we hated it at the time, we don’t have any bad feelings about it.”
Veronica had a more subtle but equally effective technique for keeping her brood in line.
“Occasionally Mum would take the wooden spoon in her handbag when we went shopping,” Ben chuckles. “She’d just flash it to you, like Dirty Harry would pull back his jacket to show you he was carrying a gun.
She’d pull a little bit of the wooden spoon out of the handbag, just to let us know she was packing heat…
“We call Mum the ‘Big Kahuna’. She’s a no-nonsense character – a formidable woman and a fantastic woman. Mum is the superglue that holds our family together.”
When Ben was seven, he was diagnosed with epilepsy. “It was a big deal at the time,” he says. “It’s not now – it’s minor and it’s managed.”
Veronica remembers that first seizure vividly. “It was a very moving experience,” she says, “when Ben had his first epilepsy episode, to see John lying on the bed beside him crying, and the next thing, Ben came out of it and asked, ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’”
“It scared the daylights out of Mum and Dad,” Ben recalls, “and because it was the first time I had seen my dad with tears in his eyes, I remember thinking, ‘this must be serious’.”
As the years went on, the condition improved and Ben didn’t think much about it, until Sydney Swans star forward Lance “Buddy” Franklin was hospitalised after a minor seizure in 2015. Buddy went public about his epilepsy, and in an act of solidarity, Ben did, too. Since then, he’s also spoken publicly about the need for better access to medicinal cannabis for epilepsy sufferers.
Ben was a solid student, but all through high school he was itching to get into the workforce. “Mum and Dad worked seven days a week when we were kids,” he says, and watching the dramas unfold was formative.
“When I was really young, they filled in the garage and turned it into an office, and they ran The Fordham Company from there. It went into our bloodstream. If there was a problem, there’d be a phone call in the middle of the night and Mum and Dad were up and managing it, dealing with journalists and trying to put out spot fires. I was really excited by that.
“We saw it all, from massive arguments with media companies over contracts, to footballers crying on Mum’s shoulder because their girlfriends had left… When there were big scandals, their clients would hide out in our house and the media would be camped outside.”
At 15, Ben was invited to intern on Alan Jones’s radio show. “I loved the excitement and the energy,” he recalls. “It was so early in the morning and I was so young. There was a lot of swearing from the boys in the sports department, and a lot of jokes.” His career path was set.
In 1997, Ben was reporting from Canberra for Radio 2UE, when a landslide devastated the Snowy Mountains ski resort of Thredbo. He was just 21 years old when he was ordered to the frontline of the disaster.
“I talked my way into Thredbo,” he says. “Police had blocked journalists from getting in, but a bloke who owned the local radio station offered me a lift into town if I could get past the roadblock on foot. So I told the police I wanted to walk up the hill to get a better signal for my phone, and then I just started running. Next thing, a set of headlights popped up and
I got in. I feel a bit cheeky about it now, but it meant that, when the sun
“It was the first time I’d seen my dad with tears in his eyes”
came up the next day, I was the only journalist there to describe the scale of what had happened.”
Ben acknowledges now that “it was a big story to be covering as a young man”.
“I found it really confronting,” he admits. “I called my dad after a couple of days and said, ‘I think I should come home.’ They’d sent the senior reporter down and I didn’t think they needed two of us. It had been two days of one frozen dead body after another pulled from the rubble. But Dad said, ‘I’d stay. You never know, there could be someone alive under there.’ And, of course, he was right. I stayed.
“Then early on the Saturday morning they heard a noise, and
Stuart Diver was pulled out alive late that afternoon. I was live on the air describing that moment as it happened. I felt so happy to be able to share some positive news among the sadness. It didn’t take away from the tragedy of all the other deaths, but it was an amazing thing to see unfold.”
That year, Ben won both a Walkley and a Raward for radio journalism, and became the youngest reporter in history to pick up the double. An Australia Day Young Citizen of the Year Award followed in 1998.
Thredbo kickstarted his career.
Since then, Ben has worked in radio, at 2UE and 2GB, and on current affairs mainstays 60 Minutes and
A Current Affair, as well as Today.
He also fronts the family favourite Australian Ninja Warrior, which he’s as passionate about as his more serious roles.
It’s back this month for its fourth season on Nine and he’s eager for viewers to see the ninjas’ newest challenge, the Power
Tower, which looks like an “on-steroids” version of something he and the neighbourhood kids might dream up on a Saturday afternoon in his backyard.
But the big news has been the shift from 2GB
Drive to Breakfast, where he says Alan Jones’s notoriously loyal listeners have been “very welcoming and supportive”.
So far, they don’t seem to have been rattled by his newfangled ideas, like inviting them to text as well as call. He’s been switching things up for politicians, too, insisting they needn’t wait for an invitation to come in for an interview but can “call up like anyone else”.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was one of the first to take him up on the offer.
“When she comes up on the board as ‘Gladys’, I don’t know whether it’s Gladys from Menai or Gladys Berejiklian the
premier,” Ben smiles. “So I don’t have any preparation, but I like that. I like that moment of being on the edge of your seat and rolling with the punches. I’m a bit hyperactive. I love that spontaneous moment. Working as a journalist is the greatest rollercoaster ride in the world.”
With Alan at the helm, 2GB’s breakfast slot wielded a hefty weight of political influence, but Ben doesn’t find that daunting.
“As long as you’re backing the right issues and you know how to put it in reverse if you discover you’re not – how to say sorry – then you can have faith in what you’re doing,” he says earnestly. “You can’t get it right all the time, but when you know you’re right, you can’t be afraid of pushing hard.”
One issue on which he gave his all was marriage equality. When he first told his listeners he supported it, 10 years ago, he copped a vociferous backlash. “It was a toxic response,” he admits, but he persevered, even taking then prime minister Tony Abbott aside for a beer and a chat on the subject.
“So yes,” he says, “there’s a bit of responsibility that comes with the job, but I’m not afraid of having those difficult conversations, even if it’s behind closed doors with the prime minister, trying to twist his arm.
I was unsuccessful in changing Tony Abbott’s mind, but I gave it a crack.”
But for his toughest negotiations, Ben always consults the Big Kahuna.
“I must be the only 43-year-old breakfast radio host who’s had to tell the boss who was offering him the gig that he needed to do a phone hook-up with his mum… I don’t make any big decisions in life without consulting my mum. I’ve never admitted this before, but that includes asking Jodie to marry me! I’ve just always recognised that Mum’s the smartest person in the room. She’s the smartest person in our family, and we all know that.”
Ben had been listening to Jodie’s reports on radio for months and had decided she was the best young reporter around, when he met her one night at a friend’s 40th. They’d been dating for a while and he says, “Mum had already sent signals to me that she thought Jodie was a winner,” when she was offered a role as a political correspondent in Canberra.
“We’d just met, things were going well and we were living in Sydney, so Jodie was thinking of turning the job down,” Ben says, until he consulted Veronica. “Mum said, ‘No way, she’s got to go to Canberra.’ I’d gone to Canberra and it had changed my working life. Mum said, ‘You can’t deny Jodie the chance to do the same. Encourage her to go.’ So I did.”
And absence really did make their hearts grow fonder. Jodie was impressed that Ben was so supportive of her career, and he missed her more than he’d imagined: “I recall watching her one day doing a piece to camera. She was wearing a red coat, standing in the Parliament House courtyard, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to hurry up and ask this girl to marry me.’ Next thing you know, we were engaged.
“I’m a very lucky man. Jodie is an incredible woman, a very talented journalist and the best mum in the world. She is her own woman. I come from a family of strong, independent women and I find that very attractive. I won the lottery the day I met her.”
It was a godsend that Jodie was at home last year, on maternity leave from the breakfast news on Seven, when Ben’s father was at the end of his long battle with throat cancer.
Coming to terms with John’s death has not, Ben says, been as traumatic as he’d anticipated, but he’s been grateful for Jodie’s support, for his close-knit family and friends, and for the love of his children. “I’d always braced myself for this massive hole to appear in my life,” he says. “I’d been warned by friends who had lost their dads that it is a moment in your life that changes everything.”
But for Ben, the loss has been gentler. “Of course I’m sad,” he says. “I’d love him still to be here, but I’m not completely broken because we always told each other how much we loved one another. There were no regrets about things I could have said or done.”
While he was well enough, John flew the entire family to Hawaii, and a month before he died, Ben took his dad to Brisbane for the annual Australian Commercial Radio Awards.
“I think one of the reasons why I don’t feel empty now is because
I felt so full when he was here,” Ben explains, but grief is a capricious thing and suddenly his voice falters and his eyes fill with tears.
“I’d been warned by friends who had lost their dads that it is a moment in your life that changes everything.”
“That’s not to say there haven’t been times,” he admits. “I was sitting on the couch at 6.30 one Saturday morning. I had Freddy and Pearl on my lap, and I put this song on by Troy Cassar-Daley called Make The Most (Of Every Day With You), and tears started pouring down my face.
“I didn’t want to stop this moment. Jodie has taught me to embrace the emotions of life. So instead of wiping the tears away, I just let them fall. Pearl had seen me cry before, but not like this. She said, ‘Why is your face wet?’ And I said, ‘Why do you think?’ And she said, ‘You’re thinking of Papa.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am.’
“Losing my dad,” Ben says, “is a little like life: there are tough times, but overwhelmingly I feel thankful.”
And with that, Jodie hands him little Goldie, who he will read a story to before her afternoon nap. AWW
Australian Ninja Warrior returns soon to the Nine Network.