Called it: Carrie Bickmore confirmed for KIIS Drive

On 10 September, Mediaweek reported that Carrie Bickmore was leaving Southern Cross Austereo to join ARN and take over national Drive from Will & Woody. ARN didn’t confirm it, and SCA didn’t comment. Neither network denied it.

Sixty-two days later, ARN has confirmed the move.

From January 2027, Bickmore will host Carrie for the Drive Home across the KIIS Network from 3 pm to 6 pm. Comedian Bron Lewis is the first confirmed co-host and will join her each week. ARN says the show will offer “real, raw and hilarious conversations”. It’s the same time slot Bickmore’s listeners know, on a different network.

Lewis took to the stage to give those gathered a taste of what listeners can expect; get ready for all those hilarious ‘I hate my kids… just kidding!’ jokes.

OK, look, having two women fronting a Drive show may be a step forward for the female journey at large, but surely, surely there's more to us, as a collective, than jokes rolled out from the 1950s?

READ MORE: 'Not how I wanted it to end': Carrie and Tommy confirm Hit exit

READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Carrie Bickmore tipped to leave SCA replacing Will & Woody at ARN

What Mediaweek reported

The September report named Bickmore as ARN’s pick for the national Drive seat that Will McMahon and Woody Whitelaw would leave at the end of 2026, after eight years on KIIS. Sources said ARN CEO Michael Stephenson had personally put the deal together. At the time, nobody could say whether Tommy Little would go with her.

Over the next six weeks, the pieces moved into place. Will & Woody said they were “devastated” to be leaving, and said: “It was always the listeners who made the show.”

The goodbye

On 21 October, Bickmore and Little told listeners on air that their Hit Network Drive show would end this year.

Bickmore was in tears as she remembered nearly 10 years of laughing and calling it a job with her best mate. Little, visibly emotional, said it was “certainly not how I wanted it to end”, and added: “I love this job, and I would have kept doing it for a long time.”

SCA’s internal farewell email read like a scrapbook of the show: caravanning across Queensland, trips to Paris, a South African marathon for Bickmore’s Beanies 4 Brain Cancer Foundation, a plunge into an icy Tasmanian lake, the annual “Roast”, and the “Mystery Bus”.

What ARN is buying

Stephenson isn’t playing it down.

“Carrie is one of the biggest stars in Australian media, and I couldn’t be more excited that she’s coming to ARN. She has spent the past decade at the top of national Drive and built an extraordinary connection with audiences right across Australia,” he said.

“This is the start of a new era, and Carrie is an important part of our plan. Together with our new Breakfast shows in Sydney and Melbourne, we’re bringing together some of Australia’s biggest stars with exciting new talent to create a powerful content proposition for audiences and advertisers.”

ARN chief content officer Kerri Elstub said: “Carrie is simply brilliant on air. She’s warm, curious, incredibly funny and has a rare ability to make listeners feel part of the conversation. We can’t wait to hear Carrie make KIIS Drive her own, alongside Bron and the rest of the team. It will be smart, funny, unpredictable and exactly the kind of show you want to be part of on the way home.”

ARN describes Lewis as one of the country’s most exciting comedy stars, currently selling out shows around the world. Calling her the “first confirmed” co-host suggests more names are coming. Tommy Little isn’t mentioned in the release.

The new KIIS line-up

Bickmore is the last major piece of ARN’s KIIS rebuild. KIIS Breakfast with Ash, Issie & Elliot launched in Melbourne on 26 October, and KIIS Breakfast with Chris, Amy & Jack launched in Sydney on 9 November. They join Robin, Kip & Corey in Brisbane and Ben & Liam in Adelaide. Kent ‘Smallzy’ Small moves into the 6 pm to 9 pm slot, which ARN calls the “all-important late Drive slot”, and The Smallzy Show will expand to more KIIS stations in 2027. Craig ‘Lowie’ Lowe and Gordie Waters complete the network’s line-up.

More show details will be announced closer to launch.

For two months, the industry treated the move as an open secret. Now ARN has to find out whether Bickmore’s listeners will follow her across the dial.