Two decades, one underwater fight, one tomato soup recipe and an unshakeable on-air marriage. Jonesy & Amanda’s new book isn’t just a scrapbook of memories or a forced money grab; it is a 20-year relationship bound in print.
Yesterday, at a rooftop event in Sydney to mark the momentous occasion, an audience came together to celebrate not just the dynamic duo’s success or their shift to afternoons. They showed up because making two decades of chemistry and connection translate off-air is no small feat.
Amanda dancing at last night’s event.
Mediaweek sat down with the pair in a chaotic “office” style episode to talk about chapters that define them, what didn’t make the cut, what listeners can expect as they leave breakfast radio for GOLD’s drive slot next year, and Jonesy almost getting kicked out of his own event.
Why 20 years and why now
Mediaweek: Why 20 years? Why not 10 years? Why not 15 years? Why not more than 20 years for this book? What makes 20 years special for the book?
Jonesy: You wouldn’t do 15 in the book. Did you want to do a 15-year book? I wanted to do an annual.
Amanda: Jonesy says it is like a big Christmas annual. There used to be a whole lot of Christmas annuals you’d get, but we didn’t have enough material for 20 years of one-year books.
MW: What does 20 years mean to you?
Amanda: Twenty years is a big deal. I mean, 10 years in media for one show is a big deal. Fifteen years, 16 years… so I don’t know, it’s an interesting question.
MW: How did the book come about?
Amanda: I think Booktopia said, “Can we do a book?” and we said, “What a nice bookend.”
Jonesy: They kind of asked us. They said, “Would you like to do a book?” and we said, “Yeah,” and it was a really nice bookend. And as it turns out, the timing was eerily perfect.
Amanda: All that was before we knew we were going to be doing the drive show, before we knew it was the last year of our breakfast show. But it’s been perfect, and this book sums up the fun we’ve had doing it. And I’m so glad our show’s not finishing, so there’s no sadness, but it is still the end of an era.
The chapters that feel most like them
MW: And if you had to pick one chapter that describes your relationship, what would it be? Your favourite chapter?
Jonesy: Can you remember a single chapter? Underwater fight? What? No, not the underwater one.
Amanda: There’s actually a photo in the book that’s my favourite. It’s from when we went away for a weekend with our team, and it’s you and me just as friends, looking out at the water, not working, not smiling for the camera.
I got emotional when I saw it, because I thought: a 20-year relationship, our families are here tonight, our kids all grew up together. There’s a passage of time with our families. It’s been an incredible thing, and that’s what that photo said to me.
Jonesy: I like Amanda’s recipe for tomato soup.
Amanda: Every day, or we used to, in winter, have a cup of soup, like old people. We put the recipe in the book. We made a big deal of it, as if, “Wow, look at my incredible recipe”, which was: Open a packet of soup and put hot water in.
Jonesy at last night’s event
The best mishaps, disasters and on-air chaos
MW: What would you say is your favourite iconic moment from the book? A mishap that means a lot to you?
Amanda: I’ve enjoyed this week, actually. We played the stuff from his community radio days when he was 18, and his voice was old; it sounded like 100 years old, and he could barely articulate a sentence. And to think that you’ve gone from that to a man who can now barely speak a sentence is quite the journey.
Amanda: You can have the best day, and you think, “Gee, we’re professionals.” Next day, it goes to poo all over again and you can barely get a sentence out. It’s like being a professional golfer; you can still hit it into the rough.
What didn’t make the book
MW: It was a hard job to compress 20 years into. What could you not include in the book?
Amanda: Oh, your love of Sydney Sweeney, that didn’t make it in.
Jonesy: Amanda’s flatulence problem.
Amanda: He’s making that up. The next book will be a scratch-and-sniff. But in reality, most of it made it in.
Amanda: Pretty much, we’ve bared it all. What we loved about this book is that we sat down and just talked, and then that became transcripts and became the book. So it wasn’t written as “You do a chapter, I’ll do a chapter.” It’s a conversation that became a book, and that’s us at our best.
The end of breakfast and the beginning of Drive
MW: How are you feeling about the move to a new timeslot?
Amanda: It’s three hours on air, live. It’s a river. It doesn’t stop for you; you have to match it at every point. And the challenge of that has been extraordinary, and as we go to drive next year, I wonder how the river will feel.
I’m looking forward to maybe a softer river.
Jonesy: It’s more Wet’n’Wild. At Wet’n’Wild, you go down the thing where your cossie comes up your bum, and then you go on the other one where you get an inner tube, and you float along. I think it’s our turn to be in an inner tube and float.
Amanda: We’ve had 20 years of a very successful breakfast show. And so we’d be stupid to start again. We are taking what we think and hope people have loved about us, and doing it at a different time of day and reaching a different kind of audience.
Jonesy: Drive is like a wasteland, and we are turning it into the fertile plains of five-time radio. Imagine Sydney Sweeney on a jet ski, riding on the green plains. I know it’s missing in the metaphors. It doesn’t matter. It’s going to be great.
Of course, this has been AI generated. Alas, sorry Jonesy.
After 20 years, the book is a celebration of everything that has kept their partnership working: chaos, affection, silliness, truth, and the ability never to take each other too seriously.
Now they head into the next chapter. Just with an inner tube and love for Sydney Sweeney’s acting skills’