Former broadcaster Mike Carlton reflects on experience with radio “titan” John Laws

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Mike Carlton is a former broadcaster who worked with John Laws at 2UE for many years and shares his reflections.

Transcript

00:00He was enormous fun to be with, actually, but the impressive thing was the grandeur,

00:09all the panoply and style of a showbiz king, the Rolls Royce, the golden microphone, the

00:17chauffeur, the fleet of cars, antique cars he had.

00:22He was a grand figure, and at first I was quite in awe of it, because I'd listen to

00:26him as a kid.

00:26I used to come home from school and turn him on.

00:28And then to actually meet this titan was something else again.

00:32We became friends.

00:33Then we became enemies.

00:35We had a feud for a couple of years and we became friends again.

00:38But he was wonderful company overall.

00:41I want to touch on that, you listening to John Laws as a young person yourself.

00:46What was it like for you then to meet and work with him?

00:51Well, he had an endless capacity to reinvent himself.

00:55He started as a disc jockey, you know, play on the hits.

00:57Then, for a while, he became a sort of an agony aunt or agony uncle, if you like.

01:02And women would ring him up and threaten to commit suicide.

01:04And, hello, John, I've just lost my husband.

01:06I'm going to kill myself.

01:07And he would talk him out of it.

01:10He made quite a thing of that for a while.

01:12Then, in his third incarnation, he turned himself into a commentator and an interviewer,

01:17which he did with considerable skill and style.

01:20He was never a journalist.

01:21He never said he was.

01:22But he filled that role quite magnificently with a significant presence in Australian life.

01:30So, what was it about his style, do you think, that had, you know, politicians, particularly

01:35prime ministers, in fear of him but always going on his show?

01:39I don't know if they were in fear, but they certainly acknowledged him.

01:43I mean, Paul Keating, for example, said that if you want to educate middle Australia, you

01:48educate John Laws.

01:49And it was a pretty perceptive remark.

01:52It was Keating who chose that moment in 1986, when he was treasurer, to go on the John

01:57Laws show and say, look, the economy is stuffed.

02:00And if we don't change, we're heading to become a banana republic.

02:03But that had a huge impact, except that old John didn't know what a banana republic was

02:08because he said to me the next day, he said, what's a banana republic?

02:12I had to explain it to him.

02:13But Keating was right.

02:15You got to middle Australia in large numbers through John Laws.

02:19Yeah, talk to me about his audience and particularly his audience loyalty.

02:25They seemed to sort of follow him regardless of the network that he was on.

02:29Yeah, they did.

02:30John had a terrific instinct for what people wanted and how to give it to them.

02:38Women loved him.

02:39He virtually made love to him on air, you know, with his darling and all that sort of stuff

02:44and so on.

02:45And he treated them like lovers.

02:47Men admired him for his masculinity.

02:49So he had him in both hands, which is not always all that common.

02:54And he knew how to do it.

02:56And he played it very, very well.

02:58So they followed him loyally from radio station to radio station.

03:03There's been quite a bit of, you know, a lot of tributes paid to him throughout this

03:08morning in particular.

03:08One that stuck out to me I heard this morning was Annabelle Crabbe referred to John Laws

03:13as perhaps the original influencer.

03:17What do you make of that comment?

03:19Yeah, sounds about right.

03:21Annabelle nails it.

03:22He most certainly was.

03:23There was nobody like him on radio before, nor again.

03:29I mean, Alan Jones was a significant presence, no doubt about that.

03:33But he didn't have the clout that John Laws had.

03:36Jones had a hardline right wing audience of basically fairly stupid people, whereas John's

03:42audience was much, much more eclectic, much more widespread.

03:45He had him in the palm of his hand.

03:49They listened to him and they believed him.

03:51They regarded his word as gospel.

03:54His career, of course, wasn't without controversy.

03:57Take me through the cash for comment period of time, what that was like at the station and

04:02how he managed to recover from that.

04:05Well, what it was like at the station was sheer panic, actually.

04:10The management went into a tailspin because it's two big stars, Laws and Jones, were caught

04:17up in it.

04:18They had, in fact, taken money to push various products.

04:23It wasn't so much, which is fine if it's advertising and disclosed and obvious, but it wasn't.

04:29John, for example, had spent a lot of time bagging the wicked banks, how they were screwing

04:34small Australians with high interest rates and vicious behavior, et cetera, et cetera.

04:39And then all of a sudden, magically, he switched around to saying what benevolent folk the banks

04:43were and how kindly and generously they were helping battling Australians.

04:48And he was paid for that.

04:49He was paid to do that.

04:50He didn't reveal it.

04:51So, yeah, they got him and they got him rightly so.

04:53He always denied it was sinister in any way.

04:57I thought it was not illegal.

04:59It wasn't illegal, but it was certainly wrong.

05:01He wasn't perhaps as bad as Jones, who did the lot, but at the radio station, as you

05:08asked, there was sheer panic how to recover from it.

05:11But things moved on.

05:13John maintained his innocence to the end.

05:17And by and large, his audience believed him because they weren't fools.

05:21The audience weren't stupid.

05:22And they knew that he was actually plugging the banks because he, I guess, been assigned

05:28the door, paid the door, agreed to do it.

05:30They weren't fooled by that.

05:31And things moved on and it all disappeared.

05:34Before we let you go, Mike, just summarise for us, I guess, how do you suppose that John

05:40Law's legacy will be remembered?

05:43I don't know that it will be much.

05:47You know, radio is written in the wind.

05:50There is not much record on it.

05:54We go on air.

05:55We talk.

05:56We vanish.

05:57We disappear.

05:58He was certainly, I think, probably the greatest broadcaster the country has known.

06:03But remembered?

06:04Oh, you know, my kids have only the vaguest knowledge of who he was, particularly my young

06:10bloke.

06:11And that's the way life is.

06:12Things move on.

06:13Things move on.

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