ABC radio’s Ali Moore is trading the Drive shift for the Italian countryside, with her last show being May 29.
Her replacement will be Charlie Pickering, host of ABC TV’s The Weekly and, since late 2024, the nationally syndicated radio comedy panel show Thank God It’s Friday.
Moore and her husband, who has business interests in Germany, are in the process of buying a farmhouse in Umbria, the fulfilment of a dream that has been simmering for a decade.
“I am going to split my time between Italy and Australia,” Moore said. “I want to learn Italian, I want to learn to cook, and I want a really different life to the one I’ve had for the last 40 years.”
Moore began her journalism career as a graduate cadet with the ABC in 1987, starting out on 3LO (as ABC Melbourne 774 was then known). She went on to work across radio and television, including as host of Lateline and Lateline Business, and as the ABC’s Beijing-based China correspondent. She also had long stints with Nine and the BBC, based in Singapore.
Though she intends to keep working in some capacity, the move signals the end of a journey. The latest chapter began with her taking up the Drive chair at the end of 2023 when Rafael Epstein moved to Mornings.
“It has been amazing, and I have loved it, I really do genuinely mean that,” Moore said. “But a dozen broadcast roles and three employers is, I think, enough for one career, and it’s time to do something else.”
Moore revealed to ABC management in December that she was unlikely to see out the entire year, and on Friday she revealed to her audience that she was leaving, and that Pickering – a regular guest on the program ahead of his 5pm panel show – would be her replacement from June. He will have a job ahead of him, too, in rebuilding audience share from a low 2.5 per cent of listeners in the most recent survey.
How does Moore think her listeners will respond to Pickering?
“I genuinely think he’s great, and I think he’ll be great for the program, he’ll be great for the station.”
Familiar though he is to ABC audiences – and especially to Drive listeners on a Friday – Pickering is a very different personality to Moore.
“My husband and I once spent a couple of hours walking around a market in Pakistan trying to buy me a sense of humour, because I largely don’t have one,” Moore concedes. “I’m very serious, and I’ve come at this job from the background and the perspective of a news journalist, and maybe that’s sometimes been to my detriment with the amount of stuff we have to cover.
“And now management has gone from someone with no sense of humour to a comedian, who is also one of the brightest people I know. It will be really different, and it will be really good.”
For Pickering, this is a gig he’s been waiting his whole life to do.
“It’s the best shift on the best radio station in the best city in the world,” he says. “That’s how I feel about it.”
He rattles off a long list of Drive presenters he has admired, including Moore, her predecessor Epstein and Virginia Trioli. But it’s the memory of listening with his mother to Doug Aiton and Terry Lane after school pick-up that burns brightest.
“It’s cold outside but it’s cosy in the car, we’re in the driveway at home, and my mum has tears rolling down her cheeks because of something we’re listening to and laughing at, and we aren’t getting out of the car because we want to hear the end of this thing.”
Pickering plans to keep doing his TV shows, The Weekly, which doesn’t return until late next year, and The Yearly, and has no intention of giving up TGIF either, which he concedes may come as news to station management.
“I may be speaking out of school here, but as far as I’m concerned I will hit the 5 o’clock news and sprint down to the studio where there’ll be an audience waiting, because there have been many times when that one hour has been the absolute highlight of my week.”
He’s had plenty of experience in radio, dating back to the early 2000s on Triple J and most recently as host of the Breakfast show on Fridays (when Sammy J was in the chair) in 2023. But he knows he’ll have to step it up if he’s to match the levels of those who have so inspired him.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime job,” he says. “I’ve got a lot to learn, but I really look forward to the challenge of trying to make a radio show that keeps you listening in the driveway after you get home.”
Karl Quinn talks movies on the Drive show every Friday.
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