Murphy says: “Wow. That’s a Melbourne bingo card. I couldn’t have laid it on any thicker, and you go ‘bang’.”
He has three kids, aged 17, 15 and 10, with his high-school sweetheart. Vella has been married for three years, but the partnership dates back to her teens, too.
“We met when I was 17 at a nightclub in Crown casino, with my sister’s ID, and Molly Meldrum was on the mic,” she says.
“Is this a joke now,” asks an incredulous Murphy, who is learning the details of his on-air partner’s backstory for the first time. “Is this Melbourne Trivial Pursuit comes to life?”
ABC management hopes it’s a Melbourne pairing that comes to life. Breakfast and Mornings are the bedrocks of radio, and while COVID-19 gave 774 a huge boost as people tuned in for crucial updates, as the air of crisis moved on, so did many listeners.
A change of presenters offers a brief window of opportunity to get them back, at least for a short while. Come January, the job of Murphy and Vella will be to keep them.
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The ABC has been auditioning Murphy for about three months, since he returned from a three-year stint in Western Australia covering footy full-time, an experience that was fun but ultimately taught him “that’s not what fulfilled me”.
Vella – whose media career began at right-wing talk station MTR as a cadet at the feet of Steve Price – received a text message about two months ago telling her she was in the frame. It landed just as her career itchiness was ramping up.
After the pair did a trial session together, they felt it might work. But it was a missed phone call that convinced Murphy.
“She had called, I’d missed it, and I called back, and she says, ‘What’s with the missed call? Is this a power play?’ And from that moment, I was like, ‘this is going to be great’.”
For Vella, the gig represents a chance not only to apply the skills she has honed in TV but to show a side of herself she’s had to keep hidden.
For Murphy, it feels like coming home. “When I hear the ABC jingle, I can smell burnt toast and marmalade from the kitchen table growing up,” he says. “This is the North Star.”
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Melbourne is a big story, he says, citing former Age journalist Martin Flanagan: “To tell a big story, you need to tell a small story. So it’ll be a thread count of a million small stories that then capture Melbourne.”
So, a kind of fine Egyptian-cotton approach to capturing the life of the city?
“Exactly,” Murphy says. “We’ll see what sort of thread count, but we’ll try our best for satin.”
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