Kyle and Jackie O weathered commercial and community pressures until they didn't

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is a Pisces, on the cusp of Aquarius. Which apparently means 2026 is a year of high "cosmic energy" for him, where he will be "catapulted into the limelight". Correct! And I understand it should be a cracker year for Pisceans, one of abundance and prosperity: "When one closes, another opens, which is why they'll be able to accomplish their dreams easily."

I don't think Andrew anticipated the door opening might be that of a police station, and the door closing would be his own front door — behind him. He hasn't been charged but remains under investigation for suspected "misconduct in public office". 

Readings like this one are probably why I don't study the zodiac.

But after more than a quarter of a century of dominating radio waves together, it was, oddly enough, a discussion about the former prince's star sign that — at least on the surface — finally caused the relationship between Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson to crack.

In short, she was interested, and he was not.

'It's not an attack'

On February 20 — a day after Andrew's birthday — Henderson left the "Kyle and Jackie O Show" on KIIS FM after a seven-minute on-air tirade from Sandilands. He said she was too obsessed with astrology after she tried to dissect the star sign of the disgraced royal.

"Your fixation on this has made you almost unworkable," he said. "You're off with the fairies, you are unfocused, you don't give a sh*t … everyone in this building has mentioned it to me."

Though she said she was offended, he continued to berate her, saying she was not doing her job properly. She cried and labelled it a "total attack".

Sandilands didn't care: "It's not an attack, it's an actual fact, babe, I'm sorry."

Henderson has not been back on air since, and says she can "no longer work with" Sandilands.

Both behind the scenes, and on air, clearly tension has been mounting for months.

Network owners ARN have said it considered the incident "serious misconduct" by Sandilands, in breach of contract, and have given him two weeks to somehow remedy things.

The amount of money at stake is mind-boggling — the pair had signed a $200 million contract to continue the show for another 10 years, receiving $10 million each per year. The pressure of this had reportedly contributed to hundreds of job cuts across the company, 240 jobs in the last year alone.

So perhaps a stretched, stressed management will not be overly disappointed.

Decades of controversy

It is an odd moment to topple, though, given the show has weathered decades of criticism and censoring for sexism and nastiness. Like the time in 2011, Sandilands said the much-adored and respected Magda Szubanski would shed more weight in a concentration camp. Or in 2012 when he mocked a disabled infant or called a female journalist a "piece of sh*t" on air.

I mean, have we just grown sick of this, of the public cruelty and regular trashing of decency codes?

Kyle and Jackie O are both gifted broadcasters, but aimed to shock.

What about the time, in 2024, after they had moved to KIIS, when they played the sounds of their production staff urinating, and had to guess if it was a man or woman hovering over the mic-ed up toilet bowl? Or in 2009 when they told a Cambodian-Australian woman that they would bring her niece to this country, but send her back if she did not correctly choose which door she was standing behind? (She guessed wrongly, cried and they said her niece could stay). 

Then there was the moment, that same year, they wired up a 14-year-old kid to a lie detector and had her mother ask her about her sexual history, only to have her reveal that she had been raped at 12? Who grills a 14-year-old about sex live on air, or ever?

It was not just about the hosts, but also about the callers given air time — like the bloke in 2024 who described his favourite sexual position as a "butcher's wheelbarrow" — holding the limbs of a woman like a wheelbarrow, "and then you go to town and just butcher the p*ssy".

A complacent Sydney

Perhaps Sydney had grown complacent — as Tim Burrowes put it in Mumbrella, when they launched in Melbourne, "What had crept up was the increasingly X-rated content of the show in Sydney. The regular audience had got used to it, and the sleepy regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), had failed to regulate it.

"Suddenly, the outside world was listening anew, and was shocked by the extremity of the content. The K+J team were unwilling or unable to dial it back, to make it accessible to the new audience."

The trammelling of the show's success, and arrest of its proposed march to national domination promptly amplified the voices of its critics.

The most prominent was the activist group Mad F***ing Witches, who have lambasted Sandilands for what they describe as "violent misogyny" on social media for years, openly and successfully pressuring advertisers to drop their support for the show. The hashtag they employed was #vileKyle.

The group claims that 1900 advertisers have pulled funding from the show as a result.

Regulators were also circling closer with things like…. standards.

Last year, the ACMA found several breaches of decency rules, and flagged an intention to add a further condition to the KIIS license — to refrain from airing content "which is highly offensive to an ordinary reasonable listener or which contains strong and explicit sexual references". Sandilands was furious about those he described as "pearl clutchers… [who] don't like me telling dick jokes".

Was it prudery, or was it an objection to a culture of casual, often aggressive misogyny, chiefly by Sandilands, but that flourished on the watch of both Sandilands and Henderson?

Witches take credit

This week, on Facebook, the Mad F***ing Witches claimed victory, saying this had all happened because of "the witches who follow and boost our social media posts; the witches who contact advertisers; the witches who send us tips and information and advice and support; and the witches who fund our workers.

And most particularly, our volunteers, who work harder than anyone knows or could understand, purely because they care so much about ridding Australia of misogyny and filth … We'll continue to change the world, one a***hole at a time."

This grassroots group, intent on recording and exposing toxic content, has maintained sustained pressure on advertisers to pull money from the show.

We don't have all the information yet on what caused this show's demise.

But the fact that we are now staring at the smoking embers of arguably Australia's most successful radio pairing surely must be linked to a pincer movement of increasingly uncomfortable commercial and community pressures.

Responding to the ACMA findings in November last year, Sandilands said: "Some people that never listen to this show have made a group of activist haters who force people, 'Hey, complain about this show, I know you've never heard it, but this guy is a misogynist'. That's what they're saying about me, which I believe is completely false," he said.

"So, this has left me in a weird position; what do I do?"

Guess we're all waiting to find out.

Julia Baird is an author, broadcaster, journalist and co-host of the ABC podcast, Not Stupid.