Bruno Bouchet on being the best EP in the country & then realising everyone, except Kyle & Jackie O, is replaceable

Bruno Bouchet has opened up about his all-or-nothing approach to radio and his need to be the best executive producer in the country.

His quest to be the best, however, also came with the humbling realisation that Sydney’s #1 FM Breakfast show can in fact survive, and thrive, without him.

Bouchet, the former EP of The Kyle & Jackie O Show and now Kyle Sandilands’ manager, was speaking to Anita Anabel on her new The Good Chat podcast.

He revealed he left the prominent EP position because he didn’t want to coast along and simply phone it in for the sake of it.

“Perhaps I’d run out of energy, perhaps the mental health stuff was starting to creep [in]… whatever it was, I just felt like ‘I don’t think I can nail it as much as I did in the past’, and that’s that,” he said.

“I was coming to the end of my contract and I was umming and arrring about signing on for another two or three years, and I sort of had this really honest self reflection, where I was like ‘I don’t think I can be as good as I was in the previous years’, and so, that being the case, I was like ‘Well, the decision’s then been made that I should do something else’.”

He said he sees too many people in prominent positions doing nothing remarkable with it.

“If you can’t give 100% of yourself to a gig, then you should give it to someone else,” he added.

In that vein, he said if he isn’t the best producer in the country, he can’t see the point.

He said the on-air team of Jackie ‘O’ Henderson and Sandilands were “bummed” when he revealed his decision, because they had a good thing going and the chemistry was right.

But it was humbling to realise, he said, that the show really didn’t need him.

“The senior producer that was working with me at the time, Sonia Jahshan, we had kind of worked together so closely that [the transition] was just seamless. The day I left, she stepped in and the show never missed a beat,” he said.

“And it can kind of be a bit humbling when you’re like, ‘I hope this show is shit without me’. But you’ve got to be very real with yourself and realise that on The Kyle & Jackie O Show, everyone is replaceable except for Kyle and Jackie O. That’s essentially it. And those guys had success before I came along, and they’ll have success long after I’m gone.”

The chat also covered his mental health, his most controversial on-air stunt and the toll of Breakfast radio hours.