The ‘Magic’ of Hamish & Andy

SCA giants Hamish and Andy have revealed some of their secrets of their success at the National Commercial Radio Conference.

Having been friends from their student days and in an on-air partnership for a decade, a certain amount of trust is essential to making the Hamish and Andy dynamics work.

Both credit each other, and their friendship, for making it work with Hamish telling the audience of peers:

“You’re hoping to have a conversation where you’re on the same wave length and finding the same thing funny and building and building it.

“The natural instinct is to think if we need to put heaps of effort and planning into it. But as time goes on, you realise that will kill a genuine moment on radio”.

Andy expanded on that idea of planning versus spontaneity on their show.

“There are still a lot of people who will tell each other what they’re going to say and that works for them, but that would take the fun out of it for us.

“We don’t tell each other what we’re going to say and you go into each day genuinely excited about what’s going to happen. And with ideas, Ham and I try not to play in the same area again”.

As much as spontaneity and a deliberate stance of not looking for the next ‘big’ thing they can do, friendship is a major part of their success on-air, which Hamish readily admitted.

“It’s a very odd thing for people, who’ve been mates since Uni. It’s a weird thing to have this (radio) as your job, You don’t want anything to damage it. You’d lose your job and your friendship”.

“There’s never a guarantee that something will work, but if it makes us laugh, there’s a good chance it will work with the audience”.

It’s clearly a ‘formula’ that works with the recent news that the pair will remain on air through 2017.