Mick Molloy on ending Martin Molloy, leaving Hot Breakfast and shagging at work

Mick Molloy has opened up about his time in media, including the various times he’s been fired, noting that no matter how bad it gets, you should never burn your bridges.

“You’ve got to be careful in Australia in our business, there aren’t many bridges. Burn one, and even when you go, you’ve got to learn that there’s a fair chance that you will be trying to work with these people again at some stage,” he told the Herald Sun’s Sacked: Showbiz podcast.

He said his strategy of being a “media whore” – working across television, radio and cinema – gave him the best prospects of long-term survival.

Molloy now works on the syndicated Triple M Drive show Kennedy Molloy, but previously helmed the Hot Breakfast alongside Eddie McGuire and Luke Darcy.

He said when he left he was still in love with radio, but the show was taking him away from quality time with his young children.

His other hugely successful radio stint, Martin Molloy, ended via mutual agreement, he said, because it was simply too exhausting and all-consuming.

“As opposed to radio today where you kind of turn up and tell a funny story or talk about your day or what shampoo you’re using, that show was, we used to spend hours and hours writing it, making it and then producing it. And there was no template at that stage for a show that was on 54 stations. So, we were doing it really hard. We were spending massive hours a day. And by the end of it, it was a mutual agreement between me and Tony [Martin]. We both looked at each other and went ‘We’re exhausted’. But the network, that wasn’t a sacking, they were, they couldn’t believe we were leaving. We were a real cash cow for them and we’d kind of broken open a new area, which was national drive, which look at it now, it’s probably the most volatile. There’s these big network shows on there now,” he said.

The comedic performer also touched on the difficulties of finding love, particularly with organisations instituting “bonk bans” and women’s evolving expectations of men.

“You can’t even get a shag at work now”, he said, positing that 80% of coupled-up people he knows first came across their partners in the workplace.

Despite the challenges – and the sackings – Molloy said radio’s unpredictability is actually one of its key attractions.

“What I like about our business is it’s very hard to say what you’ll be doing five years from now, and the same still applies,” he said.