triple j throw a surprise party

Ollie Wards is Acting Program Director of triple j. He writes about a recent idea they ran on the J's….

Over the last few years, triple j breakfast's Tom and Alex have been throwing massive public parties. They started with 21sts for each other and then last year threw one for listener Kate Morton in Newcastle.

This year we wanted to move the story on a bit and do something different.

We were throwing ideas around about doing a surprise party, but had to work out how to have the whole country in on it without ‘the mark’ knowing about it.

So Tom and Alex did a call out for listeners to nominate a friend who was overseas in a remote country (so they probably wouldn’t be listening and would hopefully be doing something charitable).

Michelle in Melbourne nominated her friend Grace who was coming back from the Seychelles on Friday morning, where she’d been doing marine conservation for a couple of years.

We spent a couple of weeks meeting Grace’s friends and family on air, building up to her return. Then live on Friday morning, as Tom steered the ship in studio – Alex took a surprise welcoming party to Melbourne Airport.

Later that night the surprise continued to a big free party at Billboard in Melbourne with artists DJing like Missy Higgins, Illy and Alex from Oh Mercy. Here’s how it happened at the airport: