What next for Fitzy & Wippa?

Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli, one half of Nova Sydney’s Breakfast show Fitzy & Wippa, has opened up about his dynamic with co-host Ryan ‘Fitzy’ Fitzgerald and how the two create a workplace environment which enables them to survive in radio.

Wipfli said that in radio it can be easy, or even tempting, to get caught up in the politics and procedures of it all, but he’s learned to shut it all out.

“I think you play the game a little bit,” he said. “Everyone gets too passionate about things, you get stuck on things in this game, and you can very quickly start spiralling if you worry about all the small things. And I’ve gone through those stages, where you come in and go ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this anymore if they’re going to play that music. I cannot do that again. Why are we playing Nicki Minaj ‘Starships’ at 6am? It’s like another alarm clock going off for people. Guys, who’s in charge of the music here?’

“So you can’t worry about that kind of stuff. You’ve just got to focus on what you do.”

Wipfli was speaking to Anita Annabel on her podcast, The Good Chat, and revealed his Breakfast team largely stays away from the main Nova machine and just does its own thing.

“We’re very lucky within the team that we have. I think there’s maybe 12 of us in the Brekky team, and we’ve just got to make sure that we do what we do. And we’re a little bit separate from the other half of the building as well. So we keep our distance and not let that side of things get in the way of what we try to do creatively. And I think that’s the best thing you can do if you’re in the radio game, is try and create the environment for the creators to create, because you do need that time to think of a different way to do it or present the new challenge or whatever it might be.”

And despite being on air together for a decade, Wipfli said the Fitzy & Wippa show still had life in it.

“Lucky enough, we continue to come up with ideas that I think are great,” he said, adding that he and Fitzgerald have a very similar sense of humour.

“We’re very different people, most definitely we’re different people, but at the same time, we both share that understanding of ridiculous, and we love it. So if we’re constantly in the game of knowing what we’re doing and then we can find our way to that little play area called Ridiculous Park, then we love to do that.

“And I think also, when you’ve been doing it for so long, the challenge becomes how you’re going to do it differently, and not so much how you’re going to do it, because you don’t so much waste time on things that don’t work because you have a far greater read on the situation. But it’s just continuing to try and create different content and different ways of doing things. That’s the challenge.”

He also revealed he had spoken to good mate and radio powerhouse Hamish Blake about potentially working together down the track, but wasn’t sure if it was actually a great idea.

 

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“I mean we always talk about it, but at the same time I think we’re extremely close because we haven’t worked together. I’d hate that to ever get in the way of what we have now – that beautiful bromance,” he said.

Separate from radio, Wipfli, fresh off the back of his stint on Celebrity Apprentice Australia said he’d be keen to do more TV projects, as long as it’s not Dancing With The Stars – “I’d hate that. I’d never do that,” he promised.