Watts is a writer, spoken-word artist, DJ and regular of the Melbourne arts scene; when he spoke, it was thoughtfully, and about things from the arts to current issues. He had other RRR presenters stepping in to co-present, and they were similarly intelligent people like Alicia Sometimes. Though most of the show wasn't talk but music; the music was an eclectic selection, spanning decades, and I don't recall him playing the same track twice; the music was radio programming at its finest, in the same tradition as John Peel.
The three regular breakfasters, however, are the typical crew of professional buffoons, joking and guffawing about current news, sports and pop culture, in a marginally more intelligent way than on commercial radio. The volume of chatter exceeds that of music, and the music is repetitive: they apparently bring in a handful of CDs, choose one track from each and play that week in, week out. I cannot count the number of times I've heard, for example, Wolfmother's "Apple Tree" or Danger Doom's "Space Ho's" (which they played today again) on the show in the past few months. (Not that these are necessarily bad songs, but if I wanted to hear the same "alternative" tracks over and over, I'd buy a FM radio and tune into Xfm or something.)
I'm thinking of reprogramming my RRR recording scripts to skip the breakfast show altogether and wake me to different programmes.