Trevor Chappell (radio presenter)

Trevor Chappell is an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) local radio presenter based in Melbourne. He is currently one of the regular presenters of the Overnights program broadcast nationally from 2:00 am to 5:30 am (or 6:00 am in some areas) on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings. He is joined by a variety of regular guests every night.

Chappell was born and raised in Western Australia where, after completing high school, he moved into working in a range of odd-end jobs - including mines, wheat bins in the far north-west to even working as a builder's labourer.

Once he turned 21, Chappell moved to Victoria where he studied teaching and then moved into youth work. Three years after this, he enrolled in an acting course at the National Theatre in Melbourne.^[1]

Overnights

Chappell hosts the Overnights program Australia-wide on Monday to Thursday mornings (Rod Quinn hosts the program on Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings) from 2:00 am to 6:00 am AEST (midnight to 4:00 am AWST. South Australia and Northern Territory have their feed delayed 30 minutes to enable it to be broadcast in the same local time slot. His program features a "How, When, Where, Why" quiz on minutiae of pop culture: television, popular music, movies, comic books etc., which stimulate involved discussions within that framework, with only occasional excursions into real life events. No subject is too juvenile or too recondite to be discussed in depth and with apparent seriousness. This light-hearted spirit is continued by his regular guests, including Scott Goodings (on television). This atmosphere evaporates for the second half of the program, when adult subjects are discussed at a mature level, with his guest interviewees and talkback callers and their subjects treated with intelligence, compassion and utmost courtesy. An overwhelming proportion of listeners, or at least respondents who go to air, are male, many of whom identify themselves as truck drivers. His programs may be heard live through the ABC's Internet service, and are available to be heard again on-line for the following 24 hours. Chappell has listeners in Monterrey, Mexico; Portland, Oregon; Cheung Chau, Hong Kong; Tokyo, Japan; and Denver, Colorado, plus "Tom from Delaware".

On 28 April 2010, Chappell hosted a discussion about how Wikipedia works and debated its reliability with a collection of callers.

Some callers during the quiz have said that Chappell does not give clues out during the quiz; however the technical operator and second host, Michael Pavlich, has become known as a "massive clue giver" and, the joke goes, has now earned more audience respect.

He is known for his dislike of the Beatles and his recall of the TV shows Owly's School, F Troop and popular Perth children's TV characters Fat Cat and Percy Penguin.

He is also a huge ABBA fan, with a special fondness for Bjorn; and he is known as a consummate Lapsang Souchong tea aficionado.

Some listeners believe that Chappell should be recognised for his compassion on 8 February 2009 in the early morning program after the "Black Saturday" bush fires in Victoria. The way he spoke and showed compassion to survivors on that morning, through the radio waves, will live in many listeners' memory. One listener wrote, that these survivors had just experienced some very significant life-threatening incidents and that he had treated them with outstanding empathy.

References

External links

• Trevor Chappell webpage