Fifteen years, 12,075 hours of live TV and 3450 shoes gives David ‘Kochie’ Koch the title of one of the longest-running Australian breakfast TV show hosts. For a numbers man, the financial expert loved calculating these statistics.
Visiting Kochie and his wife Libby’s city apartment, the couple shares the good, bad and hilarious moments of Kochie’s Sunrise tenure.
Meeting her hubby more than 40 years ago, Libby – who revealed she watches him every morning – says she never expected to be married to a TV star.
‘I’ve been around well before all of this happened. We’ll be married 39 years in January,’ Libby explains. ‘I’m so proud of him.’
Surprisingly, Kochie had a controversial start on Sunrise.
‘I was only supposed to fill in for three months, and it’s been 15 years. After a year, the then managing director of Seven approached the board to get me fired because they thought I was too opinionated. Thankfully, I’m still here!’
Now, he’s a household name.
A celebrated finance journalist, Kochie, 61, knows he divides people: ‘People either love me or hate me because I have an opinion, but even the ones who disagree with me, they respect I know what I’m talking about. They may say: ‘He’s a boofhead and I disagree with him, but he’s good at finance and politics.”
The father-of-four also admits he has no regrets.
‘What you see is what you get. Over three hours of live TV a day, you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not. And we’ve won 14 straight years of breakfast TV, so something is working,’ he explains.
‘Fifteen years ago when we started, we were 10 per cent of the Today show’s audience and we reeled them in in 18 months, and have won every year since.’
For the full story see this weeks issue of New Idea – out now!
