Broadcaster Steve Price has taken a swipe at Kyle Sandilands amid his health scare but still offered some kind words for a man he once called a ‘buffoon’.
Sandilands revealed on Monday morning he had a brain aneurysm and required immediate brain surgery.
‘On Friday, I was told by my medical team, which sounds like I’m already very sick, that I have a brain aneurysm and it requires immediate attention, brain surgery,’ Sandilands said.
‘My doctor said if I didn’t get it checked, I would have died.’
Price, a long-time rival of Sandilands, addressed the situation on New Zealand radio station Newstalk ZB during his weekly news segment with Mike Hosking.
Despite having criticised the radio host for his controversial content over the years, Price expressed his hope for Sandilands’ recovery.
‘I’ve had real crack at this guy, because of his smutty content, in a number of newspaper columns that I’ve written and on television I’ve called him a buffoon,’ Price said.
‘Look, I hope it all works out well from him. He’s been and had a scan and now he’s got to go and have brain surgery because they’ve found an aneurysm on the brain.
‘I hope the surgery is successful and I hope he’s OK.’
Even amid the health scare, Price couldn’t resist taking a jab at Sandilands when discussing his and Jackie O’s much-hyped move to the Melbourne airwaves.
‘They rate number one in Sydney FM and more often than not number one overall,’ he told Hosking.
‘Last year they were been beamed into Melbourne, very unsuccessfully, rating about five per cent.’
In April, Price was highly critical of Sandilands’ first Melbourne show.
‘That garbage you put to air this morning, sexualised rubbish. Toxic, and nobody should listen to it,’ Price said, adding: ‘And you will be a massive failure in Melbourne.’
Sandilands has blasted Price on several occasions, calling the broadcaster a ‘demented old loon’.
‘He is someone that knows about failure,’ he said about Price.
‘I think the last breakfast show he did in Melbourne pulled a 2.6 (referring to the poor radio ratings for Price’s show on Melbourne Talk Radio in 2012).
‘You meet more people at the servo filling up fuel (than Price had listeners).’
Sandilands put his brain aneurysm down to ‘a life of cocaine abuse’.
‘It’s not a blockage. It’s like, imagine your blood vessel is the garden hose, and the garden hose is weak and it blisters out like a big bubble, you know, like a puncture in it. (It’s) like a bike tyre with a big bubble – that bubble’s the aneurysm, so it’s not blocked,’ he said.
‘It’s expanded and if it bursts, (I will become) either a vegetable, in the wheelchair, or dead.’
Sandilands will be away from his radio show for up to eight weeks.
