What do you do when all of your stories fall through the day before you go to air?
A. Run repeats
B. Make a whole new show in 24 hours…
In today’s special episode we’re taking you back to the wonderfully chaotic early days of All The Best, to reflect on the legacy of Jesse Cox, a visionary audio storyteller and the co-founder of All the Best, who passed away in 2017.
Through a combination of personal stories, archived audio, and reflections of friends and past colleagues, this episode celebrates Jesse’s groundbreaking contributions to Australian radio, as we pay tribute to his fearless creativity.
This episode also marks the re-launch of Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship. Established in 2020 in his honour (briefly paused in 2022), the fellowship was designed to support aspiring audio storytellers, inheriting Jesse’s mission to “strengthen the Australian audio community, push storytelling boundaries, and amplify underrepresented voices.”
From 2025, each recipient of the fellowship will receive $1000 to create an ambitious audio feature story, supported by an individualised learning program and national broadcast outcome.
Apply to the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship 2025
Applications are now open for the 2025 Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship. Click here to apply. Applications close at 5 pm on Wednesday November 20th 2024.
We are indebted to Eliza Sarlos, Belinda Lopez,, Miles Martignoni, Zacha Rosen, Louise Cox and Jesse’s family for their contributions and help telling this story.
Special thanks also go to the JCAF and FBi Radio teams for helping to make All The Best the new home of the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship.
This story features material from Vibewire and music by Blue Dot Sessions.
All The Best Credits
Executive Producer: Phoebe Adler-Ryan
Editorial Producer: Melanie Bakewell
Host: Madhuraa Prakash
[00:00:00] Stories from around the corner and around the country. You’re listening to All The Best. Proudly supported by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Mads: You’re listening to All The Best from FBI Radio 94. 5. I’m Madhura Prakash. Before we get into this week’s stories, I want to take a moment and acknowledge that I’m recording from stolen Gadigal land and pay my respect to Gadigal elders past and present.
I also want to recognize that the area where I’m recording from, Bradfern, has long been a place of storytelling, strength, resistance, and resilience for First Nations communities.
Okay, so here’s the thing. All the Best is launching an audio fellowship, or I guess relaunching it. It’s the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship. [00:01:00] It’s been running for the past few years and supported the incredible work of Australian talent like Patrick Abood, Jay Uwe and Christine Kix. But next year, 2025, it’s going to be homed by us.
All the best, and it’s going to support emerging audio producers with some cash, some tailored mentorship and audio masterclasses. And I know our fellows are going to make some incredible work in the spirit of the fellowship’s namesake, Jesse Cox.
Jesse: We forget sometimes the power of, of putting on a pair of headphones and just being lost in that story.
Mads: You’ve heard of Jesse Cox, right? He was one of the co creators of this show and left a huge impact on audio storytelling in Australia in a short amount of time. Today’s episode is about him. Now I’m going to hand you over to the very safe hands of our executive producer Phoebe And our editorial manager, Mel.
Mel: Hey, I’m Mel. I’m here with Phoebe, our executive producer.
Phoebe: Hello.
Mel: Uh, you don’t [00:02:00] often hear our voices every week. We are behind the scenes pulling together this show.
Phoebe: We better get to work.
Mel: In 2010, Eliza Sarlos,
Bridget Dagg and Jesse Cox founded the show that you’re listening to right now. All The Best was going to be a local storytelling show. And I was going to fill the arts and culture brief at FBI radio, with local voices and local stories.
Jesse Cox went down to meet some of the regulars. Let’s go inside.
And I might be able to give back and help a couple of the young kids. I didn’t give much thought, uh, to Australia today.
This is All The Best on FBI Radio, 94. 5. My name is Jesse Cox, I’m one of the producers on the show. football, and Jesus Christ, and drinking.
And the heart of this social drinking scene is He took me to a small photo on the wall of when the gym had just opened.
Has it changed much in those 20 years you’ve been coming? It has not changed at all, it was exactly the same. We’re starting [00:03:00] the show this morning on All The Best with some Atmos that we recorded.
Here’s Jesse’s first radio story from 2010. It’s the best job in Sydney. All those dudes in suits, they suck.
They’re sitting in their offices, playing with their computers. Not for me. He grabbed a recorder and hit the streets to talk to Sydney’s bike couriers.
Jesse: I spent the day hanging out with Shifty and the other bike couriers who battle the city, rain, hail or shine, to deliver packages all across the CVD.
Darting in and out of buses, taxis and jaywalking pedestrians, on a normal day these couriers can travel over a hundred k’s. Pedestrians just like to, you know, look at their iPhone and walk around with their head down while there’s plenty of Jumping around people and driving them out of the way. With road rage, it’s pretty bad.
One of my friends the other day had his cheekbone smashed in by some thug. No one’s on your side, sort of thing. You’re like stuck between a rock and a hard place. When I was young, I used to get [00:04:00] pretty angry at some things that happened on the road, but I haven’t been doing it for a while. It’s like water off a duck’s back, you know.
We said we want to make radio documentaries. Uh, we pretended we knew what we were doing. We had, uh, no idea what we were doing. We certainly didn’t have any, uh, training or experience, but in the spirit of community radio, we were giving it a go.
Eliza: It was so chaotic, and I’m sure if there are recordings of it, it’s quite embarrassing.
Mel: This is Eliza Sarlos, one of the early hosts and co founder of All The Best.
Eliza: You know, a guy in his 20s who had limited radio experience just knew what storytelling was and how to do it well and um, how to bring people along with this vision. That vision was to create a space for people to learn how to make a radio story.
He was a practicing artist at the time and I think he brought a lot of that energy to radio and there’s a lot more radio like that now, but at the time there [00:05:00] wasn’t that much in Australia and Jesse was really invested in the show succeeding and creating that platform for new storytellers and new stories.
Mel: In those early days, all the best performed live storytelling events. They held pitch meetings, getting everybody in the room to talk about their story ideas. They had 24 hour radio races where you had to make a piece real quick, and they collaborated with artists and writers festivals.
Belinda: There was no one getting in the way, it was just what you and your collaborator mates dreamed up.
Mel: This is Belinda Lopez, Jessie’s friend, colleague, and a former features producer at All The Best. The thing that I always admired about Jessie right from the very beginning was that he was not afraid. to fail. He, he kind of would launch himself into the unknown like he did with all the best, like he did with everything he did.
And he just had a crack.
Eliza Sarlos described two memorable episodes when failure seemed imminent. There was the time that she and Jesse tag teamed on a 24 hour story edit.
Eliza: Took breaks to [00:06:00] have little naps under the desk in the production booth. People with, uh, without Jesse’s spirit maybe would have said, Hey, screw it.
Let’s just play our best of, but Jesse was so committed to getting this story to air.
Mel: And the time and other show stories, which take a bit of pre production and a bit of planning, they all fell through.
Eliza: We didn’t have a show and I was like, let’s just do repeats. And Jesse was like, no, no, we’re just going to do a show in 24 hours. We’re going to get to air. Like, I think that was, I can’t remember, you know, it was a couple of days before, which, is absolutely nuts.
Belinda: They were short an episode, they had nothing to air that Saturday, and they just said, okay, everyone get your microphones out and just come up with something and just see what emerges.
Mel: Phoebe and I go digging in the All the Best archives to see if we can find this infamous 24 hour episode, the one where all the stories fell through. It’s called First Impressions, and on the website, the play bar does not work. Work.[00:07:00]
So we do a call out to the all the Best universe and we get a few leads. Maybe try Eliza Sarlos again. You could try Jesse’s mum, Louise. Belinda also suggests Miles Martini who worked with Jesse on the episode. So we ping off a few emails.
Phoebe: Mel, there are so many updates, but they all point to the same thing, which is.
No one knows where this material is.
Mel: I feel like it’s so kind of ironic because I just feel like I keep hearing that, you know, Jesse Cox was someone who loved spreadsheets and was incredibly organized and that would have had a handle on this, but we can’t find it. Speaking of mysteries, one of Jesse’s most famous radio stories It’s about a magic trick that his grandparents used to perform on the radio.
It was a trick they never revealed, became like a family secret. We can’t play that story for copyright reasons, thanks ABC, but here’s [00:08:00] an excerpt of an early version he made for All The Best. This is Jessie’s grandmother who was part of the performance.
The Piddingtons: What made the Pettitons mysterious was the fact that We, we never told them, um, what it was.
We used to say, you are the judge and people had to work it out for themselves. And we’d lead them up the garden path and leave little loopholes for them. And then they’d fall into the trap and have to listen next week. And then we’d close that loophole and do another one. So we always kept it as a mystery.
Mel: Jesse played his own tricks too.
Belinda: My. absolute favorite documentary that he made was called The Real Tom Banks because I remember how it made me feel When he played a generous trick on the listener.
Mel: Belinda also worked with Jesse at the ABC, where he produced award winning documentaries [00:09:00] and co created audio centric programs like Radio Tonic, Long Story Short, and This Is About.
Belinda: Like I had this visceral reaction of, oh my gosh, because often I feel like at this point in the game I can pick it, I can see it coming, and I didn’t. And, and, but it wasn’t a kind of trickery that was just to indulge the maker. It was actually to enhance the humanity of the game. of the person in the story and I thought it was just exactly the kind of work that we were all trying to make.
Mel: It seems like Jesse is so often behind the scenes instead of in front of the mic but here he is in front of the mic talking about what’s going on behind the scenes.
Belinda: What I love about audio is when you’re doing stories you’re You’re hiding so much. Like everything, you’re cutting up multiple little bits, whether you’re working in film or radio or even, you know, the visual space.
You’re cutting up multiple bits. In radio, you can hide all those cuts.
Eliza: I wish [00:10:00] everyone could know what went into the show.
Mel: We also wish that we could just, like, find the show.
In an email from Louise, that’s Jessie’s mum, she tells us how much she used to love listening into the show when Jessie was just starting out, how the team were winging it, and how much they loved it, about the faded FBI sticker that’s still on their letterbox.
Phoebe: I was just thinking, is it terribly boring or actually delightful that my favourite things have come from emails?
It’s like the reading out of these anecdotes in email is even more. Than the people we interviewed necessarily, where we’re hearing Jesse’s voice or the imprint of him secondhand.
Mel: One of those imprints comes in another email from All the Best alumni, Zasha Rosen. Phoebe has said before that she feels that Zasha is actually a living archive of All the [00:11:00] Best.
Phoebe: Actually, I do have a spreadsheet. Of what? Zasha sent me his live production schedule. Just like the one that we use for planning episodes. So it has all of the plans for that first impressions episode that we’re searching for. So in first impressions, Vincent Parfitt is a self proclaimed magician who always performs a magic trick when he first meets someone, doesn’t let her first impression of a neo Nazi.
See in her history of eugenics class, prevent her from getting to class to change her appearance sometimes when she first meets people. And then there’s the IRA glass interview.
Mel: Can you take me back to Sasha’s email? What did he say?
Zacha: 11th of January, 2012. 11:38 PM from Sasha Rosen. So, wow. Anyway, I don’t know if we have an idea for what to do with Ira yet, or indeed if you’re interviewing him as I type [00:12:00] this.
Anyway, this was the idea of what we can do with him that occurred to me during the show, while I was watching him speak. Ciao. Sasha. Idea. What is the universal meaning to be found in the story of Ira Glass? This is the story he tells. Stories about stories, stories about action, about things happening with all sorts of people.
His story has stories inside it. What’s universal in Ira Glass story about these stories? The curiosity, the search for meaning in ordinary people, the push to make the world an interesting place? The story here is, what does Ira want? What’s he looking for? Once we find the meaning from his story, about stories, then we make a theme for the whole show around it.
Jesse responds saying that Bridget Dagg and he, um, were half crashed, half invited to dinner at the Golden Century with Sydney Festival people and got a little bit on tape with him there. It sounds like most of the tape is them getting access to him and recording in a loud Chinese restaurant back when that was really difficult to deal with even compared to now.[00:13:00]
Um, they’re thinking the show could be about idols.
Mel: What do you think the significance is of that story? Why are we so interested in it?
Phoebe: I think there’s something quite poetic about the idea that we’re making a story in a way that’s about the idol of all the best. And this is a moment when he was us, and he was meeting his idol.
Mel: We become a bit obsessed with this tape, which actually nobody can find.
I just, I just feel like I keep coming back to Zasha’s story concept. Like, are we making the story that Zasha wanted to make?
Phoebe: Yeah, I think, I think in a way we are. But we started doing it before we read Zasha’s email.[00:14:00]
Mel: I guess the question is, how meta do we get?
A few days later, Miles Martignone sends me an email. He worked with Jessie on the episode that’s missing, First Impressions, and he’s found the recording. He also says that they go out box popping together, and that Miles thought that he was so terrible at it, and he was so glad that he was there with someone like Jessie.
But then, that Jesse turned to him and said,
Jesse: Well, I hate doing these things. I’m really bad at approaching people.
Mel: Anyway, here’s a bit of the episode.
First Impressions: Sometimes you get incredible stories. Really, really great stories. And sometimes, Sometimes you have a week like we’ve had where there just haven’t been any stories.
If you could see Jesse right now, he’s, he’s sitting in the studio, he’s, you can hear him laughing at his, himself, it’s, it is a bit of a ridiculous situation to be in when you produce a weekly radio show to not [00:15:00] have a show to be able to bring to you this morning. Well it’s kind of what you live for each week, you, you’re working towards, you’re working towards it.
A 10 a. m. on a Saturday and, and you’re making a radio program and this week, well, we’ve kind of failed. We, we haven’t made it. We failed miserably. We failed miserably. I just want to step back for a moment and say, look, we did have really good story ideas. So some of the stories that we were chasing for the past few weeks for this program, we had producers going out.
And, and making content, we had stories which involve people who used to dress up and pretend to be men when they were women. We had stories about a neo Nazi who was confused and developed this beautiful relationship with this other, with this person who was completely opposite to that. We had stories about magicians, stories, all these stories about first impressions.
And so last night, I get this phone call from Jesse, and he tells me exactly what he has just told you with, you know, the optimistic spin of we did have all these great stories. It was going to be excellent. And now we have nothing. [00:16:00] I had this moment as I was looking at the computer earlier today. And the last story kind of fell through.
I thought, well, what do you do when you don’t have a show? You just have to kind of call a spade a spade and say, you don’t have a show, but I’ve got a solution. If it was the show, the show was to be themed around first impressions. We’ve kept that theme. So I’m thinking I just go out and have a first impression.
I think I just give myself 24 hours to meet people and I just try and have a really, really interesting day tomorrow. And if I have a really, really interesting day and I record the people I meet, then I kind of feel like we might have a program by the time you hear this. So over the next hour we will be hearing stories on first impressions, particularly, specifically Jesse’s first impressions.
I don’t know what they’re going to be, I can’t tell you much more. I have no idea what they will be. In fact, because we have to tape it tonight, we actually can’t introduce it, apart from to say that I’m leaving the studio right now and I literally have 24 hours [00:17:00] to, to, to, to make the show. But you know what?
Keep listening. I guarantee you it’s going to be entertaining. It might even be good. I think, I think it will be good. Jesse, I think you should stop talking. Get out of here. Go, go and get these stories. Alright, I’m leaving. I’m, I’m off. Thanks. Okay.
One of the founders of All The Best, Jesse Cox, is saying goodbye after three years with the program. Jessy was instrumental in building up this show. As a former Features Executive Producer, he helped form a new generation of radio storytellers. The team’s efforts have paid off. Last weekend, we were awarded a prize for Best Spoken Word and Current Affairs Program by the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia, and Jessy had a big part to play in that.
Jesse: We’ve managed to build that program, we’ve managed to get it funded, uh, managed to get it distributed by the Community Rated Network around Australia. What I find [00:18:00] super exciting about this space is that it is a completely traditional medium, but it is evolving to include pictures, to in Include online to include GPS.
And um, I think what’s exciting to see is that yeah, how that independent sector can grow. Because we all know that there’s uh, money is disappearing out of journalism, disappearing out of media organisations. So it’s going to really require us as an independent sector to find interesting ways to fund that through crowdsourcing, through possible foundations.
But it’s the very beginning of that work and that’s where I’m excited for this next part of, I guess, my interest and life to uh, to look at how that sector can grow.
Mel: After all the best, Jesse hopped over to the ABC. And while there he managed to make some of his brilliant ideas happen. He produced GPS located audio stories at Cockatoo Island, and a series called Radio with Pictures that went to the Sydney Opera House.
He even went on to win a couple of Third Coast awards, that’s like the Sundance of sound, and a Walkley, by the time that [00:19:00] he was 31 years old. But then, in 2017, Jesse passed away suddenly. Belinda Lopez spoke at the memorial.
Belinda: I remember the first time I met Jesse, he started talking to me about legacy. And I think back now, what kind of 25 year old talks about legacy?
And he wasn’t talking about his own legacy. I had to work that out. It was like, Oh no, he’s, he’s not speaking about himself. He was talking about the show and how the founders had set up the structures and the funding necessary so that this show could continue and could be passed on from generation to generation of radio makers.
And that continues today. All the Best is still around.
Mel: In 2022, All the Best celebrated its 500th episode by going back and talking with former executive producers who have passed through the show. Sasha Rosen left this note about the house that Jesse had [00:20:00] helped to build.
Zacha: I’m Zacha Rosen, and I joined All The Best maybe a year after it first got going, maybe a little longer.
Back then there was nothing like this show, not in Australia. All The Best taught me how to make radio, it taught me how to make narrative radio. I think one of the biggest successes of the show itself was is that now you can make radio like that all over Australia. You can make it on podcasts, you can make it on big networks like the ABC.
It’s, it’s a different world. And although All the Best is still out there training people, it’s now part of the world that it’s helped to create, which is a world where this show is not the only show. Where this show is not the only place you can learn to make radio like this, even though it’s still a great place to learn it.
And I think that’s a pretty amazing legacy.
Mel: That episode was bittersweet. Our funding hadn’t come through, and the [00:21:00] future for the show looked uncertain. But then all the best was approached by Jesse’s friends and family. They’d set up a fellowship in his memory to support audio makers, and it needed a new home. They looked back to community radio.
Belinda: People like Jesse are so necessary because they kind of look at the ruins and say, well, what can we build now, you know, so as long as we keep having people like that, then these structures will keep being built to new again and again,
Mel: We want to leave you with one final email. It’s from Jesse Cox. It’s one that Eliza Sarlos dug up and it’s about getting shit done.
Eliza: This email was one that was sent in response to a forward from Caroline Gates, who was the [00:22:00] program manager at FBI at the time. Uh, and it was after we’d just broadcast the story of FBI as part of our first supporter drive show, the story of FBI was our attempt to. retell the story of how FBI radio in Sydney came to be.
Um, it was of course at home and, uh, something we felt really passionate about and wanted to do a good job of it. And in the wake of that show, there was a really great energy and excitement, both about the station and where it had come from. And also the show, the email goes, I think two big things come out of telling the story about FBI.
One, if you have an idea, believe in it. And get together the right people to share that vision and try and make it a reality. Then eventually it becomes just that, a reality. And the path towards that is not short, but by staying true to that vision, you eventually not only get there, but get there with the integrity of the idea still intact.
I think we can learn a lot from that in shaping the future of All the Best. And two, [00:23:00] the power of storytelling is an amazing thing. And good stories told well on radio have an amazing capacity to make people feel. Let’s hope we can keep doing this on All the Best. as we continue to shape the type of storytelling we want to share with our listeners.
Mel: We hope these values that motivated Jesse, his fearlessness in storytelling, his willingness to just give things a go, and his drive to tell stories that have the capacity to move people, to make them feel empathy for others, continue to be channeled in the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship.
Phoebe: Applications are now open for 2025.
You can find all the details and apply anytime before November 20th at our website. www. allthebestradio. com. The Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship is open to anyone with foundational skills in audio who want to push the boundaries of audio storytelling. We’re looking for applicants [00:24:00] from any creative practice or background who can demonstrate Jesse’s fearless approach to storytelling and sound.
Jesse: We forget sometimes the power of the Of putting on a pair of headphones and just being lost in that story.
Mel: Special thanks to Louise Cox and Jesse’s family to Eliza SLOs, Belinda Lopez, miles, Martin Yoni, and Asha Rosen for their help telling this story.
Phoebe: Special thanks. Also goes to the JCA and FBI radio teams.
for helping to make All the Best the new home of the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship.
Mads: All the Best would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we make these stories [00:25:00] and pay our respect to elders past and present. All the Best is made at FBI Radio on Gadigal land in association with SIN and 3RRR on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung lands. And 8CCC on Arrernte and Warumungu Lands.
The all the best editorial producer is Mel Bakewell. And Phoebe Adlerian is our executive producer, and thanks to the many volunteers that make all the best possible shining bird composed our theme music and Annie Hamilton design the artwork. We’re heard across Australia on the Community Radio Network and were made possible by the arts.
Gallery of New South Wales and the Community Broadcasting Foundation. You can find our full archive of more than 500 episodes at all. The best radio.com. I’m Madura Prakash. Thanks for [00:26:00] listening.