Michael "Tunny" Tunn (born 18 January 1974) is an Australian radio announcer and television presenter. He was hired by Australia's national youth station Triple J in 1991 at the age of 17, making him Australia's youngest professional radio presenter at the time.[1]
Biography
Tunn was born and raised in Adelaide. He got his start in radio presenting 'Rock and Roll High School', a requests program for high school students, on Triple M (Triple M has since renamed to Three D Radio). Triple J hired him on 25 August 1990 as part of a major change to its lineup of presenters.[2] The decision to hire Tunn attracted a high amount of media attention.[3] He was, however, unable to go on air at the station until he completed high school.[4]
After completing school, Tunn moved to Sydney, where the station's studios were located and presented midnight to dawn shows over the Australian summer until be was given his own requests program, called 'J-Klub', in February 1991 when he was 17 years old.[3] In May 1991, he also began hosting The Afternoon Show on the ABC television station. By 1995, when Tunn was aged 21, he had presented shows on almost all of Triple J's shifts.[5] He hosted Triple J's evening request program The Request Fest between 1992 and 1997, and was also the presenter of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's children's TV program The Afternoon Show during the early to mid 1990s.
Tunn quit Triple J in late 1999. At this time, he was the station's assistant music director, but was frustrated by a lack of promotion opportunities.[6] In June 2000, he joined bigfatradio.com, an online radio station that used proprietary web page streaming technology so that the end user was able to view pages sent from the studio.[7]
After the collapse of the venture in the Dot-Com bubble burst,[8] he joined the Austereo network in January 2001 and became the Assistant Program Director and Afternoon Presenter of Triple M Adelaide and SAFM. He left the position on 27 March 2006. Later diagnosed as bipolar, he lives off a $40 (Australian dollars) disability pension. In 2016, the 42 year old Tunn pleaded guilty in Adelaide to a shoplifting incident. He was fined $50 and ordered to pay $260 in court-related costs, and released without a conviction.[9]
References
- ^ Watson, Bronwyn (18 February 1991). "Triple J Releases its own Top Tunn". The Sydney Morning Herald.
- ^ "The Afternoon Show hosts: Where are the presenters we rushed home from school to watch now?". au.lifestyle.yahoo.com. 31 December 2023. Retrieved 18 June 2024.
- ^ a b Holmes, Peter (20 May 1991). "The Afternoon Show". The Guide. The Sydney Morning Herald.
- ^ Chamberlin, Paul; Jurman, Elizabeth (1 September 1990). "Uneasy Rebirth for a Station". The Sydney Morning Herald.
- ^ Webb, Marius (21 April 1995). "No Grandstanding Here". The Sydney Morning Herald.
- ^ Sheil, Fergus (25 February 2000). "An Old-boys' Network?". The Age.
- ^ Dent, Jackie (19 June 2000). "Just Like The Old Days". The Guide. The Sydney Morning Herald.
- ^ Needham, Kirsty (13 October 2000). "Bigfatradio.com Goes Bigfatbroke". The Sydney Morning Herald.
- ^ Former Triple J radio star Michael 'Tunny' Tunn Pleads guilty to stealing pies, sausage rolls, dailymail.co.uk. Accessed 18 June 2024.