What’s next for Gareth Cliff?

Gareth Cliff, who recently left 5FM, announced he will be running his own digital breakfast show. File picture: Dumisani Sibeko

Gareth Cliff, who recently left 5FM, announced he will be running his own digital breakfast show. File picture: Dumisani Sibeko

Published Mar 31, 2014

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GARETH CLIFF and his team hugged each other in the studio as he finally buried his show this morning.

An upbeat Cliff said he’s had a terrific time on 5FM, “I’m feeling very great, I’m very happy”, said Cliff as he smiled.

Several of his listeners came into the studio to bid him farewell.

One of them was Dylan Eksteen, audio technology student, also popped into studio to say goodbye to Cliff.

He said to him, “I love your show”. Cliff responded in jest saying, “Just say I love s***”.

Popular radio station, 5FM are keeping mum after Gareth Cliff announced his departure from his breakfast show today. For the past seven years Cliff, who is also a judge on M-Net’s Idols, has enjoyed a big following from 6am – 9am on weekdays.

Throughout his show this morning he kept on insisting that the announcement was not an April Fools joke but that today was the team’s last day on the station. Leigh Ann Mol, Thabo Modisane and Damon Klvari will be joining Cliff on his exodus.

Cliff said that he would be leaving the station for good but was not at liberty to say where he would go next. “Who knows. I might be leaving radio for good,” he added.

5FM publicist, Kim Sears said that no deals with other DJs had been concluded which meant that the station would only make Cliff’s permanent replacement announcement later in the month, while it is reported by Channel24 that Grant Nash will be Cliff’s stand-in for the month of April.

Sears confirmed that their afternoon drive time DJ, Fresh would be staying on at the station.

Since the early days of Alex Jay and Mark Gilman, the station have had a tradition of purging their drive time DJs after approximately seven years.

However there is speculation that Cliff was forced to go when he recently played the song Nkandla Style on his show. The song is a big hit on YouTube with over 260 000 hits in three days. It was created by he and his team and is based on the big hit Gangnam Style with a chorus that goes: “If you’re number one you get to drive the gravy train, you get to fly the Gupta plane, you know the power of the shower.”

In the meantime, SABC’s other commercial station, Metro FM are planning to announce major changes to their line-up tonight.

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