The New Paper
Sunday, Mar 18, 2012
After five years off the airwaves, a new marriage and a baby, Jamie Yeo is returning to radio.
On a morning show. For the first time.
And in direct competition with her former husband, Class 95 DJ Glenn Ong.
The local actress, TV host and DJ will be co-hosting The Power Breakfast Show on Power98 with Power98 DJ Sonja Steinmetz and new addition, industry veteran Hubert Tang.
The trio will begin duties on Monday.
The revamped line-up was revealed at a press conference yesterday by the station's new programming consultant, Shareen Wong, who is also returning to radio after a hiatus.
Wong, 37, had contacted Yeo last November, suggesting they meet up to chat.
Yeo, 34, told The New Paper in an earlier interview: "We talked about me going back to radio, which was an interesting idea and very exciting to me, but I told her I had to think about it."
At the time, Alysia, Yeo's daughter with her English husband Thorsten Nolte, 37, had just turned one.
The couple own a marketing firm, Upfront Media.
"I really didn't have the time for anything full time. I have a company to run, I have my husband, my daughter. The last thing I wanted to do was to steal time away from her," she said.
After the first round of discussions with the Power98 team, Yeo's initial decision was to not take up the offer due to family commitments.
Yeo - who hosted the Say It With Music programme on weekday nights for 987 from 2001 to 2006 - said she has had several job offers since she gave birth to Alysia in 2010.
The offers included one from an international news agency which wanted her to travel around the region to speak to sports personalities, but she rejected them.
"I always thought I'd never want to do anything that took me away from my family too much," she said.
But in the end, Yeo said she was made an offer she "couldn't resist" in the form of a part-time contract.
"To be honest, the money side of it is just a bonus for me; it'll allow me to save for my baby, buy her nice things. It's not a bread and butter issue.
"More importantly, Power was really willing to accommodate my timing," she said.
While other morning show DJs straggle to work at four or five in the morning, Yeo will be joining her co-hosts only at 7am.
"If I had to wake up at 5am, I'd hardly have any sleep because Alysia wakes up once a night, at around 2am," she said.
"I'm so grateful to my co-hosts for being so understanding."
Tang and Steinmetz will be up bright and early to kick off the show at 6am.
Yeo, who has known Tang since her days at MediaCorp Radio, said the energy among the three of them isgreat.
But will it be good enough to beat a certain morning show featuring a certain former hubby?
"Honestly, I've got no ambitions of outdoing him," she said.
Aware that she is going into a time slot that Ong - whom she married in 2004 and divorced in 2009 - has been at for years, she said she has no plans to "take on his style".
"I'm not Glenn," she said. "I could never outdo him in terms of style."
Though she doesn't habitually listen to morning shows, she has been flipping stations recently in the mornings to find out what her peers are up to.
And that includes Class 95's Morning Express show.
"There are no hard feelings between Glenn and myself," she said.
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