Cliff Brooks is the assertive, no-holds-barred one who loves to party, while Jason Zammit is the shyer, more tactful one who prefers a quiet night in with his girlfriend, watching a DVD.

Or so they tell me…

There was only one way to find out and that was to sit them down together at their favourite hangout, The Dubliner.

This place has changed hands several times (some may remember it as Vis-à-Vis and before that as Café Rouge). Now being run by Carl, it already has a faithful clientele who have spread the word about the good food and atmosphere. Carl is half-English and his business partner is from Dublin, hence the name, but he maintains, “this is not just another Irish pub”.

The restaurant upstairs is not usually open for lunch, but they have made an exception for us.

It is rather strange meeting people who work in radio for the first time, especially if you only know them as these disembodied

voices. You feel you know them because the voices are so familiar, but it takes a while to adjust to the way they look. Cliff, for example, sounds older than he looks (although he is constantly bemoaning the fact that he’s turned 30) while Jason is often told he looks nothing like he sounds.

“Someone once told me I sound like a big, tall black guy, which is fine by me,” he smiles. It’s not the first time that people have recognised him from his voice – depending on his mood, he might exchange a few words or try and hide behind his cap and sunglasses, saying “no it’s not me”.

Maybe he really is shy.

These two are like a comic duo, playing off each other’s humour and trading snappy one-liners. They both have a dry, ironic kind of wit which they have honed to perfection in their years of broadcasting.

Cliff and Jay met each other in a roundabout way as they hopped from one station to the next. It all started when Jason moved to Malta just after finishing high school.

“My parents were already retired here in Gozo, and I just lived it up for a couple of months until I ran out of cash,” he says in his Canadian accent.

After doing some bar work, he happened to meet Mark Spiteri from MAS communications who needed someone to do voice-overs. Jason’s father used to work at an ethnic radio station back in Toronto so the medium was not entirely new to him. Basically, however, it was a matter of learning the ropes “on the job”.

Then in 1993, Calypso radio got its licence and Jason joined the station.

“It was practically run by foreigners then, people who used to work with the BBC like Steve Joy, and that is how I got my training. It started off as an ‘oldies”’station, which was great because I got all my knowledge about music from that era. My first show was Jukebox Saturday Night playing 60s and 70s music which listeners loved. But then Calypso realised the market wasn’t big enough for oldies and they had to branch out into today’s music, targeting the 18-30 age group which was what Bay and Island Sound were doing.”

By the end of his stint at Calypso, Jason was doing everything, including reading the news, and he knew it was time to move on.

His next career move was to Island Sound in 1995 where he spent the next seven years. Unfortunately, what started out as a promising station ended on a sour note and it eventually folded.

“We all resigned in January 2002 and were just working our notice, so the owner just closed it down. Towards the end, although I was still on air, I was at the end of my rope.”

Both Cliff and Jay agree that it’s not just a fall in advertising revenue that can bring down a station, but poor management and a lack of vision.

“You need to have some zest as well in the format. The market is so small that I think at least one other station will go bust by the end of the year,” Cliff predicts.

Which bring us to Cliff’s part of the story. He is a Leeds lad, but “made in Malta” as he likes to tell it. His parents apparently conceived him while on holiday in Paceville.

He’s probably tired of being asked this, but: why did you come to Malta?

“I was working at a radio station in the UK, doing outside broadcasts, and I just got bored of England, moving around from one station to another. It’s a horrible place to live in right now, honestly. As soon as Tony Blair came into power I left, it’s become too politically correct. A Maltese ran one of the clubs I used to DJ at, and he suggested I come here, so I came for a holiday. I kept coming back and forth for a while. A friend of mine, who was Steve Joy, was working at Calypso and he suggested we meet up. In the meantime, however, I had been also approached by Island Sound so that is where I started.”

Jason: “He hasn’t told you that he used to bother tourists with time share.”

Having someone at an interview who knows all your past history can be very annoying.

“Yes, I bumped into a guy over here and he saw that I had the gift of the gab, so I did it for a month or so,” Cliff admits. “It’s a good product actually, it’s just had a lot of bad publicity.”

Cliff had his training with the Craig Chrysler Group that has now been bought out by Capital radio group in London. He began as a 16-year-old under the Youth Training Scheme being paid £32 a week (“at least you were getting paid,” quips Jason who did something similar as a student for a college credit).

Cliff got the job through sheer persistence. He kept badgering the station manager but couldn’t get an appointment, so he lied and told him he was a journalist from The Sun and that’s how he got in the door.

(“That’s the kind of determination Donald Trump would recognise”, remarks Jason).

Cliff continues: “I told him ‘I’m going to keep hounding you until you give me ten minutes’. They gave me a ten-minute chance to do a demo, and that’s when they gave me the job. It was a very good opportunity because radio is a very closed industry, you never see any vacancies advertised in the paper. So I was there, getting people’s tea and sorting out records for them. Then a DJ was sick one evening, they asked me to sit in for him and that was it.”

Jason says his experience with Calypso was similar: “I was thrown in at the deep end too. I was just doing voice-overs for their promotions but my real job was working with FXB making furniture. One day they phoned and asked whether I could do the drive time show, so I was filling in here and there. Then the chance came and I did regular breakfast shows, which is where they start you. Eventually they gave me the 60s and 70s show.”

Listening in to that show was another Island Sound DJ who would eventually join Cliff and Jay at XFM.

“I was only 20, obviously young, and Ozi later told me he couldn’t believe this young guy doing a golden oldies show. But he used to listen because he said I used to make it sound cool,” Jason recalls.

When Cliff and Jay eventually met up at Island Sound, they immediately clicked, despite coming from such different cultures. One thing they had in common was that they had both adapted to Malta’s laidback lifestyle.

Returned migrants either tend to stick it out here in Malta, or high tail it back to where they came from after a few years. Jason has stayed, “I have been back to Canada to visit, but every time I’m away I find myself going on and on about how great Malta is. I love what I do and I like living here.”

As for Cliff, it’s the longest place he’s ever stayed in and “corny as it might sound” it’s the only place he calls home.

“I’m not patriotic about the UK at all, only about the football. I wouldn’t live there if you paid me a million pounds. Bring back Margaret Thatcher is what I say.”

This seems to be a sore point so we turn back to the safer subject of radio.

I ask them whether anyone can learn to be a DJ.

“Well, the problem in Malta is that yes, anyone can be a DJ,” Cliff points out.

But can they do it well?

“Unfortunately, there’s no real training. In the UK, all the big radio stations provide training.”

Jason adds that in Malta, stations tend to train DJs in their house style rather than giving them formal training as such.

They like to tell the anecdote of how one of their female DJs Caroline Eggert came to be hired. She had never been on the radio before but just showed up out of the blue and said that she felt she would be good on air if they would just give her ten minutes. Cliff knew what being given those ten minutes to prove one’s self felt like, so he gave her a chance, and today she has her own show.

“The same with Corinne Muscat, another Canadian, whom I met when I first came to Malta,” Jason says. “Every time we spoke on the phone I used to think she had such a sexy voice. When a client wanted a sexy female voice for an ice-cream ad I thought of her. When I went to Island Sound she took my place at Calypso, and now she’s with us at XFM.”

A lively personality, which can be projected through a pleasant speaking voice, is crucial for this medium. But Cliff and Jay agree that equally important is knowing when to simply shut up.

As station manager, one thing Cliff was after was DJs with their own personality and not just “robots”. They are trained to fit in with XFM’s style, which gives the station its identity. What annoys him is when people describe it as “another Island Sound”, because the line-up and format are totally different.

“What we like our English-speaking presenters to project as well is their love of living here so that listeners can identify with them. An example I use is, ‘what’s Joey from Zejtun who works in factory going to relate to?’ We involve our listeners with emails and text messages – we read out every text because people like to hear their name on the radio. We’re accessible and we rely on their feedback. We have a web cam so people can see what’s going on.”

“We’re open to public scrutiny,” Jason announces in his deep voice.

The tagline XFM uses is “Malta’s fastest growing radio station” and this is not just another slogan. Surveys have shown a dramatic jump in listeners and they cannot keep up with the advertising. The staff has grown as well and they’re planning to move to new premises next year.

A success story if there ever was one.

While we’ve been talking the food has arrived. The good thing about The Dubliner is that you can also order from the pub menu which makes an ideal light summer lunch. Jay had carpaccio as a starter while Cliff had the grilled vegetables and sun-dried tomatoes. For the main course we all had the chicken wrap with a honey mayonnaise.

We manage to drag our attention away from the delicious food to talk about the programme that they co-host.

The idea for creating a drive time show together had been brewing in Cliff’s mind for a long time.

“It’s something that either works or is a complete disaster. We poached Carlo Borg Bonaci from Bay to do the breakfast show and that’s when we decided to go for it. We had an advantage because we already knew each other so well. Abroad, they stick you in a hotel room together for a week to get to know each other, and it’s all very scripted, no ad- libbing at all.”

While there is a certain amount of preparation, to go over the day’s topics and the questions for guests, a lot of the jokes and banter is off-the-cuff.

When did you realise that it was going to work?

“I think after the first show,” says Jason. “First of all, we make each other laugh and find the same things funny. He has a

different taste in music which is good because there’s always that friction between his likes and my likes. He’s always picking on me for how I pronounce tomato, for example. In the beginning, though, we used to sit with a third party and go over our

topics, to see what would be good or not.”

“I think if it comes across that you’re enjoying yourself without sounding rehearsed, then it’s good,” Cliff says.

Jason recalls one of the funniest intros they ever had: “We literally came in from a press conference, had no time to prepare, and sales people were coming into the studio because they wanted to talk to us. So we just started the show with everyone from sales on air with us, introduced them, and it was a total free-for-all. It was total madness.”

Over the months they have introduced new characters like Judge Joey and “David Beckham” who allow them to get away with a certain amount of double entendres without ever crossing that fine line between being funny and being downright crude.

They have also come up with some original competitions like “The scruffiest man in Malta” which prompted a good response from listeners.

It can often be a wacky show. Right now they are on a new kick where they pronounce words with a heavy Maltese accent. Cliff gives me an example: “For me…” rolling his “r” and putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable in a wickedly accurate impersonation.

No one is safe from their teasing, including Caroline who hosts the show before them and who is “blamed” for fiddling with the buttons when anything technical goes wrong in their own programme.

Radio is such a friendly, familiar medium that listeners feel they are your friends and can come up and tell you anything, as Cliff often discovers.

“I was having something to eat and this guy comes up to me and says, ‘you can’t eat that’ and started taking my plate away. I said ‘who are you?’ He said ‘you’re on a diet for charity!’ It was when we were going to the Geres gym every day. Sometimes I forget what we’ve said on the radio. A couple of weeks ago another guy tells me, ‘Mela, you’re still fat!’ Another thing is that they always expect us to be together and they’re always asking me ‘where’s Jason?’”

Oh, oh, it’s almost like they’re married.

Just as we’re speaking about diets, or the lack of them, we are offered dessert. Mindful of the calories, and feeling very virtuous, we all have fruit.

Except Jason cannot resist dipping his fruit in the melted caramel which came with it.

As we’re winding up the interview, they reveal a bit more about themselves.

Jason is the introvert, happiest when he is behind the audio desk, claiming to have a slight phobia of crowds.

Cliff, on the other hand, loves a live audience and, in fact, continues to be a club DJ, although he’s cut back now that he’s getting (ahem) older.

Jason can’t resist telling me: “He was so depressed when he hit 30 last month. For a whole week, the topic was him being 30 and I couldn’t mention age at all.”

Wait till you hit 40, Cliff.

He has also been known to complain loudly about bad service in restaurants… much to the chagrin of his friends.

“However, I can be absolutely tongue-tied when it comes to women,” he insists.

One thing is for sure, neither of them is tongue-tied when 4pm comes around. After a long day at work, listening to the two of them is like a tonic, and if you see people laughing out loud while they’re driving, chances are they’re listening to Cliff and Jay.