Why do they always record Fortunately in the piazza outside New Broadcasting House? I’m no great consumer of podcasts (yet) but I’m determined to include the best ones I come across in Onmyradio, and the ones I have heard all happen indoors. So why risk the noise, moisture and high NOx levels of outdoor Central London?
Well, Jane Garvey and Fi Glover are busy media women so it’s handy, for a start. Jane and Fi both present Radio 4 programmes (Woman’s Hour and The Listening Project respectively). And if it rains, they just duck into the Media Cafe on the ground floor (which, let me tell you, hasn’t got the slightest air of ‘meejah’ about it. I worked in that building for years and there was no-one saying ‘darling’ or air-kissing anyone. It’s more like the sixth-form cafe in a struggling urban comprehensive).
But that’s not good enough: there must be any number of nice, quiet, warm, air-conditioned studios inside. Except, Fortunately isn’t a nice, quiet studio sort of affair. It’s not ruminative or intellectual. Hell, it’s not even intelligent half the time. Or intelligible some of the time, but more on that later. Look who’s coming.
Source: BBC
OK, that’s why they do it in the road.
The BBC, perhaps fondly imagining that its listeners must still be as intrigued by its inner workings as they were in 1932 when Broadcasting House went up (ooh, glowing valves and ‘rippling the ether’), describes Fortunately as ‘a frank look behind the scenes’. It also, inexplicably, uses a photograph in which Jane looks like Stan Laurel scratching his head uncomprehendingly after Ollie’s given him a stiff telling-off.
Fortunately, the show ran obliquely away from that stuffy mission statement as soon as ever it could. Garv and Glov described the contents of their handbags instead and lightly dined upon each other’s foibles throughout Series 1. A basic running gag underlying the podcast is that Jane is famous, bedecked with awards, set for a damehood and will inherit ‘The Hour’ from Dame Jenni Murray in due course, while Fi isn’t and won’t. From Series 2, they began booking fresh meat in the form of a regular weekly guest.
Now in their fifth series, Garv and Glov work together like Cagney and Lacey – that’s pretty much the highest praise possible in my book – and I bet they argue in the loos. Oof, I just had a sudden, atavistic urge to call them ‘the girls’ but that would be both inaccurate and sexist. They’re both buzzing around 50, and it’s safe to say there is no taboo on mentions of the menopause, especially if it makes for a good gag.
The pod starts, as it often does, with a quick catch-up about last week’s guest (it was Anneka Rice and they loved her). Then, 30 seconds in, it’s already – almost imperceptibly – off the rails. Actually, beyond having a guest and being in the pizza (that’s what they call the piazza) I don’t think Fortunately’s got any rails left and that’s why you don’t feel a bump. Fi asks Jane what’s in her lunch. Jane says she’s eaten it already. Which might just be a fib to stop Fi nicking some of it. They talk about their guest Helen Zaltzman’s podcast, Answer Me This, which she co-hosts with Olly Mann, and why people who want to know random stuff (their pod’s raison d’etre) don’t just Google it. Jane dreams up a pointless query: who was that bloke I used to fancy in the 1970s TV series The Onedin Line, and how long were everyone’s sideburns?
There’s no bland sisters-togetherness: G&G are consistently, satisfyingly rude to each other. Jane once accused Fi of wearing a ‘man-pleasing smile’. Fi, when nettled, tends to make faux-flattering remarks about the Garvey bosom. They use surnames quite a lot. Maybe they don’t like the Starbucks-y overfamiliarity of first names. That, plus the mucking about, make me feel like I’m listening to them decompress outside school rather than the BBC (I think that’s where the ‘girls’ thing sprang from. I suddenly want to smoke a forbidden fag).
Their guest arrives, and walks straight past. “Zaltzman, over here!” Despite the surnaming, they both seem on first-name terms with her. Do they know everyone who’s anyone? Jane recalls that Helen once made her a bedjacket, which probably explains the familiarity. I’m genuinely surprised no-one picks up on this. I thought bedjackets went out with the Light Programme and town gas but, on this evidence, they’re unremarkable night attire for Radio 4 presenters and pioneering podcasters.
The end of this long, scatty bit is signalled by a jingle featuring 6 Music’s Shaun Keaveney (an early and much loved guest) and the bit with the guest proper follows. A serious critique of Zaltzman’s oeuvre does not follow: whatever else Fortunately is, it’s time off Radio 4 for both presenters.
But that’s a false dichotomy, as they say on Radio 4. It’s not as if either Jane or Fi have to move any great distance from their normal broadcasting styles to Fortunately’s carefully modulated devil-may-care. They’ve always been off the autocue, as it were, but, whatever else is going down between them, Cagney and Lacey are always damn good cops. Fortunately is mainly a delightful waste of time, but it isn’t a whole different gig for them; they’ve just dialled down the consequential (never to zero) and let in more of the querulous (never entirely absent).
Source: BBC
OK, the intelligibility quibble: I don’t know how this podcast is recorded, but it sounds like there’s just one, stereo mic. Which is fine: multiple mics outdoors can end up giving you a racket of background noise; and Fortunately does sound attractively impromptu. But the mic does, just a bit too often, seem to get moved too far away from whoever’s speaking. Given how everyone’s bouncing off and reacting to one another, that can null out a stretch of the podcast longer than the actual inaudible words. Maybe just stick the mic in the middle, and everyone gather round? Oh shit, was that a mansplain? Am I gonna get busted for that? I’m not an anyone who’s anyone. No-one reads this; I’m back to TL;DR. But I’m avoiding the pizza from now on, just in case.
I’m not even going to pretend to objectivity; I love listening to Shelagh Fogarty in the afternoon on LBC. But then, if the whole point of Onmyradio is to blow a trumpet for the best speech radio (and not to carp – much – about the mediocre), I’ve got to sound off about Shelagh.
I’m a relative latecomer to commercial speech radio, mainly because I’m scared of phone-ins. It’s not just that some callers are ignorant and bigoted; it’s my overreaction to them. There are great callers, of course; I want to listen to regular folks, not least because you don’t get much of ’em anywhere else. But as soon as someone who enjoys being an arsehole comes on, my chest goes all tight. I have to go “La-la-laa!” to drown out complete untruths being complacently accepted as fact. I hate it when someone genuinely opens their heart and tells it how it is for them, and the guy they’re arguing with interrupts them and says, “Nah, I still think…” Gah, click.
I’ve never yet switched Shelagh off. I don’t fully understand why, but it’s something to do with the way she models good behaviour for her listeners. She listens, and unlike some other phone-in hosts she doesn’t battle prejudice with prejudices of her own, just with education, and conviction, and honest doubt (she should really be sponsored by nuns, because listening to her thoughts and interventions is one of the best adverts for a Catholic education you could get). So when the kind of caller that usually makes me cringe comes on, they’re not just allowed to vent. She takes them on, but she’s not trying to take them down. They get the respect they never give anybody. They’re argued with, but always with a view to enlightenment: to find out whether the guy on the phone actually understands his opinions instead of just hurling them at us. I almost felt sorry for Danny on Tuesday’s show; he was never really in the game:
Source: LBC
Even when invited by a more sympathetic caller to see Danny as a threat to society, Shelagh’s reaction is to think how to fix it in the here and now rather than stamp Danny out, or be tough on the causes of Danny.
Source: LBC
I love it that she knows callers probably haven’t tuned out after they’ve been on air, and addresses comments to them. So let me try to do the same. The thing is, Danny, she was far nicer to you than you had any right to expect, especially when you tried adopting that horrible, fake-tolerant tone about black Britons. It’s like she was your big sister, caring that you’re so deluded and angry, but absolutely refusing to put up with any of your nonsense. Shelagh could help you, if you only listened to her more. Look, she’s cured me of my phone-in phobia.
So many things I could and should write about to restart this sadly neglected radio blog: Chris Evans leaving BBC Radio 2 breakfast; Eddie Mair also deserting Auntie for the LBC drivetime slot, causing some very welcome re-scheduling on that station and eliminating the dreaded 7 o’clock in the evening speech radio void. Well, I dreaded it, anyway – but that’s another blog post entirely.
Whatever I write about, I’ve got to stop trying too hard to be comprehensive. If you can be bothered to read the earlier posts (four years ago!!) I think you’ll agree that the term TL;DR could have been invented specifically for them. They definitely bored me when I re-read them just now, but I’m leaving them in place as an exercise in honesty and to pad the ruddy thing out a bit. From now on, it’s shorter and snappier: I listen to a show; I write about it. You don’t need to know the presenter’s shoe size, or why I think that matters – and the effort involved in all that just got in the way and was part of what stopped me doing it. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it: I was just too damn conscientious.
I think the next few posts are going to be pretty much pure praise of my favourite programmes, but I really mean to start discovering new stuff – podcasts as well – because that was my original aim: to add substance to the bland listings you’re faced with if you try to explore what’s on the radio.
So; I’ll shut up now and tell you about Shelagh Fogerty, like I should have done four years ago.
Got a question for you. Have you ever had a conversation in a pub or, more likely, round at someone’s house after the pub, where you’re surrounded by unfamiliar people – friends of your partner, perhaps – and the talk turns to those subjects normally avoided if everyone wants to stay on undemanding, easy-going terms, i.e. religion or politics?
The volume gets turned up a bit; genuine disagreements are breaking out and the whole evening’s in danger of fracturing into several isolated, potentially nasty arguments. But there’s one particular bloke who talks a lot more than everyone else, and he’s got the voice for it: resonant, carrying. He, at least, seems rather pleased that the conversation has taken this turn. You sense a man entering his element. And he’s talking to the whole room; he somehow manages to encompass and unify the emerging debates, if only by making everyone disagree with him. He’s not just a Devil’s advocate: he asks you what you think, finishes your sentences for you and then asks someone else what they think, so you never get to make your point. You feel your hackles rising. Who does this guy think he is? He puts on voices, for goodness’ sake. One minute he’s attacking you as if he’s aspiring to be an understudy for Jeremy Kyle, the next he’s crooning like a tuneless Sinatra, with lyrics by Gandhi.
You go home that night with a sense of a punch-up narrowly avoided; once you’ve waved goodbye and you’re safely down the street, your partner turns to you, cheeks puffed out.
“Fwoof. That was hairy.”
“I know. Who IS that bloody bloke?”
And you’re asking that question because, at one point during the whole episode, you experienced the uniquely uncomfortable feeling of hearing your own views coming out of the mouth of a man you’re pretty sure you don’t like, can’t like: you instantly re-examine your opinions to see if you still really believe them.
You may or may not have had such an experience – and if you haven’t, you’re probably quite grateful. Nonetheless, if you tune your radio to LBC at 10 in the morning, you will hear that bloody bloke. His name is James O’Brien. He’s for real and he does this for money on the radio.
I know phone-in presenters exist to wind up their listenership a bit, generate a bit of passion, get the phones ringing. Maybe the only sensible thing I’ve got to say is that he does this more effectively than anyone else I hear on the radio, and I should sign off right now. But I’m assuming you’re not interested simply in listening to wound-up people, people who fall for the jock-generated shock. You’re after something more; better. I think you can find it here – but it’s most definitely ‘as well’ rather than ‘instead of’.
Which is why I’ve been putting off writing this post. Quite honestly, loading the dishwasher and catching up on the ironing has been more fun, and this blog is supposed to be about good radio, stuff you’ll like. Unlike Iain Dale, LBC’s drivetime presenter, James O’Brien attracts the usual panoply of nutters and bores, and he is, of course, well aware of it. Like any phone-in host, O’Brien is obliged to acknowledge his regular audience, the people who are practically guaranteed to call. Giving their opinions a certain amount of airtime – and tolerance – is the usual quid pro quo, but on this show you find yourself wondering why they keep tuning in, let alone calling. Someone accused O’Brien of being a cultural Marxist of the Frankfurt School this morning; I suppose that makes a change from the usual level of flak he gets. I’ve no idea if the caller was a regular, but I found myself devoutly hoping he wasn’t.
O’Brien gives this sort of thing short shrift, thank goodness, with a nice combination of deadpan and a heavy hand on the phone faders – and this is exactly what’s needed. By the time that veteran of the phone-in format Brian Hayes (who made his name on LBC) reached a studio near me at BBC 5 Live, his technique was well-established: give each caller just enough time to make a single point and then wham, fader shut and they were never heard again as he continued the discussion with his main guests in the studio and down the line.
Brian Hayes didn’t appear to discriminate; it didn’t seem to matter if you were a good caller or a bad caller, you still weren’t allowed to interrupt the grown-ups. James O’Brien handles it better: ditch the nutters and bores, talk to people with stories to tell rather than axes to grind, the trick being, of course, sorting the former from the latter. But even if you’re the last caller on the switchboard, he’d really rather hear his own voice. That’s not a dig, by the way; it goes for just about every radio presenter you could name. And here’s the weird thing: so would I. Because he does it so well. Listen to him talking up a topic early in June, ‘How can we stop so many cyclists dying on our roads?’:
Source: LBC
As well as the Dutch cargo bike, he’s happy to admit to quite a variety of things I suspect a large chunk of his audience find suspect. He diets; he drinks coconut milk; he went to public school; he points an amused finger at himself when his pleasant, RP-influenced speaking voice slips all the way back to Kidderminster; in an item on faith schools, he cheerfully announces, ‘If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d want my children to attend a Catholic school I’d have laughed in your face.’ He says things like, ‘The phone lines are open in case I need correcting on this.’ This is not standard phone-in jock-speak. They punt for calls, they exaggerate, they annoy, but they keep their own personas intact – infuriatingly unassailable, in most cases. Phone-in presenters so often seem to become the mirror image of their worst callers: the more discussion they engage in, the more entrenched their opinions and prejudices become. James O’Brien, though, puts himself out there, sets up his ego like a wobbly coconut on a shy.
In fact it’s quite easy to imagine O’Brien ringing up his own show and giving himself the O’Brien treatment: “What? So a man who thinks it’s acceptable to ride around one of the busiest and least cycle-friendly cities in the world, pushing the fragile skulls of his young children out ahead of himself as some sort of grotesque infant crumple zone, is telling me I’m wrong to point out how many cyclists put themselves in danger on London’s roads?” But there is perhaps, no better metaphor than a cargo bike for his heart-on-sleeve approach to broadcasting, opinions and vulnerabilities stuck right out in front. I genuinely don’t think he’s putting it on:
Source: LBC
If that strikes you as too emotional, schmaltzy even, listen to him explaining his reaction to a tweet in which a listener had criticized public sector strikers on the grounds that they ‘took more out of the system than they put in’.
Source: LBC
Still too much, too heartfelt? Not for me. Where else on British radio do you hear this sort of thing? I can’t think of a single show presented solely by someone avowedly or evidently left-wing (though Ken Livingstone does co-host an LBC weekend show with ex-Tory minister David Mellor). James O’Brien gets called left-wing; I suspect he is not exactly that, but he is no reactionary; he levels with his listeners about his changing relationship with the world.
It’s a style that, as I’ve listened to his show, has seemed to fail as often as it’s succeeded: in his talk-up for the cycling item, he contrived to both deplore and invite comments that blame cyclists for fatal accidents:
Source: LBC
I don’t believe this is cheekiness or chutzpah; he’s genuinely conflicted. In an item on education, he proselytised for Michael Gove, telling us he’d seen the light about the Education Secretary’s policies. I don’t think he was being ironic. Provocative, yes. Gove, he enthused, is a genius. The problem with poorly-performing state school pupils is that their teachers are making fashionable excuses for them: poverty, cultural deprivation and the like (maybe they’re all cultural Marxists). All Gove wants to do is bring the best education – the kind of education you get in independent schools – to everyone. Who could argue with that?
Well, where to start? If this is just phone-in hyperbole, then O’Brien is no better than the rest of the sad crew; worse, in fact, because he must put such a lot of effort into sounding as if he believes it. But I don’t buy that: he’s genuine – and often wrong. His logic on this occasion was laughable. It reminded me of when I shared a flat at university with a public schoolboy who used to throw his chip-wrappings into people’s front gardens. When I objected, he would say, “Well, it’s better than throwing it on the street. The people who own the houses will clear it up.” When I pointed out that it would be better still to put it in the bin, his response was, “There aren’t any nearby. And I’m not carrying a greasy ball of paper home with me.”
I’m still struck by the ability of the privileged to conflate self-interest with morality. I don’t remember anyone calling the show to point out that, far from levelling up every school, Gove’s policies seem to be bent on introducing inequalities of funding and access and expertise all over the education system, splitting academies and free schools from local-authority schools, etc. And that was, perhaps, my failure: why didn’t I get on the phone to LBC? I might have ranted at O’Brien, told him to get real, demanded to know whether he’d ever set foot in an ordinary school, the kind that has to cope with children whose messed-up home backgrounds mean they don’t and can’t read, write or even speak fluent English, tie their shoelaces, or even sit still just for one minute and do as they’re told. The ones local authorities have to employ people to provide one-to-one supervision for. The ones who come to school in the morning hungry because their parents can’t be arsed to provide even a bowl of supermarket own-brand Shreddies. And I mean arsed, not afford: they’re 99p at Aldi. Oh, wait. I sound like that bloke at the party. When did I get so judgemental? I think I hate myself.
And here, maybe, I’m getting near to what I find compelling about the O’Brien show. He’s addressing uncomfortable issues, the stock-in-trade of the tabloids: immigration; benefits; payday loans; weight-loss surgery; paedophilia; racism; violence against women; Islamic radicalism; the Nanny State. Stuff that concerns working-class people. Stuff that, seen from a middle-class perspective, defines working-class people.
O’Brien comes to this rude arena armed with nothing more lethal than an education from Ampleforth, the country’s leading Roman Catholic independent school (unless working at the Daily Express and Channel 5 can be said to build moral fibre). He could easily have followed in the footsteps of fellow Ampleforth alumnus and BBC presenter Ed Stourton, 15 years his senior. I can hear James now, muttering through a much more upmarket agenda on the Today programme or the World at One. They wouldn’t have him now, of course. His widely publicized on-air rows with Nigel Farage (in which he concentrated on UKIP’s reputation as a racist party) and Iain Duncan-Smith (in which he slammed the government’s work experience schemes as cheap labour) have established him in many minds, rightly or wrongly, as a committed leftie, but I see his function in Britain’s cultural life as essentially conservative.
We don’t use the word ‘folk’ much in Britain; it has the wrong connotations. Hitler talked violently of the destiny of the German Volk; Americans talk cosily of ‘folks’; we see it as anachronistic, beardy, rural. I wish it meant something like the US ‘middle class’: working people of all types. I think O’Brien preserves, quite intentionally, a vital link between such a folk and certain, arguably old-fashioned standards of morality that once gave the working class its traditional preface, ‘respectable’. He’s no Bob Crow, but his style with politicians reveals a similar refusal to bend the knee to the powerful. Like that other self-appointed guardian of common virtue, Jeremy Kyle, his role, his relationship with his audience, is essentially that of mentor, preceptor; but where Kyle blasts and blames, James O’Brien is at the opposite pole, trying to ask the best question.
The clue came weeks ago, in that cycling item. Why on earth was he inviting us to criticize cyclists on the day a cyclist died? He suggested it would be ‘a bit beneath us’. My initial reaction was, ‘Well, James, you might reasonably conclude, since you’re the man making the invitation, that you should consider it beneath you.’ But he was there before me: the word he used was ‘us’. That’s what’s different: for all his moral schtick, O’Brien refuses to sit in the regular presenter’s God seat, above what he calls ‘the curious crucible of the radio phone-in’. He presides, but he sits in there with us: vulnerable, fallible, fallen, bloody bloke.
Photograph: By James Cridland [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
As soon as you tune in to Richard Bacon’s afternoon show, you know you’re going down a road somehow less travelled. In the early years of 5 Live, the BBC was keen to blur the distinctions between successive ‘segments’ of output as its hourly rolling news format progressed. Presenters who tried to indulge in friendly chat during the ‘handover’ from one segment to the next were discouraged. Twenty years later, there’s still no chat, but the tone of Richard’s voice as he welcomes you in unmistakably stamps his identity onto the next two hours, and would’ve driven the execs mad back in the day. Compare and contrast his show opener with those of the preceding Shelagh Fogerty and the following Drive programmes:
Source: BBC
What is he up to? It’s been said of Richard’s on-air persona that there is a ‘faint whiff of cheese’ about it. That’s undeniable, but is this an involuntary speech tic, or something more calculated? Is he taking his job entirely seriously? Well, no. In 1991, as Richard was worrying about his GCSE results, something momentous was happening to British broadcast news: the phenomenon known as Chris Morris. Only a few months after Radio 4’s FM service was taken over by rolling coverage of the first Gulf War, Morris, perhaps Britain’s most effective satirist, took to the airwaves with On The Hour and bit the bum of news broadcasting so hard that a lot of people working in the industry (including this blogger) wondered – when we managed to stop laughing – how it could ever carry on.
Source: BBC
1992 saw another series, and in 1994 he brought the format to TV with The Day Today on BBC2. The sound and sight of Chris Morris reading out headlines like ‘judge rules man with glass face too ugly to stand trial’ in his über-grave newscaster’s voice, or humiliating his reporter colleague Brian O’Hanraha-hanrahan for pretending to be able to speak German seemed somehow to draw a line under a whole era of news broadcasting, ruling whole swathes of newswriting and presenting inadmissible on the ground that it took itself far too seriously. Ever since, you can divide news presenters into ‘pre-Morris’ and ‘post-Morris’. The distinction isn’t just about age: it’s whether they get Morris’s take on the pretensions of the news business. Too few did, but Bacon is pure post-Morris. Hence the cheese: it’s an acknowledgement of the essential arrogance of a presenter’s position, from a presenter much less given to arrogance than many.
It’s easy to forget that sports broadcasting was parodied just as mercilessly: Alan Partridge’s doggedly hackneyed style began on On The Hour but, maybe because sport takes itself even more seriously than news does, Morris’s shows don’t seem to have changed the way sports broadcasters carry on at all. In the world of news, however, some felt the sting – and saw it as an opportunity. The very top rank of radio reporters and presenters had relatively little to worry about at first: the likes of John Humphrys and Sue MacGregor on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and Robin Lustig on The World Tonight ploughed on, their programmes’ style having never descended to the sort of urgent, prepositionless ‘newscasting’ Morris was deriding.
Others totally got what Chris Morris was on about, among them Eddie Mair, then fronting flagship news programmes on BBC Radio Scotland, and Jane Garvey, presenting the BBC Hereford & Worcester breakfast show. They both moved to Radio 5 Live when it began in 1994, and have since risen to the very top, not least because they knew how to function in the post-Morris news world, in which journalistic ‘scoops’ and ‘exposés’ just couldn’t be taken at face value any longer.
Quite apart from the influence of Chris Morris, Radio 5 Live’s style, which in its early days prided itself on live coverage of even such prosaic news events as press conferences, would in any case have demanded a fully developed sense of humour in its presenters. As often as not, the live happenings failed to happen or, even when they did, would subject listeners to aeons of boring preamble. Until industries and institutions stepped up to the demands of rolling news, presenters and reporters often found themselves commentating on events that were little short of a shambles. The thin line between tragedy and farce was frequently crossed, and this was where Eddie Mair, Jane Garvey and, later, Fi Glover and Julian Worricker were able to shine.
Five Live is no longer the rolling news station it was in the 90s. For better or worse, the BBC decided that News 24 – now just ‘The News Channel’ – should pick up those heavy reins and, a few years ago, the BBC’s medium-wave wonder horse began to come under criticism from, among others, UTV – the owner of its main commercial competitor, TalkSport – for substituting chat for news. One slot singled out for criticism was Richard Bacon’s afternoon show, then beginning its second year. His defence was not just robust, it demonstrated a firm grasp of the workings of the industry: Bacon really knows his radio – and news – onions.
If I sound surprised by that, I don’t mean to be; it’s just that, on air, his persona is relaxed, often playful. He sends himself up and generally sounds one of the least worried people on the planet. He’s worked on Capital and XFM, and in some respects he brings to the BBC a welcome whiff of commercial radio – and its ever-present anxiety about audiences. Every now and then his determination never to bore his listeners shows through. Getting a report from 5 Live’s John Pienaar at last year’s Lib Dem conference, Richard got frustrated: ‘Is anyone outside the Westminster bubble listening? You can almost hear them turning off!’ This is not what you’re supposed to say to BBC chief political correspondents, but Richard understands attention span – and how easy it is to change stations on radios these days, or turn to the many competing diversions of the web.
He’s at his most relaxed on the show’s set pieces: Monday’s ‘Bacon’s Theory’, which attempts to demystify science stories; Tuesday’s TV review with regular reviewer Boyd Hilton of Heat magazine; Wednesday’s ‘Moan-In’, in which listeners call in with their personal bugbears, and Thursday’s ‘Chart The Week’, which rates the top five most talked-about news stories of the preceding week. The tone is light – almost remorselessly light. The Chart The Week selections, for example, owe much more to the tabloids and websites like Buzzfeed than to broadsheet newspapers or the BBC’s own news pages. A typical rundown featured a faked twerking video, the arrest of a couple in Hong Kong for letting their child wee in the street, the Spanish footballer Dani Alves eating a ‘racist banana’, the new Star Wars film cast photo and Oklahoma’s botched death row execution.
Richard’s guests are often from the media and arts worlds – and why not? This fits his sense of his audience. They watch a lot of TV and films; they’re urban, they’re more his own age than the core late-40s 5 Live listenership: they’re Richard’s thirtysomethings and when they’re not at the movies or in front of the telly they’re listening to live radio and podcasts and, above all, they’re online – and tweeting. Richard has a particularly close relationship with Twitter, having been a very early user and enthuser about the medium. He now has a million and a half followers, and has said he believes Twitter gives a much truer picture of people’s attitude to news events than do traditional broadcast and print media. And by truer he means less respectful, more critical.
News stories are not ducked, however, no matter what UTV might say. The slot immediately after the news, sport and weather at the top of the hour is always filled with a current news story and so are many others. At its best, the show combines its roll-call of media guests with more serious coverage. Recently, headmaster Stephen Drew was a guest on the show the day after the teacher Ann Maguire was stabbed to death by one of her pupils in a Leeds secondary school. Mr Drew featured in Channel 4’s Educating Essex documentary and was on the show to promote a follow-up programme, Mr Drew’s School for Boys. Richard began by asking Stephen Drew for his reaction to the tragedy and, although his answer was exactly what you would have expected from a professional headteacher, it gave a serious backbone to the subsequent discussion about the causes of bad behaviour in children, which could easily have become insubstantial. Richard asked whether any of the boys featured in the programme were psychotic. Mr Drew demurred, instead identifying the home environment as the major factor in children’s behaviour.
Source: BBC
Richard Bacon has not yet developed the sort of professional carapace that really seasoned interviewers possess, that gets them through encounters with any kind of guest – and I hope he never does. Every so often, someone he can’t quite cope with appears on the show, and the result is just as entertaining as any off-the-cuff chat with a compliant celeb. The veteran BBC news correspondent Kate Adie came on a while ago to promote her book, Fighting on the Home Front, which charts the huge changes in women’s lives occasioned by the First World War. Given that Kate Adie, as a broadcaster, is defiantly unaffected by the Chris Morris revolution, and one of Richard Bacon’s most endearing qualities is his enduring ability, at 38, to sound boyish, the encounter sounded as if he was having to endure a visit from Great Aunt Kate: sit up straight, don’t fidget, I am talking. Richard did his best and – as one ought when great aunts descend – politely asked for a story.
Source: BBC
I’ve met Kate Adie; her charm and reputation are genuine and formidable. I found it hard to tell if Richard was fascinated by her or intimidated. I’d say, a bit of both but mostly the latter; she seemed to exert a Mrs Robinson-esque power over her younger news colleague – no mean feat given the interview was done ‘down the line’ between separate studios. Her book thus briskly and effectively plugged, Aunt Kate allowed Richard to kiss her goodbye, and normal service was soon resumed – but I’m willing to bet, once he’d got over it, that he realised it was still great radio.
Iain Dale with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby
Seven o’clock on weekday evenings can be a difficult time for news listeners on British radio. On the national networks, as BBC 5 Live’s Drive programme hands over to Sport on Five, Radio 4’s post-Six O’Clock News you’ve-made-’em-glum-now-make-’em-laugh comedy slot gives way to a two-minute news summary then, for this listener at least, the make-’em-despair Archers cornerstone. Independent national radio offers nothing by way of an alternative: Talksport’s afternoon football show gives way to… well, more football. Only the BBC World Service offers its half-hour Newsroom round-up, but unless you have a DAB radio – common enough in the home these days, but still rare in the car – you can forget tuning in to that, and in any case its agenda is international, not domestic.
Three years ago a viable alternative appeared on LBC in the shape of Iain Dale, the Conservative blogger and publisher. Initially in an evening slot, Dale’s show gave radio news listeners somewhere to go at 7pm, though if you stayed on until 10 you found you were listening to news about Martha’s intractable haemorrhoid problems in Willesden rather than the latest political manoeuvrings in Westminster. Last March, Dale got to ditch the medical phone-in segment and really stretch his wings in an extended 4-8pm slot. Suddenly you had not just an evening bolt-hole, but a whole new drivetime place to go, focused on news and politics. It was like asking for a jam sandwich before bedtime and being taken out to dinner instead.
Of course, beyond the reach of LBC’s London transmitters – the show goes out on 97.3 MHz FM, the 1152 AM rolling news service joins FM at 7pm and both services are on the Greater London DAB multiplexes – if you’re listening at all you’ll be listening online, so if you’re driving you’re probably still experiencing your own 7 o’clock news dilemma. Interestingly, LBC is audible via DAB in Glasgow and Edinburgh, which must say something about its extra-metropolitan appeal. At this point I begin to wish, all over again, that Channel 4 Radio had stuck with its plans for a high-quality speech station to rival BBC Radio 4. Iain Dale’s show is a prime example of how good that independent national output could have been – and I believe the BBC’s networks would benefit from that competition.
As soon as you get into the meat of the show at 4pm after short news and travel bulletins, you realise you’re sitting at a very different table from the BBC’s news and current affairs offerings. There are fewer dishes, but they’re bigger, and take longer to eat: the first item can last until 4.45. What the show loses in breadth – by this time, 5 Live’s Drive show will have covered 8 or 9 items – it gains in depth, or at least Iain Dale must hope hope so. He’s in the hands of his guests, and his callers.
Dale certainly attracts a high class of guest: a roll-call of powerful and influential people turn up, and often seem happy to stay on and slug out an issue at length – including with callers. And they’re not all his Tory mates: John Cruddas, Peter Hain, Alastair Campbell, Jeremy Corbyn have all made recent appearances, as have Liberals and UKIP and others. UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage proved once again that he has a great voice for radio. In fact, if you’d never heard the show before, you could be forgiven for assuming Farage was the presenter: he has a deep, mannered voice with a resonance the microphone likes. It’s a commercial voice – if UKIP bomb at the next general election, Farage could make a good living voicing radio ads – and, like a radio pro, he’s completely in charge of it, making it swoop and rise with indignation as he describes how everyone told him UKIP would never succeed in winning the next Euro elections, but look how wrong he’s proved them all. Farage’s voice, nicely balanced by his bloke-down-the-pub affability, draws you in, and you have to snap out of it and remind yourself that he hasn’t actually won them yet.
Mid-interview, a Channel 4 film crew turned up, just in time to hear Dale confront Farage with a bit of facer: a letter from his schooldays, unearthed by Channel 4, in which a teacher apparently branded him a ’fascist’ and ‘racist’. Farage brushed off the allegations, but, listening, I thought the whole episode sounded more than a little contrived. By whom, I wouldn’t know, but it didn’t do the programme any favours. Guests, though, are only half the story. What about the callers?
Beneath all phone-ins lies a lowest common denominator of radio content, a sort of aural sump. It’s ingredients are simple: an uninformed caller trades prejudices with an equally uninformed presenter. You know the sort of thing:
“Well, Mike, I blame the Huguenots. We should never have let ‘em in.”
“OK, Dean, fair point. I’ll put that to Ken Livingstone later, and we’ll see if he defends the policy.”
I’d be less than honest if I said the dialogue with callers on Dale’s show never dips that low. All phone-ins run the risk – even Radio 4’s Any Answers gets the occasional ranter – and the worst consist of little else. However, I think I can say that either his production team are good at filtering out the worst offenders, or Iain Dale simply attracts a better class of caller. On the subject of Syria’s chemical weapons, one Iranian listener put his point sceptically and elegantly: ‘Have the countries of the West got rid of all their chemical weapons? And, if they have, who was invited to the bonfire of their vanities?’ This is where a prime-time BBC programme could have wheeled on a defence correspondent with an answer – but this kind of question doesn’t get asked on prime-time BBC programmes.
So what’s Dale’s secret? If you check out his blog, you quickly become aware that he is no wishy-washy, liberal Conservative. We are dealing here with a true blue Tory. Here’s a fairly typical rant:
The stupidity of the fracking protesters in Balcombe knows no bounds. The usual professional green activists, who we no doubt fund through the benefits system, have gathered at a site where no fracking is taking place, nor is it likely to. These are the same people who no doubt pitched their tents at Greenham Common, supported Swampy and have hitched their skirts to the great global warming swindle. If they think fracking is so terrible, why haven’t they protested at the hundreds of other sites in the country where it has been going on for years? I’ll tell you why. Because they don’t give a damn about fracking. All they care about is rebelling against society and attaching them (sic) to the latest leftist-green cause. They’re the true watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside. And Caroline Lucas is the perfect exemplification of this. I’m all in favour of people’s right to protest, but at least have the decency to have the vaguest idea what you’re protesting about.
Despite this vehemence, Dale’s views don’t intrude much on the show. Every so often he’ll introduce an item and state his view; cueing in an item on the MMR vaccination, for example, he cheerfully reminds us he’s previously described the attitude of parents who balk at giving their children the jab as ‘tantamount to child abuse’. But there’s not much of this and it never gets divisively party political; no doubt he’s aware that his predecessor, James Whale, was sacked for urging listeners to vote for Boris Johnson as London Mayor.
And, understandably, he’s said relatively little on air about a recent incident at the Labour Party conference in Brighton when he was cautioned after a struggle with an anti-nuclear protestor who was trying to get into shot in a BBC interview with Dale. What was Dale, a former Tory candidate, doing at Labour’s annual bash? Making trouble, of course, and money. Dale is big in the book trade, having set up the politics and current affairs publisher Biteback in 2009. He wheeled his latest author, Gordon Brown’s former advisor Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride down to Brighton to launch his book of political revelations amongst the party faithful, so as to garner lots of nice reaction and publicity – smart commercial move – divert media attention from Labour policies and, by the by, see how much McMuck might spatter on the likes of Eds Miliband and Balls. You can see why he wasn’t happy: you come down to Brighton to steal someone else’s limelight, some anti-nuclear hippy tries to do the same to you, and you end up horizontal on the prom with muck on your face. The ruddy cheek of it.
Fortunately for his listeners – and unlike some of his LBC colleagues – Dale is incapable of keeping his mind closed for long. His show is, if you like, right-wing radio, but it’s a million miles from the shock-jock radio you get in the US; Iain Dale is no Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern – for which I, at any rate, breathe a sigh of thanks. I recommend all lefties listen in; whatever our political persuasions, we all spend too much time having our prejudices confirmed by reading this or that newspaper or following this or that like-minded celebrity’s Twitter feed; hearing how the other half think is always salutary. For all his online opinions and occasional antics, he’s a well-educated Conservative with a sharp political mind and a long political memory. In American political circles he’d be called a ‘policy wonk’ and would be a guest on talk radio. In Britain, he’s at his best presenting talk radio. Faced with an extreme caller, Iain Dale doesn’t hang up; he doesn’t revile his political ideology; he doesn’t bludgeon him with the same viewpoint over and over again; he simply adopts a disappointed tone and says “Mike, if you’re going to talk like that, people will just not take you seriously.”
UPDATE: on 11 February 2014, LBC became a national station on DAB; in the station’s jingles, the tagline ‘London’s Biggest Conversation’ has become ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’. The Telegraph’s Gillian Reynolds praised the move, suggesting LBC’s owners, Global, had done it to gain influence at Westminster and that the nation would learn to love Nick Ferrari at breakfast. I dare say it might; but the producers of national drivetime news output should also cock a serious ear at Iain Dale’s show. His political sympathies are clear, but never kneejerk, and he is quick to criticise politicians of any colour if he thinks they’ve misbehaved – as in this clip from his show 6 days before the Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, resigned.
Tony Hadley with Robert Elms in the BBC London 94.9 studio (image from the Robert Elms Facebook site)
If you live in London, Robert Elms’ radio show will have something good for you; it’s as simple as that. It’s so full of good stuff, you don’t even have to like the presenter, though it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t: Elms is a man who pulls off the difficult trick of being simultaneously urbane, urban and suburban without breaking a sweat; he’s neither highbrow nor lowbrow. The basic premise of the show is simple: he invites a large cast, both regular and irregular, of clever and creative people onto the show, and revels in their cleverness and creativity. On things he knows about – and there are few areas of London culture that Elms doesn’t know something about, especially if it involves music or fashion – he’s a great enthusiast and sharer but, when new experiences or insights are on offer, he is content to sit, as it were, with us in the audience, and lap them up. It’s not all about Robert: he likes nothing better than a caller bringing a tale of a forgotten London shop or club, a legendary gig or a fragment of industrial archaeology – in short, raw oral history.
Some recent examples: two old Jewish geezers come on to talk about the cloth trade in the East End, which used to be massive but now seems to consist of, well, just two old Jewish geezers. Elms loves encounters like these, and Martin White and Philip Pittack return the love by coming across like a pair of cheerful Arthur Daleys, alternately deprecating themselves and shamelessly bigging themselves up. You don’t hear patter like this much these days.
Here’s a clip of Robert talking to music historian Russell Clarke, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Routemaster, about the launch of Stiff Records in 1976:
Historian Alwyn Turner comes in to plug his book A Classless Society: Britain in the 90s. On the rise of Britpop: ‘Britpop stops being interesting the moment it gets branded as Britpop.’ Turner then makes a related point: that post-war Britain has extended a strong cultural influence over Europe in terms of pop music and art. Elms suggests the word ‘hegemony’: it is the perfect word. Listening, I offer up thanks for a conversation that uses such words without pretension. On the whole, though, Elms tends to keeps things demotic. Trying to define the Nineties, he asks Turner, tail wagging, ‘But were they fun? the Eighties were fun, it was all picket lines.’ Elms is a working-class boy made good. My reaction: good. But, trawling the web, it’s not hard to find sneering about it.
Sir Bob Geldof turns up as one of the show’s ‘Listed Londoners’, a feature in which a notable personality explores their London connections by way of 15 standard questions about his or her favourite places to walk, eat, have a night out, etc. Only a few minutes into the interview, discussion on London architecture & social housing evolves into Sir Bob quoting Wordsworth’s Upon Westminster Bridge, in his delicious, grumpy voice, in an effort to portray the early morning view over the Thames as the sun rises and the first airliners fly upriver:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
After explaining the origins of old Boomtown Rats songs in the ill-deeds of big corporations or individuals, and complaining that he could write those same songs today, Sir Bob, who is nearly 62, asserts: ‘All generations fail, but our generation seems to have failed more spectacularly than most.’ This brings the conversation onto one of Elms’s favourite territories, ie youth culture/subculture. The 53-year-old Elms counters, claiming ‘our’ – that is, Elms’s – generation has helped make race and sex discrimination a thing of the past. Sir Bob admits, oddly, that he’s never really thought of it like that, then launches straight into a colourful sketch of the Irish music scene of the mid-70s, the background of myth, blues and fantasy woven by the likes of Van Morrison, Phil Lynott & Rory Gallagher, against which he wrote his first songs, inspired by Canvey Island rockers Dr Feelgood.
The talk doesn’t always hold together – it’s clear that, however much he might want to, sharp-dressing London soul boy Elms doesn’t really share a generation with raffish Irish bad boy Geldof, and his often-repeated assertion that youth culture ended with acid house largely because there are no youth fashion trends any more is arguable to say the least – but it doesn’t matter. This is not what the radio industry appallingly calls ‘chat’, this is conversation.
Apart from Monday’s Listed Londoner, among the show’s other regular features are:
Whose London? on Tuesdays, basically an excuse to isolate and delve into an aspect of London life or history.
Notes & Queries on Wednesdays, where listeners phone in with odd questions about idiosyncratic aspects of London life
Cover to Cover on Thursdays compares original tracks with a cover version. Elms plays judge to the listeners’ jury; it’s always good to hear real people say exactly what they like about music.
The Fourfer on Fridays, where listeners vote on their favourite song from a particular singer or group and Elms then plays the four most popular, followed by Funky Friday, which needs no explanation whatsoever.
There are regular spots on food, architecture, film, gardening and linguistics. Callers play a big part in the show, and Elms attracts the best. If you listen to talk radio at all, you’ll know that really matters: so often it’s a dull, predictable caller who triggers the tune-out impulse.
The music that spaces out the talk is, to my 50-year-old ear, satisfyingly adult; Elms is in a very small club of presenters who are unashamed fans of jazz and jazz-influenced music: in the last week or so, he’s given us vibes man Milt Jackson, French-American jazz chanteuse Cécile McLorin Salvant, José Feliciano, Nat King Cole, Jamie Cullum and the amazing Gregory Porter, who I’d never heard of. The jazz ices the more solid cake of soul, reggae, funk and rock, mixing oldies with newer talent; in the last week or so: The Stylistics; Al Green; Sly & The Family Stone; Tyrone Davis; Morcheeba; Jimmy Cliff; Dawn Penn; Alice Russell; Bowie; Dylan; Elton John, Mick Flannery; Leslie Mendelson. I’ve read that Robert Elms never plays the Beatles. I don’t know if that’s literally true, but a 2009 BBC News story quotes him thus: ‘I just think they are either childlike and simple or rather leaden and pompous – one or the other all the time. For me they turned something that was once sexy and raw and had roots, into something that was totally soulless, playground sing-along music.’ Well, it’s a free country, Robert. But that cap, if it fits, doesn’t just fit the Beatles.
The show has regular live music, often from relative newcomers, and this is a big part of its attraction. The artists don’t always take over the show – “OK, it’s time we heard (yet) another track from our guest band” – sometimes getting just one live song and a four or five-minute chat – so if you don’t take to them you don’t have to tune out. Last Friday saw Ciyo Brown in the Elms studio – which I’m betting is not huge – playing a sort of jazz-reggae fusion that sounded a whole lot better than that phrase.
Robert Elms is a survivor from BBC London 94.9’s previous incarnation as GLR (Greater London Radio), a station whose listeners’ love of its non-commercial, no-playlist music policy was, in the end, not matched by their numbers: GLR was forcibly – and, initially, unsuccessfully – remodelled as a much more speech-led station. The BBC’s then Director of National and Regional Broadcasting, one Mark Thompson, said ‘We want to evolve GLR, so that it really becomes the place where people go for quality speech radio.’ (Really, Mark? Not Radio 4?) Somehow the Robert Elms show has managed to do just that, while retaining, in its broad and intelligent music offering, more than a dash of the old GLR.
The programme exists, essentially, in the intersection of working-class life and the national culture, whatever that is, exactly. You might find that hard to accept when listening to Elms swapping restaurant tips with some overpaid glitteratus, but I’m willing to bet Elms would argue that spending your hard-earned on good food and wine is no more ‘selling out’ than spending it on good music.
How to listen
Presenting an overnight radio programme has been called ‘doing the graveyard shift’ for some very good reasons. With most sensible folk asleep in their beds, you’re often left with an assortment of oddballs, insomniacs and shift workers – and not very many of them. Tuning your set in at random at 2 am, you’re likely to hear the presenter having a desperately over-long conversation about bus tickets with Mad Arnold, who’s old enough to remember the first bus. The three of you may well be the only ones involved.
Up All Night is not for Mad Arnolds; it attracts over half a million really quite sane people every week, who tune in to hear the programme circle the globe, bringing foreign news and sport stories to a UK audience. Regular features in the show’s 28 hours a week include science, world football, film, book and mental health phone-ins, world music, Bollywood, US sport and TV, weather and archaeology news.
It’s the brainchild of softly-spoken Scot Rhod Sharp, who proposed the format to 5 Live before the BBC network’s launch in 1994; he still presents the show from Tuesday to Thursday (if you’re staying up late to listen, think Monday night to Wednesday night). Both Rhod and the Friday to Monday host, Dotun Adebayo, make sure the tone of the show stays friendly and accessible. Rhod is an old newsroom hand and foreign correspondent; his low-key interview style and his deep knowledge of US issues are among the programme’s major attractions. He has unobtrusively presented the show from the small, coastal town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, since 2004.
Dotun is a Nigerian-born, North London neo-geezer who’s as arty as he’s blokey and does an occasional relationship advice phone-in item with his wife – unmissable! When she gets really fed up with him, ‘the missus’ – singer Carroll Thompson – brings a few musical mates in, and sweetly sings Dotun off his chair. He once got his own back by staging an OB at their house.
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