Bacon’s onions

Richard Bacon

BBC Radio 5 Live

Monday to Thursday 1400-1600

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.