Folkheart

James O’Brien

LBC

Monday to Friday 1000-1300

Photograph: Braveheart, Edinburgh Castle by Kjetil Bjørnsrud (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons / altered from original

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.