Shelagh Fogarty
Monday to Friday 1pm – 4pm
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.
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