How Ken’s dream job became biggest Britain’s radio show
His battles with the Beeb, his love of family life and why, despite his success, he fears fame. The nation’s favourite DJ opens up to our best-loved broadcaster
‘ I did the usual midlife things, the gym, the car, the parties
KEN Bruce is tucked behind his desk in a small radio studio, playing a spot of ELO to his 8.5million listeners. I should be listening too. Instead, I’m distracted by a strange thumping coming from underneath his desk.
The beat is slow and measured during ELO, picks up pace over Westlife, and when he talks over the opening bars of DeBarge’s Rhythm of the Night the thud is so noticeable I’m sure that his listeners must be able to hear it. There can only be one explanation.
‘Are you drumming?’ I ask incredulously as I peer behind the desk and see both thighs working like pistons. ‘I’m afraid I am,’ the DJ admits. ‘Sorry, I do it all the time.’
Drumming, it turns out, is something that Bruce does even when he’s not behind a mixing desk. In fact, he plays drums in a band in his home village in Oxfordshire.
‘We do two or three concerts a year,’ he says. ‘I don’t sing, I don’t do announcements or anything like that, it’s a case of “don’t look at me, just let me do it”.’
That Bruce keeps it low-key is entirely predictable, given his self-effacing character. Even the fact that his programme was recently crowned the UK’s most popular radio show receives relatively short shrift.
‘In the proper order of the universe, the breakfast show should really be scoring higher than my show,’ he says of the latest listening figures.
‘I have no doubt that proper order will return at some point and this is just a temporary blip… but it’s quite satisfying.’
Bruce’s inability to bask in anything that resembles glory for the success of his Radio 2 show and its 8.5million listeners each week is a running theme in our chat, likely the result of many years working in the fickle world of broadcasting and particularly for such a capricious organisation as the BBC.
‘Never take anything for granted, that’s always been my motto and I’m not going to start now this late in my life: “that’s it, won it, won a watch”.’ He smiles at very idea.
THROUGH a glass wall in his cosy studio we can see producer Bridgett and her assistant Susan. Beyond that there’s another glass wall to a studio which I presume has just been vacated by Zoe Ball and her breakfast show team.
The last set of national audience figures saw Radio 2 lose listeners overall, and in the wake of Chris Evans’ departure to Virgin the headlines settled on the slump suffered by Ball’s muchheralded breakfast show.
Perhaps such scrutiny shouldn’t have come as a surprise to bosses given the focus placed on their flagship by the BBC itself. After Ball’s debut the Director General Tony Hall no less emerged from her studio looking as though he was going to self-combust with delight.
I wonder when he last popped in to see Ken. I’m sure the irony that the BBC’s most popular show on its most popular radio station is hosted by its longest serving presenter is not lost on a Corporation often accused of being obsessed by youth.
So why are the musings of this 68-year-old Glaswegian who has been in the same slot for 27 years bucking the trend?
‘I honestly don’t know,’ he says, cueing a Peter Gabriel track. ‘Giving the job the right weight and doing (it) properly, but not treating it too seriously.
‘Don’t insult your listeners, don’t patronise them, don’t speak down to them.
‘Our listeners are intelligent, with a great sense of humour, so you treat them as if they are as intelligent, if not more so, than you are.’
His listeners are certainly curious about him. Google his name and it often throws up the suggestion: Ken Bruce wives.
I tell him this. ‘Ah, they come, they go,’ is the DJ’s wonderfully evasive reply.
He also has an impressive tally of offspring. He married his first wife, Fiona, in 1976 and had two children, Campbell and Douglas.
That marriage came to an end when he fell for Anne, a BBC researcher with whom he later had a daughter, Kate.
When Anne called time on that relationship Bruce wrote of his devastation: ‘I did the usual midlife things: joined a gym, bought a convertible car, went to parties and drank too much.’ He met his third wife, Kerith, 21 years ago when she worked with him on the Eurovision song contest broadcast. They have three children – Murray, 17, Verity, 14, and 11-yearold Charlie.
‘Charlie is at an age where he finds it hilarious he can look me up on Google and ask questions like, “why can’t I have more pocket money”?’ (Ken can thank the BBC’s salary transparency for revealing to Charlie that Dad’s pay is just south of £300,000.) ‘He also asks, “Why did you get married all those times”?’
The family live a quiet life in Oxfordshire, partly because Murray is autistic. He also has apraxia which effects his motor skills, and he doesn’t speak.
‘It must be very difficult for him,’ Bruce says. ‘I’m the man who talks for a living.’
On his phone he shows me a Facebook post written by his son. It’s a sensitive analysis of Murray’s feelings about his condition, and reveals an understanding and sensitivity far beyond his 17 years. ‘He writes beautifully,’ Bruce says proudly, explaining that his wife supports her son’s arm while he slowly types on an iPad.
As Murray’s needs became apparent Kerith trained as a special needs teaching assistant.
‘He goes to a school which will take him till he’s 19, after that we are looking for options and there aren’t that many. We’re even looking at what we can do ourselves, perhaps setting up something. There are a lot of kids in the same situation and there’s really very little provision out there.’
As we talk the computer next to his desk rolls a huge number of texts and tweets.
He scans the interactions, broadcasting the best. Nothing’s planned or primed; it’s just him, the microphone and the music. I’ve done a bit of music radio presenting and know the challenge of
an open mic and a momentarily empty brain. I tell him it’s like watching a master craftsman at work, which prompts another torrent of self-deprecation.
‘If I have got better over the years it’s because I’ve been doing it a long time, refining and refining. And I probably don’t say as much as other people. A lot of people think if you’re on radio you have to talk a lot – you don’t have to, just make what you say work.’
It’s a talent Bruce has honed since he was a schoolboy growing up in Glasgow. Some kids want to be footballers or astronauts; the young Bruce’s dream was to become a continuity announcer with BBC Scotland.
In the late 1970s after a stint as a trainee accountant and with a car hire firm, while moonlighting on hospital radio, he landed his dream job. By the early 1980s, he had a daily music show on Radio Scotland
and some holiday relief presenting on Radio 2 which led to a full-time job and a move south.
BUT if that ascent up the greasy pole sounds easy, it wasn’t. Bruce’s autobiography, written ten years ago, is candid about his numerous applications and rejections along the way, a playbook for anyone with similar aspirations.
Even when he actually reached the hallowed halls of Radio 2 it wasn’t plain sailing. Few remember that his first stint, as Sir Terry Wogan’s replacement on the breakfast show, was comparatively short-lived and was followed by a couple of years when he was unceremoniously shuffled up and down the Radio 2 schedule before finding his mid-morning niche.
Now, after so many years in the slot, he knows his job is much sought after. I tell him of a friend of mine who is part of the presentation stand-in team for another network’s flagship show and how they all plan their holidays with military precision so as not to let anyone else get onto the deputising rota. The broadcasting business isn’t short of people with sharp elbows.
‘There are a lot of people who would like to be on Radio 2,’ he concurs, ‘but at the moment I don’t feel anybody’s hot breath on the back of my neck.
‘The BBC are being nice to me and are appreciative – they haven’t always been. In the 90s they brought in a Head of Talent and they drew up a list of talent that the BBC had. Then someone pointed out I wasn’t on the list.’
He can smile now at the memory, but he and I know that some BBC managers are capable of operating with a callousness that would get them chucked out of the Mafia for cruelty. ‘Along the way there have been attempts or suggestions that it was time to go,’ he says.
‘It came close one time but then suddenly I was reprieved. It’s always a chess game, moving the pieces around, and it wasn’t my turn to be knocked off the board.
‘Sometimes I beat myself up for staying in the same place; that I’ve been too comfortable doing the same job for too long. But then I think this is the kind of job that most people in radio would kill to do. I’ve managed to get my dream job and hang onto it.’
The years Bruce spent as part of an eloquent broadcasting tag team with his good friend Sir Terry Wogan were particularly enjoyable. Sir Terry had returned to the station after a spell on television, the effects of which are partly why he says he has never longed to make the leap across to what he calls ‘the great God TV’.
‘I don’t get off on fame, it’s almost a downside that people might be interested in what I’m up to so I don’t do anything that invites that kind of scrutiny. I’ve never been interested in television.
‘Dear old Terry was the most popular man in Britain in the early eighties, he really was.
‘He could have been elected president – then he went on television three nights a week and the nation turned on him. “That Wogan, he’s never off the screen, he drives me nuts.” Watching it all from afar I thought, how did that happen so quickly?’
OUR conversation is interrupted by the producer reminding him that the ubiquitous Jeremy Vine, whose programme follows Bruce’s, is running a bit late this morning and he can’t make it to the studio for their usual chat.
Instead he reads a trail promoting his colleague’s topics for the show, ad-libbing as usual. I wonder if he has to be more careful with the witty asides these days, in a world where careless words can cost careers.
‘You’ve got to be very careful,’ he says. ‘You can’t always predict how some very light-hearted remark could cause a Twitter pile-on. There’s always someone ready to take offence.
‘Then there’s a danger of being totally bland and just saying nothing, and obviously I’m here to try and entertain, to try to make people smile or laugh.
‘I’ll try and think of things that make me laugh – but then some of the things that make me laugh are unsuitable for broadcast on Radio 2 in the morning.’
There are ten minutes to go on this morning’s programme as Richie the travel reporter bounces in with his update and attempts to parry whatever banter Bruce decides to aim at him.
Through the glass wall I see a familiar face in the next studio: Sir Rod Stewart is recording an interview with Steve Wright. If this was telly there would be an entourage and a fuss, but such is the grounded nature of radio no one really seems to take much notice.
At midday the show ends and after recording some introductions for weekly podcasts, he tidies up and flicks the switches that shut down his studio. It’s so un-starry I half expect his tasks to include running a vacuum cleaner over the carpet.
As we leave the Radio 2 building we’re met by a crowd of fans and paparazzi who have been tipped off that Sir Rod is in the building. Bruce though, passes through the throng anonymously. And that’s just how he likes it.