Radio 1’s Greg James acts like a puppy on Prozac
Between ourselves, the Radio 1 Breakfast Show isn’t my thing. Even if I were organised enough to make time for an actual breakfast, I don’t think I’d be able to eat it under fire from pounding dance songs and those truly stressful jingles that sound like a broken Nintendo, all things that have their place in life but which seem to me to be the opposite of breakfast.
Of course, I must be wrong because millions of people love it. And I can see there’s a point to it when you’re trying to wake up. If Radio 1 is the opposite of breakfast, it’s also the opposite of sleep. Waking up to it at 6.30am is like finding a horse’s head in your bed.
On Monday, in the interest of science, I embraced that horse’s head to hear the maiden performance of Greg James, formerly of the 4-7pm Drivetime slot, now host of what he called “the most famous radio show in the world”. I’m not sure it is or ever was, but after gently shrinking audiences under Nick Grimshaw (5.29 million on average this quarter, down from 6.92million when he took over from Chris Moyles in 2012), I can see why James wants to be bullish.
Grimshaw’s last show, on August 9, was weary. “Well, summer’s over, dears, and so am I,” he began. James, on the other hand, was bouncing off the walls like a puppy on Prozac. That made it more aggravating, but since that is presumably what people want from the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, on balance perhaps it was a good thing.
It all began with a listener phoning in from Blackpool Zoo so we could hear the lions wake up and roar. It was a nice idea, though not, as James announced, “a radio first”, and transmitting the lions over a crackling phone line should probably be a radio last. He also spoilt the longawaited roar by grunting over it. In fact, the certainty that his microphone would always be on – as if I would never be free of him – felt so claustrophobic that I had to stop listening with headphones and play it out loud instead.
The best bit about the show was the genuinely funny, feline comedian Joe Lycett, who was enlisted to handle the callers (“Jamie from Guildford is really enjoying the show but he’d like you to have a huskier voice”) and give a live commentary of my heroes, the Red Arrow team, doing a spectacular. The catch was that Red One and co weren’t in their planes because it was too expensive so they did their formations on smoke-trailing bicycles instead.
That was an inherently amusing concept, though not after it had been trailed three times, executed, then dissected. But that’s the breakfast show curse. When you have to kill time, the joke is collateral damage.
The Documentary: Leonard Bernstein and Me (World Service, Tuesday), to mark the composer’s centenary, didn’t deliver on its promise to tell us why he believed in music as a social force, but it left you in no doubt that Bernstein was a force in himself, jumping about in turtlenecks at the podium, bringing Beatles songs into the concert hall, fanatically encouraging young musicians, and desperately wishing that he himself could sing in tune.
His charisma radiated off the stories second-hand, like sunlight off the moon. “You just wanted to please this man,” said one singer. Another woman addressed her entire teenage diary to “Dear Lenny” after falling under the spell of his voice on her Peter and the Wolf record. I think he would have been glad to have helped her through her anxieties. As he put it, unusually for a maestro, “I like people as much as I like music, if not more.”
Elizabeth Taylor, the novelist, feels like a bit of an also-ran. Once you’ve disentangled her from the film star of the same name, you’re tempted to compare her to two other novel-writing Elizabeths: her friend, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Elizabeth Bowen. Next to either, Taylor comes up short. At least, that was what I thought until I heard her 1971 novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, last week’s Book at Bedtime (Radio 4, Monday-friday).
Eleanor Bron was sublime as the wry narrator following Mrs Palfrey, a widow who “looked like some famous general in drag”, as she arrived at a residential hotel in London (“if it’s not nice, I needn’t stay”); met the other guests, among them an intimidating, arthritic lady, who inched around on two sticks “like an injured insect”; and lost face as months went by and her only relation, a grandson, did not visit.
The wistful piece became a dark farce when she found herself passing off a young writer as her grandson instead. It was very funny, very sad, and so dexterously compressed that you couldn’t imagine the larger book from which these five perfect pieces had been carved.
Jemima Lewis is away