VALERIE GROVE
My life has become impossible. Times Radio was launched and it’s jolly hard to resist.
Quentin Letts wrote that it aimed to be ‘an antidote to the boring old Today programme’ – so I began by listening to both in tandem, which meant two doses of Grant Shapps (sigh) within 15 minutes. Times Radio’s big coup on day one
was Boris, whacking moles and bigging himself up as the FDR de nos jours. Much more endearing was the children’s hero Michael Rosen on Today, on his seven weeks on a ventilator. Back home in Muswell Hill, with a tracheotomy hole in his neck, and a walking aid called Sticky Mcstickstick, Rosen said his legs felt ‘like cardboard tubes full of porridge’.
Thanks partly to seasoned broadcasters poached from elsewhere – Mariella Frostrup, Michael Portillo, Aasmah Mir, John Pienaar, Tom Newton Dunn and Cathy Newman, Times Radio made a highly polished debut.
Its newsprint hacks – bright boys mostly named Tom or Will – plus its film critic Kevin Maher, the ineffable Caitlin Moran and good old Libby Purves all pitched up to the mike, and Stig Abell, former TLS editor, morphed into a breakfast host.
The most prominent performers in the early days were the North London mob: David Aaronovitch, Danny Finkelstein, Hugo Rifkind and Giles Coren. They’re all seasoned broadcasters who live within a four-mile radius of one another (and me – I might see any of them on the Heath).
On Friday at 1pm, Giles Coren took over at 100 miles a minute: ‘I know it’s lunchtime but DON’T HAVE LUNCH until the show’s over; you’ll have to FAST – fasting’s good for you – till four o’clock but, oh dear, that’ll be time for Cathy Newman! You can never eat again!’
Was Giles on speed? He paused briefly while stumped (as was I) by a fiendish Times crossword clue: ‘Train to admire is arriving at the station (5,5)’. It was an anagram: Times Radio, of course.
Then Giles was almost out-talked by David Baddiel, his first guest on Desert Island Crisps, reprising his life in eight snacks. Baddiel and Coren, rattling along, dwelt on how kosher were their chicken-soup childhoods: ‘We were West Hampstead Jewish;’ ‘We were more Dollis Hill Jewish.’
Not much later, Stories of Our Times profiled another North London-born boy, Richard Desmond, once a pillar of the synagogue before turning to porn. It was beginning to look a bit ‘You don’t have to be Jewish to work here, but it helps’. And why not? As on Broadway and in Hollywood, life would be extremely dull and unfunny otherwise.
Under the title Past Imperfect, Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester chivvied Tony Blair – a soft touch – into recalling his youth. ‘I’m hopeless at self-analysis,’ he said (true), adding at the end, ‘I feel I’ve now been to the therapist.’
Matt Chorley – along with Alexis Conran, a terrific political show host – has a weak r. Hence ‘Bowis in bwight owange hi-vis’. He welcomed ‘Waw-y Bwemner’, who obligingly did his Boris: ‘Now is not the time tew, tew, tew find out what went wrong with COVID-19 – it is the time to build, build, BUILD! We’ve been all over the place and we haven’t had enough credit for it!’
Bremner also dredged up Kermit Roosevelt Jr, who in 1953 masterminded a coup in Iran; Bremner’s cue to sing, in the voice of Kermit the Frog, ‘It really makes me hap-pee to mastermind a coup.’
After a week, my head spun: political speculation and vox pop – mercifully no ads, except for Times subscriptions (got one, thanks). Back to Radios 4 and 3 for music, drama etc.
But I know my radio habits have changed for ever. I enjoyed my week of truanting and I’ll do it again: not for navel-gazing from Westminster’s bubble, but because Hugo, Giles and co will make me laugh.