DAVE BERRY
THE ABSOLUTE RADIO DJ, 43, TELLS JUST WHAT HE’D LIKE TO DO WITH MARCUS RASHFORD
What games did you play growing up?
I had a lot of love for Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo and I really loved Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the PlayStation. But overall it would have to be SSX Tricky on the PS2. The last piece of tech I bought was a PlayStation 2 but my TV is too smart to be able to play it and the converter I bought didn’t work. I just wanted to go upstairs to the bedroom and lock myself away with my PlayStation and SSX, just like my dad.
Do you still get time to play?
I still play a lot of Fifa. I play career mode and get really into the transfer market. I had real internal struggles when they introduced the ability to set your own transfer budget up to about half a billion pounds. I think I had Marcus Rashford and Mason Mount playing for Charlton in League One but it just didn’t seem right. Hopefully life will mirror the art of Fifa and we’ll see Rashford at The Valley in Charlton soon.
Your job involves very early mornings. Do you have any gadgets to help you wake?
We were given a Nespresso coffee machine as a wedding gift, which remained in its box for a while. But when I first started doing the breakfast show I heard that Ronan Keating, who does the Magic Breakfast show on the floor below us, brings in his own coffee machine because the ones here in the studios aren’t great. I went home, unboxed the Nespresso machine and it’s now being
used.
You’ve lent your voice to an Amazon Echo game. What was that like?
We do a game on the show called 5 Words 5 Grand. We decided to reach out to Amazon and do a version for Alexa called the 5 Words Game. It’s proving quite popular, which is nice because I spent a very strange afternoon in my spare room during lockdown recording myself saying things for it like, ‘No, that’s not quite right,’ and ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.’ I don’t have a smart speaker but my parents do so the first opportunity I had to play with myself – so to speak – was at
my mum and dad’s house.
If you could invent a gadget what would it do?
I’d like to control real-life footballers using my PlayStation controller. I watched Charlton Athletic play Sheffield Wednesday earlier this season and throughout the game there was only one shot on target. I felt like getting my PlayStation controller out from under the TV and jumping in.
Listen to The Dave Berry Breakfast Show on Absolute Radio