The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
BBC Radio 2’s attempts to shed listeners are relentless
The comedian talks to Ed Cumming about dealing with fame, parenting in an era of social media and taking over the Saturday morning show on BBC Radio 2
Michael Ball’s talents will be shredded as he dwindles to doing links between slushy love songs
Good old Gary Davies, yet again malleable putty in the cracks of the BBC Radio 2 schedules. What a good sort he is – a true veteran. Sixty-six years old, a Radio 1 DJ from the 1980s and presenter of the long-defunct
Top of the Pops, he’s been Radio 2 glue since 2018, with a berth in Sounds of the
80s on Saturday evening. He also pops up to cover everyone else’s holiday and the constant gaps in the schedule caused by the station bosses’ brutal approach to human resources.
Thus, as they ponder who should present Saturday’s Pick of the Pops,
Davies’s patience is tested once more as he’s lent the gig for an indeterminate period. And those bosses doubtless feel he’s grateful for the work and will, as ever, step in with his usual vim, vigour and old-school DJ enthusiasm. While we listeners were irritated that Paul Gambaccini needed shunting from it in the first place.
Gambaccini was pushed to another slot so that the late Steve Wright could have something else to do in addition to his Sunday Love Songs programme, which was all that was left for him after his daily Steve Wright in the Afternoon was axed – despite still having several years of fuel in the tank.
And the ricochets of Wright’s axing and demise are still traumatising the schedules this week. Hot on the heels of the announcement that comedian Romesh Ranganathan will take over Claudia Winkleman’s Saturday morning slot after she stepped down to spend more time with her children, the latest target is Michael Ball. He has been moved to hosting Sunday Love Songs and is putting a brave face on it. He said he would continue Wright’s “extraordinary legacy” and was “excited and more than a little nervous”. Since joining the station in 2008 and starting The Michael Ball Show in 2013, Ball has proved himself an engaging and natural host, a brilliant interviewer, a self-deprecating individual who manages to mock the worst contestants in his weekly On the Ball quiz in such a way that you love them even more.
His voice was a soothing sound first for a Sunday evening and then a perfect filler for prepping Sunday lunch. But now his talents will be shredded as he dwindles to doing links between slushy love songs, while his gig is handed to Paddy McGuinness, the former host of Top Gear, who presents radio like he’s running a karaoke night at the pub. It’s a useful talent, but it doesn’t say “Sunday morning vibes” to me. But then, that’s the point.
Radio 2’s attempts to shed me as a listener are relentless, but I continue to cling on, mixing it up with a bit of Radio 4 – including lots of the Today programme (I’m a glutton for punishment) – some Zeb Soanes on Classic FM, with the rest of my audio consumption being on Spotify. The replacement of the likes of Wright and Ken Bruce is central to the station’s policy of chavving up the schedule – the dream, it seems, being to create the accompaniment to a sort of wall-to-wall drunken ladies’ night.
Which is fine as a purpose, if they feel this somehow adheres to the BBC values of audience, creativity, trust, respect and accountability. It’s just that they seem consistently merciless in their execution. Their inability to let people down gently is so constant it feels deliberate.
It was looking as if Bruce was making a graceful exit in 2023 when he announced his departure – his decision – after 31 years. But then they forced him out earlier than mooted, with Davies, obviously, holding the fort before Vernon Kay took the reins. There was Simon Mayo’s ghastly exit in 2018, which followed the brutally awkward pairing of him with Jo Whiley. Agonising to listen to, it was a form of torture for the presenters as innovative as bastinado. Mayo later described it as Verschlimmbesserung, the German expression for an improvement that only makes things worse. And, of course, shedding Wright robbed us of the miracle of a daily show: meticulously produced, with a host of classic comedic characters, well-crafted links, an extraordinary set of jingles and musical stings, and a voice that became the reassuring sound of an afternoon in Britain.
Helen Thomas, the head of Radio 2, says she’s, “looking forward to Michael’s [Ball] earlier show, where he’ll entertain his ‘lovelies’ as he’s always done.” And yup, we’ll be there, willing him on and, as with so many shunted presenters, maintaining our loyalty like the Monty Python Black Knight fought on as each of his limbs was cut off: “’tis but a scratch.”
I wrote this on a train to Edinburgh and a young woman next to me asked what the subject matter was. After telling her, she said: “I used to work at the BBC.” She recalled showing round a student who wanted to work in radio. How might they realise their dream of one day becoming a presenter? “I had to give them the worse piece of advice I’ve ever given anyone in my life,” she sighed. “I told them they needed first to become a celebrity.”
“It’s more difficult to admit to being a beta male than it was in the past,” says the comedian Romesh Ranganathan. “It has become a bit of a cliché, or a caricature.” The archetype was a classic figure of the 1990s, encapsulated by Chandler Bing in
Friends: a physically weedy, insecure and submissive man who is eager to please and uses humour as a shield.
Jonathan, Ranganathan’s character in BBC sitcom Avoidance, which is back for a second series, is beta through and through. As he attempts to win back his estranged wife and parent their son, Jonathan constantly prevaricates and defers, to his own detriment and the fury of those around him.
“A lot of comedy is based on someone having a personality defect,” he says, sitting in an office in north London. As you would hope from someone who effortlessly anchors so many hours of entertainment, Ranganathan is easy, entertaining, self-deprecating company, trim in a navy jacket, trousers and Nike trainers.
“So [co-creator] Benjamin Green and I thought, ‘Let’s have a character that has that’. It’s such a well-meaning character flaw to have. He’s a people pleaser, so he doesn’t like upsetting people and doesn’t ever say what he means. It’s all well-intentioned, but it’s really annoying.”
He freely admits his character, which he writes for as well as plays, is heavily based on himself. Jonathan is even his real first name. His parents thought Romesh might sound too ethnic. In his stand-up, he has addressed the absurdity of thinking Jonathan might help on that front when it is followed by Ranganathan.
“I share with Jonathan that I’m deeply aware of my personality flaws and social inadequacies, and I worry I’m going to transfer that on to my kids,” he says. Ranganathan has three sons – Theo, 14, Alex, 12, and Charlie, nine – with his wife, Leesa, whom he met when they were both teachers: she taught drama, he taught maths. Like Jonathan, he worries about the example he is setting.
“I role model [his verb] in a way that’s different from my nature. I try to be more sociable on the school run.
I’m terrified of spiders but I’ve hidden that from my children.
“I have impostor syndrome, being hyper self-critical,” he goes on, more seriously. “A lot of us have that. It’s good to be critical to a degree. I’ve never wanted to be a person who thinks everything I do is great – thankfully I’m in no danger of that. But being negative about myself is folded into my personality. I think it would be cool for my kids not to have that to the same degree I do. I’m conscious of the fact that I don’t want to talk down about myself in front of them.”
As ever for Ranganathan, Avoidance is only one of a number of spinning plates. Although he protests the point, saying he is naturally lazy, he is
Stakhanovite by comedian standards. He is currently preparing to take on the biggest challenge his multifaceted, multichannel career has thrown up yet, as later this month he replaces Claudia Winkleman on her daytime Radio 2 show. “I reassure myself that they’ve not gone for a like-for-like replacement,” he tells me.
In December, Winkleman announced that she would be stepping back to spend more time with her family. Ranganathan, who already presents the hip-hop show on Saturday evenings, was happy to step in.
“I’m grateful to Claud for wanting to spend more time with her kids, and enabling me to spend less time with mine,” he joked.
But he is raring to slip on Winkleman’s headphones. “I had to really think about it when I was offered it. Taking over from Claudia wasn’t something we had been planning. Partly you think about whether you’d be any good, and also I had to discuss with my wife whether she was OK with me missing every Saturday morning at home.
“That was more frictionless than you can imagine,” he jokes. “I half suspect that she might have suggested it…”
“[I have] a mixture of excitement and nerves,” he says. “Obviously I’m excited to take over a big show. But the catastrophising part of you thinks, what if I do this really terribly? When you do something weekly like that you become part of the fabric of their week and they get quite into you. I’m not looking to reinvent the format. It won’t be three hours of hip-hop.”
The change comes at a turbulent period for Radio 2. Last January, Ken Bruce announced he was jumping ship to Greatest Hits Radio after 31 years in the job, ending his long-running career at the BBC. Then last month Steve Wright died at 69, having been axed from his afternoon show in 2022 after 23 years. BBC radio finds itself being pulled from both sides.
Younger audiences are hard to prize away from Spotify and podcasts, while older listeners are defecting to commercial stations. As well as Greatest Hits there is Boom Radio, the insurgent startup explicitly aimed at Baby Boomers. Ranganathan finds himself in the midst of a general attempt to be all things to all listeners. In the wake of Bruce’s departure,
Radio 2 reported a drop of a million listeners.
“Radio 2 has made a lot of changes in a relatively short time,” he says. “That makes it feel like the reaction is bigger because people are reacting to more things. They’re moving with their listenership, and radio’s competitive. It’s a good thing. Things can’t stay the same forever. But I’m not in control of any of that. You just do the show you want to do and hope everything else takes care of itself. If you try to second-guess any of that, you’re on a hiding to nothing.”
Ranganathan was born in 1978, the son of two Tamil Sri Lankans, Ranga and Sivashanthini, known as Shanthi, who met in their native Sri Lanka but moved to the UK in the mid 1970s. He grew up in Crawley, where he still lives despite being at the mercy of Southern Rail. “I have seen my lowest points of human behaviour at East Croydon in the morning,” he says. “It’s the closest anything has been to Lord of the Flies.
It’s brutal.”
Ranga was an accountant and initially sent Romesh and his brother Dinesh to Reigate Grammar School. When Romesh was 12, Ranga announced he was leaving the family for another woman, before being arrested for fraud and sent to prison. The family home was repossessed and Shanthi and her sons lived in a B&B before moving into a council house. After he served his time, Ranga came back to his family and settled down to run a pub in East Grinstead. A drinker and party animal, Ranga died suddenly of a heart attack in 2011.
Inspired by this turbulent example, Ranganthan says his own parenting style is markedly more relaxed.
“My dad was pretty laid back but my mum wasn’t, in terms of what she wanted for us,” he says. “You feel guilty because your parents have moved over [to the UK] and partly the reason is to give you better life opportunities. If you squander them, you feel guilty.
But with that comes a constant pressure. You have to do the best in your exams and come top of your class. I’m not like that at all. I don’t even agree with the idea that doing the best at your exams is going to give you the best chance at being happy.”
But as a parent in the public eye, he is especially aware of the dangers of social media. “People tell me I’m s--- every day on social media. I’m immune to it, but [my children] are not. They see social media as allencompassing, whereas I see it as a thing that I use.
“If they have an issue at school, they don’t escape that when they come home. If you were having the p--taken out of you, home used to be a sanctuary. You’d get s--- at school but your mum and dad wouldn’t know about it. You’d just have dinner and they’d ask why you’re not a doctor,” he jokes.
“My kids can’t escape it. We had to have an agreement that Leesa and I can look at everything on their phones. Saying to a kid ‘it doesn’t really matter, you’ll move on’ doesn’t mean anything. Their value is so tied up in how their mates perceive them. It is a hard thing to negotiate.”
His work also means his sons are exposed to some of the worst parts of the internet, in the form of the racist abuse Ranganathan still endures. “My kids know that I get racist stuff online,” he says. “What you’re seeing is a version of road rage. People behave in a way they wouldn’t face to face.”
Is Britain still going the right way on race?
“Errrr,” he says, allowing the longest pause of the conversation. “Yes, I do. But it’s a tricky thing to handle because it has become publicly less acceptable to say those things, but it hasn’t become less acceptable to feel those things. And you can’t legislate for how somebody thinks.”
Ranganathan has become so omnipresent on British screens that it is easy to forget he was a late starter in showbusiness. He studied maths at London’s Birkbeck College and became a maths teacher at Hazelwick, the secondary school he had attended in Crawley. In his spare time he rapped under the name Ranga.
He tried his hand at stand-up when he was teaching, performing at night alongside his day job.
His decision to go into comedy, and an agent’s suggestion that he give up teaching and pursue comedy full-time, came in 2011 as he hit 33, amid the financial upheaval of his father’s death. “You become conscious: I need to get us out of this,” he has said. His early material drew heavily on his background. One trick, which he admits he stole from fellow comedian Omid Djalili, was to start the gig in a heavy Sri Lankan accent before switching to his pure Crawley normal voice. Broadcast opportunities came quickly, starting with Newsjack in 2014, and have continued. He has been a frequent guest on Would I Lie to You?, Mock the Week, Have I Got News For
You, and The Last Leg, among many others. Since 2019 he has presented The Ranganation (BBC Two), reviewing current affairs, and Rob & Romesh Vs… (Sky), in which he and fellow stand-up Rob Beckett take on a range of esoteric subjects and challenges. Since 2021 he has stepped into Anne Robinson’s spiky heels as the host of The Weakest Link (which returns later this year).
There have been countless stand-up tours and specials and documentaries and children’s books and a memoir, Straight Outta Crawley: Memoirs of a Distinctly Average Human Being, not to mention passion projects about hip-hop and his comedy hero Richard Pryor. It is increasingly possible that, including repeats, Ranganathan is visible somewhere on British television at all times. Does he worry about this ubiquity?
“If it happens, it happens,” he says.
‘People tell me that I’m s--- on social media every day. I’m immune – my children are not’
‘I had times when I was suicidal and I came really close. I thought about how to do it’
“If one day I get a call from my agent saying, ‘Rom, everyone’s seen too much of you, can you stop doing everything?’ I’d be alright with that. I could get more marathon training in.”
Having once been a little softer round the edges (he was an overweight child, who detested sport), today Ranganthan is fitter than ever, having switched to a vegan diet in 2013 and taken up running. He has lost three stone in total.
“I’ve noticed it’s easier to do the physical challenges on my travel shows and in Rob & Romesh Vs…,” he says. “Before, I felt subhuman in my abilities. But whatever we say about body positivity, it is easier to buy clothes [now he’s thinner]. Life is a bit easier, you feel a bit better. Everybody tells you you look great. But I’ve looked like this for a year now. I’m nervous people are starting to forget how I used to look.
“I don’t think Leesa and I are obsessive about it, but I think it’s a healthy and positive thing for children to see us exercising.”
He is running the London Marathon this year, for the mental health charity Calm, where he is patron. “I had times in my life when I was suicidal, and I came really close,” he says. He struggled after his father’s prison sentence, and when he did badly in his A-levels.
“I thought about how I was going to do it. But the trigger for me [getting involved with Calm] was a guy I used to teach with, who went through a really tough time. We all rallied around him. I went for dinner with him [in 2019] and he was talking really positively about his future. Two weeks later I heard he had taken his own life. Selfishly, you can’t help but think, ‘What did I not do that I could have done?’ Then you start thinking, ‘What could I do going forward?’”
One of the ironies of a successful comic career is that you start as an outsider and become an authority figure. A Sri Lankan friend tells me that, since George Alagiah died, Ranganathan is now Britain’s most prominent countryman in the media. Last year, London mayor Sadiq Khan enlisted him for the “Say maaate to a mate” campaign, which encouraged Londoners to discourage misogyny in their friends. It wasn’t universally popular, to put it mildly. There were critical responses everywhere from GB News, which ran segments calling it hypocritical, to Laurence Fox, who said “you’re not a comedian #maaaate”. Even The Guardian called the campaign “woolly and over-idealised”.
“There was a backlash,” Ranganathan concedes. “I was getting a lot of s--- about it online. The team that organised it worried I was going to be upset about it. But I thought it was great. A thing like that could have gone out to no reaction at all. It was good at raising awareness.”
After a decade of saying yes, he says family pressures mean he is at last starting to say no. “There have been times when I’ve been away more than I would like to have been,” he says. “I will start to do less and less.
You think, I’ve tried everything and enjoyed it, but these are the things I’ll be doing.”
The priorities are family, stand-up, running, Avoidance and Radio 2. On the last of those, he is prepared for pushback from listeners. “People don’t like change,” he says. “Some will be annoyed I don’t sound like Claudia. Hopefully people get to like it or they won’t and I’ll get sacked. Either outcome is alright.” It’s the Ranganathan way: if something doesn’t work out, there’s always something else. Beta male, perhaps, but an alpha career.
Series two of Romesh Ranganathan’s comedy ‘Avoidance’ will be available as a boxset on iPlayer. His new show on BBC Radio 2 starts on April 20, 10am–1pm.