The business of radio is all about breakfast. Dials are rarely turned from the station they were on at the start of the day and listener numbers slowly drop off from a high point between eight and nine. This is why the breakfast presenter gets the most money and why Global decided that Chris Moyles (Weekdays, 6.30am, Radio X) was the best person to kick off its relaunched XFM, which has cast caution to the wind and will henceforth be known as Radio X. This station, incidentally, has the least elegant positioning statement in the history of media, promising to play “the best rock and guitar-based music”. I’d love to know which piece of market research led them to append that second hyphenate.
In his new role, Moyles is pursuing the same high-risk strategy he followed at Radio 1. For the first 15 minutes of his second day he didn’t play any music apart from the generic rock bed he was talking over. Since there wasn’t an ad in the first half-hour, his employers are presumably OK with this. On said second day, Moyles was speculating whether his having apparently crashed the Radio X website on the previous day could be attributed to his popularity or the fact that the station’s website was so poor. Within the breast of every breakfast DJ there rages the same battle: do the listeners love me for myself or for my station? They eventually find it’s the station. They never want to believe it.
I don’t personally find Moyles’s patter funny – people who do normal jobs are “muggles”, he talks about how he hates getting up in the morning a little more than necessary, and clearly feels most comfortable when the subject being discussed is himself – and each strand feels like the build-up to a punchline that never arrives. Nevertheless, he’s popular, which clearly means there are many bed-headed listeners who will continue to find that very fuzziness matches their early-morning mood.
Confirmation that Simon Mayo’s show is now accepted as the best place to plug a book arrives in the shape of Margaret Attwood’s appearance on Simon Mayo Drivetime (Monday, 5pm, Radio 2) to talk about her novel The Heart Goes Last. To think there was a time when Mayo, like Moyles, did Radio 1’s breakfast show.
Marking what would have been his 75th birthday, Archive On 4: John Lennon: Verbatim (Saturday, 8pm, Radio 4) is an excellent self-portrait compiled from yards of old interviews. We get Brian Matthew asking him what he thought of the recent Shea stadium show (50 years ago this summer), but most of the rest doesn’t require the services of a questioner. Lennon’s statements sound like answers to impertinent questions: whether he’s talking about the lyrics of the Beatles’ Girl, his avant garde adventures with Yoko Ono, or his Elvis Presley impressions on Double Fantasy, he always adopts a faintly combative tone. It’s this, and the music, that makes this programme work so well.
The Awesome Etiquette Podcast is half ludicrous and half useful. Thanks to social media and new conventions around marriage and partnership, the lines of acceptability have to be redrawn quite regularly these days, and few are better qualified to advise than the heirs of Emily Post, who became America’s queen of manners in the late 40s. Recent subjects covered: the dos and don’ts of public breast feeding, fantasy football, and whether it is ever acceptable to bring seven mates along to a wedding. Spoiler alert: it’s not.
