Just a usual crazy morning with Zoe Ball and her crew on the Radio 1 breakfast show:
Zoe: "It's 6.30 am and I've got a paper cut! It really hurts!"
Ginner (on the decks): "Oh, no!"
Zoe A: (her broadcast assistant): "I think you might live!"
Zoe B: "It's Will! Will made me pick up this piece of purple paper!"
Will: (her producer): "Hmmmph!"
Zoe: "Hey guess what happened to me last night?!"
Chorus: "What??!!"
Zoe: "I fell asleep during the football!! It was that exciting!!!"
Will: "Tut, tut. I'm not surprised!"
Zoe: "Go on you Scotland!!! Good on yer!!!!"
[Claps and cheers all round]
This is zoo radio. One of radio's most successful experiments. Take a long last listen because it looks like it's on the way out. With the appointment of Sara Cox as Zoe Ball's replacement last week, the BBC announced a "total change" of format for one of the corporation's most important programmes, the Radio 1 breakfast show. Cox spells it out in no uncertain terms: "I'm gonna lose the old zoo format where there were about 30 people jumping around on Zoe." It is the end of an era.
How do you define a format as chaotic as its name suggests? Well, a personality (who tends to be quite funny) joshes about with his/her crew or "posse" (who tend to be not quite so funny), behaving more or less like a circus ringleader with a bunch of performing goats or seals, who throw and catch lines instead of hoops. In Zoe's case its Will, Ginner and Zoe A; on Chris Moyles's Radio 1 Drivetime it's Comedy Dave and "Melinda" (the messenger - boom, boom - who is actually a bloke); and on Chris Evans's Virgin breakfast show it's John and Dan (both producers), Holly (researcher) and Jamie (who answers the phones). The Americans invented the term zoo radio, the best example being the Howard Stern experience. Critics are divided on whether it got its name because the studio became like a zoo, or because the inhabitants belonged in a zoo. It was Steve Wright who first introduced it to Radio 1 in the late 80s and when he left in 1995, he famously took his personalised posse with him.
The British version tends to be watered-down brew with plenty of milk - more like a domestic menagerie than a zoo. Evans took the format, more accurately called "muppet radio" in this country, to its height with the Radio 1 breakfast show in 1995. Only Evans had the ability to get into the tabloids every day with his outrageous utterances, although Capital's Chris Tarrant has been called "the King of Zoo".
Since then, the format has become so standard in radio you wouldn't even notice it was there, or that much of the time it is about as stimulating than listening to a bunch of teenagers talking about sex on the Braintree to London express. But that is precisely zoo's appeal.
At its best it is like waking up in a room full of your friends talking. Early morning radio, the kind that gets you out of bed, away from the peanut butter jar and down the stairs to work or school, appeals to that semi-conscious mindstate ("Its 6.30am and I have a paper cut!") and the breakfast show, on whichever station, pulls in 14m morning zombies daily.
So why does Radio 1 want to change the record? Sara Cox, whose radio experience started when she joined the station three months ago, will have no mates around her to chortle along at her "where did I leave my brain last night?" stories.
She will be driving the decks on her own, with input from Rajesh Mirchandani, currently presenter on BBC 2's The O Zone, who will provide the hard content of news, information, weather and pop culture gossip, backed up by a beefed-up production team. Rajesh is not Jamie Theakston, nor even Evans's sidekick, Will McDonald, both of whom were considered as potential co-presenters for Cox. The message is information over personality.
The decision to change the format was taken "before Cox was on board", says Andy Parfitt, Radio 1's controller. "Every other station offers the zoo formula now and we are different. We are publicly funded. It's our job to strike out and do something new and innovative." The more-content-less-of-Zoe's-knickers approach does not, Parfitt points out, necessarily mean Radio 1 will be trying to create an "upmarket Today programme for young people", an idea it toyed with in the early 90s.
"It will still be a moan-free zone: cheerful, energetic company," Parfitt says. "The essential one-stop for young Britain." The choice of new presenter fits with the management's decision to choose someone who appealed directly to the target audience (18-24), who had "the X factor" but most importantly was a team player.
On the shortlist were Scott Mills (team player but not well known); television presenters Ant and Dec (too much X factor); and Chris Moyles, who was thought of as heir apparent to Evans but may be thinking of upgrading his image now that the lad-friendly format is considered outdated and Evans's show is losing listeners. Johnny Vaughan was also approached but, says Parfitt, "didn't seem very enthusiastic".
"Basically, we could have got out a chequebook and signed anyone we wanted, but we didn't want the Johnny Vaughan Breakfast show or even the Sara Cox Breakfast show. We wanted the Radio 1 breakfast show." Although Parfitt says that listeners may still have plenty of time for the zoo format he is all too wary of the pitfalls - "unless you are really vigilant, you can end up sounding like you are talking to yourselves and excluding your listeners".
A former Radio 1 adviser and radio critic, Stephen Armstrong, finds it hard to believe that they would make such a radical change to their shop window without an audience incentive. "They research what they do like crazy and if they are changing the format, it is likely they have checked it out with the listeners who find it irritating."
A year ago, the station's intention was to increase the number of women in their audience and expand their regional readership. Sara Cox is the policy in motion.
Radio critic Simon Garfield, author of The Nation's Favourite: the True Adventure of Radio 1, believes we are witnessing not so much the death of zoo radio ("the format has worked for the breakfast show") as the carefully orchestrated birth of a new star. "What they are saying is, this is not going to be Zoe Ball." If Cox is to be taken seriously, she cannot be mistaken for a clone of Zoe.
Incidentally, in the stage adaptation of Garfield's best-selling book, which opens in January in London, the part of Ball is played by an old-fashioned cotton mop and Cox by a half-sized mop. Despite the protestations of Radio 1 there are already more similarities between Cox and Ball - from their ballsy-sounding surnames, to their blonde hair, music world boyfriends and the fact that they have appeared on the front of glossy magazines cuddling - than differences.
Cox turned brunette this week - the first signal that things are going to be different on her breakfast show. Can she carry it off on her own? It is hard to tell from her performance on Sunday Surgery - where as Doctor Cox she doses out sympathy and "sound" Bolton lass advice to girls who call in with weight and boyfriend problems. She is also on the Saturday lunchtime show with Emma B and both shows have been taken off air while Cox is primed to take over next April.
But Parfitt is supremely confident in her abilities (Cox was his first choice) and the rest of the station appears to have taken her to its heart. Cox is thought to have a quick, easy-flowing, unaffected sense of humour and a maturity beyond her 24 years. "Sara doesn't need to shock to impress," says Parfitt. "But it's wrong to say she is more mature than Zoe - they are different people."
"It will be trial and error for the next three months. There'll be loads of pilots", says Garfield. "And I would not rule out the possibility of a regular male counterpart joining her".
The question of whether or not this is the death of zoo will be less relevant if on her second week Cox is suddenly joined on air by a mystery friend called Will.
Either way, Radio 1 is not taking such a big risk. "The incredible thing about radio," says Garfield, "is that a show can reinvent itself overnight. If she does balls it up, they can always get her friends back on."
