Ever wanted to wake up with Kelvin MacKenzie? Now's your chance, with the former Sun editor filling in for Nick Ferrari on the LBC breakfast show this week. He sounded like he was having lots of fun. But were his listeners?
Opinions, as Dirty Harry said, are like arseholes. Everyone's got one. Why someone would want to wake up listening to all and sundry spouting away on a radio phone-in is beyond me. But I did it this morning, just to see what MacKenzie was like.
"Now I understand why they put you in Nick Ferrari's place," said one caller. "You seem to represent the same ignorant views that he does."
"Fantastic!" bellowed MacKenzie. He wasn't quite so confident on the airwaves as he is in print in his weekly Sun column, and occasionally sounded like he had no idea where the next jingle was coming from. His views were reassuringly - or depressingly - familiar, depending on your point of view.
I don't envy MacKenzie's on-air colleagues, though. The former TalkSport owner enjoys a joke, particularly when it is at someone else's expense. "If we have any listeners left after that I would be very surprised," he said after a particularly uninspiring paper review.
Handing over to the sports presenter - forgive me, I missed his name - MacKenzie let rip with a one-minute diatribe at Thierry Henry's expense. "He is a disgrace. He should be shot." The sports presenter gave an aural impression of a rabbit caught in the headlights and wisely just got on with reading the sport.
Having tried his hand at TV presenting last year with More4's The Last Word, MacKenzie told me what he really wanted was his own radio show.
"It's fantastic. You go on the radio and say what you want and everyone gets up in arms. They give you a huge cheque and you go home and have your dinner." Or in MacKenzie's case, your bacon sandwich, coming off air at 10am.
With a new owner in the form of Charles Allen's Global Radio - it paid £170m for LBC parent Chrysalis Radio last month - what better time to audition for a permanent slot on the station?
"The first thing I'll be doing is going on Ebay because I'll need a smaller chair," joked MacKenzie. "Other than that, I look forward to reducing the size of the LBC audience."
