When Nick Grimshaw was given the Radio 1 breakfast show presenting job in 2012, it wasn’t merely a personnel change – his appointment marked a meaningful generational shift. The previous host, Chris Moyles, was known for his blokey banter and litany of politically incorrect jokes. Grimmy was his decidedly un-laddy replacement, a radio funnyman for a more inclusive age – one where casual bigotry, or even just hurting people’s feelings, was no longer a laugh.
Now, as Grimshaw hangs up his headphones – hot on the heels of fellow Radio 1 stalwart Annie Mac – it’s time to take stock of the youth-oriented entertainment epoch he has helmed for over a decade. While Grimshaw never courted controversy, he certainly wasn’t bland. In fact, his vaguely camp, intensely pally style didn’t sit well with everyone, and his breakfast tenure was plagued by reports of low listening figures. But for those on his wavelength, Grimshaw made Radio 1 seem an unbeatable start to the day for the first time in a lifetime – and the phrase ‘Radio 1 comedy’ no longer a contradiction in terms.
Grimshaw bids adieu from his drivetime show, but over the past 14 years he’s presented practically every slot in the schedules. Radio 1 always formed the bedrock of his career – he got his first gig at 23, presenting the radio version of the BBC’s youth strand Switch with Mac – even when his TV gigs (The X Factor judging panel, the Celebrity Gogglebox sofa) were more high-profile, and his celebrity mates (most notably, Harry Styles) made him a tabloid fixture.
Those celebrity mates remain a significant part of Grimshaw’s shtick. In his final broadcast, he remembers how Kate Moss came up with the breakfast show’s prank call game Call or Delete after insisting on sitting in on a two-hour production meeting. He thanks Pixie Geldof for her Instagram tribute post, and receives heartfelt voicemails from Alan Carr, Jack Whitehall and Styles himself. Yet rather than seeming like a shameless namedropper, Grimshaw’s great skill is to put everyone on the same social stratum; one of his most appealing qualities is that he seems exactly the same no matter who he is speaking to. Whether he’s messing about with a superstar he doesn’t know, chatting to a listener or simply relating anecdotes about his non-famous friends, he makes his show feel like a natural extension of his actual social life. This means he can transport big-name interviews into the sphere of friendly chat without it seeming fake or try-hard, but can also charm glamorous guests into doing daft things: in this last show, he relives a time he made Rosie Huntington-Whiteley advertise cat food.
Nowadays, out-and-out silliness is crucial to Radio 1’s identity, and Grimshaw is no stranger to such games. Being accessible but not patronising, goofy and perky but not childish is a hard balance to strike: it involves buying into features such as Hunt the Sausage (in which guests must guess which caller is eating said meat product) and The Ball Bag Quiz, but with a microdose of irony, so the whole thing doesn’t seem ridiculously infantile. Sometimes, things are more straightforwardly funny – for this final show Grimshaw resurrects savage quizmaster robot Showbot, a joke which is perfectly pitched and genuinely clever – but often his role involves laughing with and at a game at the same time.
That sense of arch detachment does seem to prevent this final outing from getting too sentimental. Instead of sobbing uncontrollably, Grimshaw worries that he isn’t sobbing uncontrollably, and struggles to deal with his colleagues doing so, before embarking on a highly relatable overthinking spiral about exactly when he might start crying (he never does). Instead, in true DJ style, he lets the music do the heavy lifting, ending with Talking Heads’ This Must Be The Place, an incredibly beautiful song about love feeling like home. It’s fitting in many ways: Grimmy suffused the airwaves with a warm, welcoming atmosphere; it was also a place that as a young radio fan, he felt he belonged. Ultimately, though, Grimmy brought his own world to Radio 1 – and it will be much poorer without it.
