Lauren Laverne: warm and accessible. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
People who start their day by listening to the radio don't appreciate having their breakfast shows messed about with. All anyone wants at that hour of is continuity, in the shape of the same presenter as the day before. But a fortnight ago, indie station Xfm's breakfast listeners, all 283,000 of us, got the kind of shock you don't want to deal with at 7am. Lauren Laverne, who'd been presenting the show for 18 months, had decided to quit. There was no advance warning; she left for what was supposed to have been a holiday, and while she was away, the station announced she wasn't coming back.
The official reason was that she had decided to devote more time to her parallel TV career, but the manner of her departure wasn't just unceremonious, it was odd. The station seemed to have been caught on the back foot, with no immediate replacement for the award-winning Laverne, and no idea what to do in the meantime. They kicked off this week by drafting a hapless male substitute, who said he'd been called in with two hours' notice. "Now, I know you're wondering, 'Where's Lauren?'" he said. Too right, we were wondering. Audibly wilting, he phoned her on air and asked her to explain. Her uncharacteristically tongue-tied response was that she'd been "juggling too many balls" and "had to drop one".
I have only gone into this much detail because Laverne wasn't just the best breakfast presenter on any music station, she was the only redeeming feature of Xfm's daytime lineup. (The evening line-up was and remains pretty much exemplary.) Her breezy wit and lack of ego made the music tolerable - and here it should be noted that Xfm's daytime playlist differs little from that of its parent station, Capital. She was also warm and accessible - a friend, in other words; a friend with better taste in music than the station's programmers, who compelled her to play the likes of Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars in the hope of enticing Heart and MagicFM listeners into switching to the X. Laverne played them, but the disdain in her voice made it clear she was doing so under duress. She never knuckled under. She was more than a match for a bit of spirit-sapping MOR and programme features such as Indie Bingo.
Her departure divests the daytime schedule of its only remaining ideological link with the Xfm of 1997, which launched as a much-welcomed alternative to mainstream pop radio. There's nothing now that distinguishes it from the Capitals and Galaxys; its careerist presenters are simply biding their time till they get the nod from one of the big guys, a la Laverne's predecessor Christian O'Connell. What a pity.
