Holiday... celebrate

On darker days, you may find me hunched over the dial on my digital Roberts Radio searching for a parallel broadcasting universe where the people who cover holiday leave for regular presenters actually present those programmes all the time.

This week I've been not working in someone else's office, but at home, busy writing The Miss Jones Memoirs (Deluxe Edition) – A Life In Lambswool. While staring into the middle distance, and sharpening and resharpening my pencils, I've been listening to Liza Tarbuck and Mark Radcliffe cover for SteveWrightInTheAfternoon on Radio 2. As some of you know, I would marry Mark Radcliffe, were he to ask, so you can imagine how happy I was to have him in my spare room chatting away of an afternoon, as if he were there in person knocking me up some shelves. I'm not familiar with SteveWrightInTheAfternoon's 'act' these days, but I'm reluctant to believe it has evolved sufficiently since the late 80s to better Mark Radcliffe enthusing about Leonard Cohen and Liza Tarbuck being more entertaining than almost any other female presenter on the radio without her raising a sweat/a sneer/her hemline/other.  Similarly, it is a happy, happy day when Adam and Joe present the 6 Music Breakfast Show, as they sometimes do when Shaun Keavney is away. Unfortunately my holidays coincide with Keavney's uncannily often – enough to make me wonder if I am actually married to him without somehow realising. And I return to work, and to early-a.m. radio, only to hear Keavney's taunting thank you to A&J for their stand-in services.

But naturally there is never pleasure without profound and grinding pain. And in this broadcasting Butlin's, Ruth Langford and Eamonn Holmes present This Morning. Forever. Less your shangri-la, more shangri-aaaarrgggghhhhhhhhh...

The kids are… really really dumb

I don't think I can listen to XFM any more. This afternoon they had a phone-in quiz to win some gig tickets. The question was 'Which band had hits in 1996 with Govinda and Hey Dude?'

The caller said 'Is it The Beatles?'

Here is the news

I think I'm fairly aware of my own failings, although I'm sure there's plenty lurking ready to throw me a surprise mortification party. And one of the ones I know well is that I just don't have a dissecting, analytical mind. The kind that effortlessly glimpses a path through dense webs of information. As a result, I'm appalling at arguments. (Among the barbarous verbal weapons in my glittering armoury: 'Never mind.' 'It's probably my fault.' 'It's hard to say unless you're actually in that situation.') I would almost certainly be dreadful at chess. And the complex political climates of places far away often make me wish John Craven would sit me down kindly and tell me what's really going on. But even I can tell that radio news – the kind I listen to (I'm not including Radio 4 in this, 4 fans) – is news for idiots, by idiots. 

On this morning's 8am bulletin on 6 Music, they revealed that financial regulators were investigating who spread rumours in the city which caused share prices to drop. That was it, verbatim. That was the story. Someone spread rumours and suddenly money went wrong. What exactly were these rumours? That Jeff on the Tokyo desk is adopted? That Fiona in New York has 'started'? That Elaine the night cleaner will do it for 20 Silk Cut and a pint of Snakebite?

Things often work this way on the radio news I get to hear. A story breaks, and initially the report sounds for all the world like it's been excitedly put together by reporters from a student newspaper, blithely untroubled by facts and sources and explanation. Then, in the half-hour between that and the next bulletin, it's as if they've shown their work to a proper, grown-up journalist who's said, 'Now, remember what we learnt about who, what, where, when and why.' By 8.30am today, a gentle rewrite had introduced motives and suspects and consequences, and the free press had once again reclaimed its dubious merits. Until 9am, anyway. 

Luckily, there is one bastion of the fourth estate that you can always rely on.

Things I have genuinely heard a Virgin Radio DJ saying today:

'The chancellor... he loves a bit of tax.'

'Anyone who has the same surname as a British military hero is alright by me.'

One of the boons of my day job as a freelance drone is entering the many different, parallel worlds of daytime radio. The 80s Hour on Virgin is amazing. It's too bad The Hoosiers and Scouting For Girls are never far behind it. This was my favourite thing I heard today:

Bat Out Of Hell was very narrowly beaten into second place. Sorry, Meat. Had they played Dead Ringer For Love, my decision would have been reversed.

Some films you loved when you were 12 bear repeated watching in your 30s. St Elmo's Fire is absolutely not one of them. It's like being made to watch your own GCSE drama project.

xxxxxxxxx