Читать книгу Good Morning Nantwich: Adventures in Breakfast Radio - Phill Jupitus - Страница 10

These days it’s pretty much taken for granted that the breakfast show on any radio station is the most important show of the day. But why is that exactly, and how did it happen? Like anybody else facing such an all-encompassing question I googled it. Just typing in ‘breakfast radio’ yielded 32 million results. That might be a bit time-consuming. So I narrowed down my parameters a little and tried for ‘history of breakfast radio’. Yes! 16,400,000. Let’s narrow the field a little more: ‘history of breakfast radio in the UK’. 4,100,000. This was all well and good but I had a few specific questions about the form, which I’m not sure even the mighty Google could handle.

One of the most fascinating developments in broadcasting over the last twenty years is how many universities and colleges have started to focus their attention on training people for jobs in media in general, but radio in particular. Most people who I have encountered in radio were pulled towards it by a desire to work in the field, but at the time there were no formal qualifications as a radio presenter or producer. People would generally start by volunteering and then if they were good at their job and got noticed they’d be offered the odd paid shift, and on it would go. Several high-ranking editors and producers I have worked with over the years started their careers in just such a fashion.

One of the country’s leading facilities for learning about radio today is the Media School at Bournemouth University. Indeed the first time I visited there was to present one of the 6 Music breakfast show’s regular outside broadcasts from the student radio station. The night before I went with my producer Phil Wilding (of whom, much more later) to present one of our regular outside broadcasts from the student radio station. The night before, we went to interview Swedish pop outfit The Concretes who were playing a student club in town called The Firestation. I remember walking up to the exterior just after we arrived in town and looking round at Wilding whilst uttering, ‘Wow, it looks just like a fire station.’ I have often been grateful for the restraint that Phil showed over the years, especially in the face of my colossal ignorance. Especially when it came to quite obviously repurposed municipal buildings.

We were due to be interviewing singer Victoria Bergsman and set up our microphones in some dim backstage nook and patiently waited for her to finish soundchecking. As various healthy, Nordic members of the band and the crew darted around us conversing with each other in Swedish, Phil and I could only sit there gurning like idiots every time a new face poked round the door. Each friendly Scandinavian face offered a friendly smile usually followed by, ‘Can I help you?’ Each time this happened one of us would blurt out something about being from the BBC and waiting for Victoria. ‘Ah yes, she is soundchecking at this moment, but she will be with you soon, I think!’ I couldn’t be that polite in English, let alone a second language.

I wandered out into the auditorium to watch them running through the brilliant opening track from the In Colour album, ‘On the Radio’. I always had a weakness for songs about radio. One of my favourite bands, The Members, had two belters in ‘Radio’ and ‘Phone-in Show’. Joe Jackson had ‘On the Radio’, Costello sang ‘Radio Radio’, electro keyboard whiz Thomas Dolby had ‘Radio Silence’. There was ‘Rex Bob Lowenstein’, ‘Radio Sweet-heart’, ‘The Spirit of Radio’. Possibly my favourite song about radio is ‘This Is a Low’ by Blur which uses the Radio 4 shipping forecast as inspiration. The list in my head was growing as I watched the band wander through another perfunctory rendition for the benefit of their sound man. As I dwelt on this, Wilding gave me an urgent wave: it seemed our interview was now on.

Now I can’t speak a word of Swedish, and that as far as I’m concerned is my loss. But even without it I could sense that Victoria was not too happy to be doing an interview now. This would always throw me in an interview situation. I was always far too reliant on the good will of my subjects. I found it almost impossible to maintain a sheen of journalistic detachment. Whenever this happened, I’d try to find some common ground or some link with the band, which might open up the talk a little. Victoria’s English was OK and possibly a little better than she was giving us at first, but I took a gamble on a compliment. ‘Can I just say, Victoria, that having heard the new album, and seen you soundchecking briefly, you do remind me very much of another band…’

She eyed me with curiosity. ‘Really? Which band?’

‘Fairport Convention.’ She smiled and the rest of the chat was a breeze. It was a calculated gamble that paid off. I often wonder how things would have gone if I’d said Dollar.

The studio facilities at Bournemouth University were actually a little bit better than those we had at Broadcasting House. It was a much newer desk, and there were two fully functioning vinyl decks as well as the CD players. The room was full of students, all of whom were studying for a career in radio. In fact shortly after this Jo Tyler (who lectures in radio at Bournemouth) invited me to do a question-and-answer session with a group of students. After an over-long and quite sweary session, I thanked the students and made my way out of the room. As I did so a smiling, bearded man approached me.

‘I think you know my son-in-law, Dylan Howe! I’m Zoe’s dad, Sean.’

Professor Sean Street has been working in and around the world of broadcast radio for forty years. As he was now the Director for the Centre of Broadcasting History Research, I felt quietly confident that he could give me a good deal more background on breakfast radio than the internet. Well, perhaps not more, but certainly less than 32 million websites. I started out by asking him how breakfast radio came to be so important to the daily schedules rather than at night like prime-time television is.

‘In the beginning both here and in the States it was the other way round. Before television, families would gather round the radio in the evening. In pre-1940s America the great desire was to lure people away from the evening radio where they knew they could sell advertising because everybody was listening. The trick was to try and get people to listen to pre-nine o’clock radio in the morning.’

So it was the pursuit of new revenue streams for radio which drove it to develop new programming for the morning audience. But surely this would require a completely different style to those big variety shows that families listened to in the evening?

‘The first radio show I could find with the word “breakfast” mentioned in it was Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club and that ran from 1933 until 1960 with the same presenter, Don McNeil. He totally built the show around his persona. It had music, inspirational readings, philosophy, a bit of poetry, all that kind of thing. It was a variety-based entertainment show, and it was completely unrehearsed, there was no script, they had a live band and the whole thing was done in front of a live audience. There was one famous incident where Bob missed his train, so they just had to soldier on without him. Then in the middle of an interview he arrives and it’s all “Look who’s here!” The whole thing was totally ad-libbed. Meanwhile in this country the BBC wouldn’t allow anything on the wireless unless it was very tightly scripted.

‘American broadcasters were also trying other shows at the time like the husband-and-wife hosted Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick with Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kollmar. This show actually came from their home, and they made breakfast and chatted and he’d say things like, “I’ve got a headache. I shouldn’t have drunk that wine last night…” and all that sort of thing. But the whole approach was very gentle.

‘You always come back to America when talking about breakfast radio because the whole issue was being addressed far earlier than it was here. The first thing that could be called a breakfast radio show ran in the States from 1930 to 1943 and was presented by a man called Tony Wons. It was a fifteen-minute mixture of chat and poetry. He used material that he sourced, but he also used items from listeners, so people would think, “I’ve got a quote he might like to read,” and they’d send it in. So he developed the idea of that relationship with the listeners where they contributed to the show.’

So while American commercial radio was defining the form, the BBC was operating along very different lines. In fact the BBC didn’t start to develop breakfast radio properly until the 1960s. Sean recalls that period quite clearly:

‘The switch came about in this country in the early 1960s with the arrival of the transistor radio. This is the first time that you have music that’s truly portable. And kids who would want to listen to Radio Luxembourg or the pirates or later on Radio One have a means of getting away from their parents’ space. My awakening to breakfast radio was with Radio Caroline and Radio London and that sense that when you were getting ready to go to school there was actually something cool to listen to on the radio and there never had been before. The Light Programme had Breakfast Special presented by John Dunne, but I had very little recollection of what had gone before. For a teenager in the early sixties, having Radio Caroline and listening to Johnny Walker playing really cool stuff was a revelation. I didn’t think getting up in the morning could be fun.’

So the pirates were the first people to make mornings fun, but how long after that did it take the BBC to get on the early morning radio bandwagon?

‘The thing is that the BBC is so often held up as the history of broadcasting in this country and yet when you look historically at it the BBC has more often than not responded to trends rather than creating them. It did it in the 1930s because commercial broadcasting hit a market that they weren’t hitting, which was Sundays. This was because Reith believed that Sunday was the Lord’s Day, and you only broadcast hymns and prayers. In comes Radio Normandy broadcasting from outside the country on a Sunday with a programme sponsored by a firm of bookmakers and blowing the audience completely out of the water. Then the war comes along and they get their act together, and out of the war comes the Forces Network which then becomes the Light Programme. But by the 1960s they’ve lost their way again and suddenly The Beatles are there, the whole Merseybeat thing has happened but on the BBC it’s Bob Miller and the Miller Men playing versions of popular hits. You could only hear The Beatles on Luxembourg and occasionally on Saturday Club with Brian Matthew. Then the pirates come on stream around 1964 and Radio 1 arrives in the August of 1967.’

So, the tardiness of the BBC aside, breakfast radio has been around for years. And there are a number of different kinds, which have evolved from very simple beginnings. Had I known that a live band and a studio audience were an option I might have tried to revive the idea of those early broadcasts. Indeed as part of the preparation for the book I spent a week working at Nerve Radio, the student radio station of Bournemouth University Students’ Union. Our Friday show was held in the cafeteria and students were invited to come and watch. I have to say that there’s a quite natural feeling to doing radio with a live audience in the morning. Everybody in the room is in a similarly fragile state and it’s quite nice to share the whole waking up experience. Maybe Don McNeil was on to something.

But why were breakfast radio listeners so partisan? The wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding Terry Wogan’s departure seemed a little out of proportion for somebody simply not making a radio show any more. I asked Sean why he thought people got so upset about it.

‘People get very tribal about what radio station they listen to because they understand how to listen to a show. They understand the code, they know the format, they never have to stop and think what’s happening now because they’ve got the shorthand. Listeners want that security. If you have a regular spot on your show at five to eight and for some reason you miss it and play it at ten past eight, your audience is completely thrown. People are extremely sensitive at that time of the morning.’

Indeed they are, and that was one of the reasons why I was always very careful to have the inertia of 6 Music breakfast build slowly over the three hours of the show. The low-key opening to the show was no accident. There was no need for me to be chirpy if I was playing music because the music would do that part for me and I could wake up alongside the listeners. But it seemed that in the radio landscape I was on my own. The style of most breakfast shows, especially commercial ones, was much more in your face. Also, lots of stations have two presenters at breakfast time, a man and a woman. But not like the easy-going Dorothy and Bob back in the 1940s. The current style is lively, in your face and above all loud. How has this happened?

‘You tend to think that it’s just because you’re old and it’s not for you. But I do think that commercial radio has lost its way. I don’t think the people who run commercial radio get out enough and just talk to the audience. You look around and see the mess that commercial radio has been in over the past few years and you think, “These are bright people, they’re not stupid, so why are we still wallowing in this?” Why can’t we plan a radio strategy that thinks beyond the next RAJAR, which they can’t seem to be able to do? They would say we’re aiming this at a particular audience, it’s not for you so we don’t expect you to like it. They think it doesn’t matter if the speech is vacuous because it’s having a laugh, isn’t it? It’s a lack of imagination. If the people who ran commercial radio bought Tesco’s, they’d walk in and go, “Well, this is all great but it’s full of shelves. If we got rid of all this stuff, then we could make some more space.” It’s like they’ve got it round the wrong way.’

So while broadcasters are striving to make a perfect breakfast show, are they missing the point that the show is actually defined by its listeners?

‘It took thirty years for Wogan to build that programme, but it comes back to the fact that it was actually the audience that built it. He developed this persona of a presenter who’s talking to people who are like himself, just a year away from a home for the bewildered and are constantly misunderstanding things. And he’s not trying to be chirpy, he’s just being like you are. And that strikes a chord in the audience, they get the joke and they play the joke, and that was the genius of it.

‘It seems an obvious thing to say, but I think that these days we don’t consider the audience enough. We do the brash young presenter thing because we think that’s cool. But are we actually broadcasting to anybody or are we just talking to ourselves? Are we having fun and excluding everybody else? I used to listen to Chris Evans’s earlier breakfast shows, especially the “zoo radio” stuff, and it was like watching somebody else’s party, they were having a great time but I’m excluded. They don’t really care, and I think there’s a lot of that still goes on. Maybe it’s the fact that a lot of the managers and controllers now grew up with the zoo format and they still think that’s the way to do it.’

As technology advances, the amount of choice available to listeners seems almost limitless. With internet radio and features like the iPlayer, audiences are able to ‘time shift’ shows to a listening time that is convenient to them. If I’m in America in Boston, I get up and can listen again to that day’s Today show on Radio 4 five hours after it was broadcast. At home in the mornings I quite often listen to the previous week’s edition of God’s Jukebox from Radio 2. Has breakfast radio as we have known it been served notice?

‘My wife was a massive Wogan fan,’ says Sean, ‘but can’t stand Chris Evans. So when she saw him coming over the horizon she discovered internet radio. She comes from Liverpool so now through the internet radio she listens to Radio Merseyside. You’ve got stations that were only ever meant to broadcast to a local area but which, thanks to the internet, can be heard anywhere in the world. That’s the quantum change: breakfast radio is available to anybody anywhere.

‘I listen to a lot of Canadian radio on the internet. I listen to a brilliant NPR jazz station from New Jersey. I can dip into other people’s breakfast now, I’m listening to their reporting of the New York rush hour; it’s not my rush hour but I’m vicariously feeding off it in a way. I find it fascinating because with somebody else’s breakfast show you get a sense of the rhythm of the life of the place in a way that you would never get at any other time of the day. That’s the exciting thing. Why would I want a DAB when I’ve got 2,500 stations on my internet radio?’

So is the appeal of a breakfast radio show that it defines more than just the radio station?

‘In the morning we’re raw, we’re receptive, we are probably most ourselves at that time, and a good breakfast show understands that – maybe it doesn’t know it understands that, but intuitively it does.’

It’s interesting to note that even the earliest breakfast radio shows were partially informed by what was being done in the evening. That was pretty much my game plan for the 6 Music breakfast show: to take an evening radio specialist music format and tailor it for a breakfast audience.

If I had sat down with Sean Street before making my own breakfast show then I might have had a bit more consideration for the audience. A show of that kind, at that time of the day, was a difficult listen. The music was quite often ‘challenging’ to say the least at a time of the day when people might not want to be challenged. It’s the start of their day and they’ve been asleep, so do they really want to be woken up by ‘Ace of Spades’?

In retrospect I should have thought a little more about what I was doing and had a little more regard for the opinions of the audience as well as those of the BBC staffers guiding me. But in the isolated world of the stand-up comedian the only voice in your head that you trust is your own, and my time at 6 Music at least taught me that that voice can on occasion be extraordinarily unreliable.

But in 1978, on the brink of leaving boarding school and facing the time in my life when I would have to make some serious long-term decisions about my future, the idea of being a deejay was about as likely as me going on tour with Paul Weller or working on a hit comedy TV show for BBC2 or having a football column in The Times. It was time for me to knuckle down to grim reality, and lower those expectations.