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.
