‘Do you feel like crying?’ asked Shaun Keaveny on his 6 Music breakfast show this week, before replying, ‘Text us your tears.’ It was Tuesday, the first day back at work for many listeners. And Keaveny was trying to cheer us up. Then he played ‘Grey Day’ by Madness.
Keaveny’s lucky. 6 Music reckons that its listeners, being creative types, don’t have to get up so early to leave for work. Their alarms will be set for later, and Keaveny doesn’t have to be in the studio for his three-hour show until 7 a.m. By which time, over on 5 Live, Phil Williams and Rachel Burden have already been up and chatting for an hour with their version of the Today programme — a little less news, a lot more football. According to them, the first day back at work after Christmas and New Year is the busiest day of the year for car mechanics, as everyone gets back into the car for the daily commute after a week, ten days, a fortnight at home. (Over on 4, Today reported, in contrast, that it’s the busiest day of the year for solicitors because so many marriages disintegrate amid the festive decorations — not the first time I’ve heard that one.)
As a New Year penance, I decided to put on trial the big breakfast shows, getting up before dawn to listen in to Williams and Burden on 5 Live, Keaveny on 6, Richard Madeley on 2 and Mark Forrest on Classic FM. Most of us listen to the same stations every morning as a way of smoothing our way into the day, and also I guess because it requires too much effort to retune, or find that other preset button. Yet a change of station provokes a quite different wake-up call, like swapping from a chipped but much-loved mug to the new snazzy version just received for Christmas. Even on such a minor scale, the altered perspective, the different way of being, can shift the gloom, lighten up the winter blues, create the illusion that change is possible.
Swapping stations, though, can also be a bit disorientating, like having coffee rather than tea as your first taste sensation of the day. Your aural nerves are shocked into overdrive when subjected to blasts from Hendrix rather than a dose of Elgar; or a debate about football referees instead of ‘Thought for the Day’.
On 5 Live, Phil Williams talked to a woman who had attended the Salford vigil for the student who was shot dead at Christmas. Her nephew had been murdered a few years earlier. ‘Do you think you’re living among an underclass?’ he asked her. Without flinching, she replied, ‘Salford has changed…’ She was far more polite than the question deserved.
Over on 2, Richard Madeley was standing in for Chris Evans. There was scarcely any chat, which was quietly reassuring. Chris’s brash bonhomie dispels any dark thoughts, and ensures that within seconds you’re buzzing, just like him. But with the wind lashing the windows and the news all about gun crime, Madeley’s unobtrusive, calming comments were somehow more in tune with that first-day-back-at-work feeling, and made me want to linger on the station rather than Keaveny’s too-keen attempts to make us laugh (pretending to be Rupert Murdoch: ‘Wendi, where’s my pants?’).
It was a bit surprising to discover that travel news is much more live on 2 than on 5 Live, where the bulletin was much shorter. In spite of 5 Live’s exhortations to text, text, text, 2’s listener base ensures it has far deeper, wider coverage. What, though, was most revealing was the way the stations are so gender-driven. On 5 Live, Rachel Burden was given a brief opportunity to flex her most-listenable voice, and her radio touch (‘I still don’t know what day of the week it is,’ she says, echoing what we’re all thinking). But before long we were plunged straight back into incomprehensible debates about refereeing decisions.
Meanwhile Andy Burnham, shadow minister for health, rushed between studios talking about cosmetic implants on 4 and social-care bills on 5 Live (‘If I were in government…’). By 8.30 a.m. I was desperate for some international news. 5 Live gave us Jonny Diamond on the Iowa caucuses, and interviews with some of the Republicans who would be voting later that day on the candidate they wanted to lead the party into the presidential election. 6 Music mentioned briefly that Youssou N’Dour (the singer with that massive hit in ‘7 Seconds’) would be standing for president in Senegal. On 2, we discovered that there have been rallies in Budapest, protesting against proposed changes to the constitution. But otherwise it was all very parochial. Which I guess is what breakfast shows are all about — how to ease us slowly into the day. Nothing too arresting, too dramatic, too testing.
Will I be switching stations? Probably not. But then again Hendrix at 7 a.m. is like intravenous caffeine. It’s just a shame about the jokes.
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