In December Christian O’Connell quit as referee of Radio 5 Live’s sports argument show Fighting Talk. The news came as an almost physical blow.
In his care Fighting Talk had become less a programme in which people talked about sport than a show that my proudly non-sporty 11-year-old daughter had begun to make a point of listening to. It was funny, it was witty, it was fast-paced, all the things that Question Time would be if there weren’t so many people interested in politics on it.
When Fighting Talk returns on February 4 (11am), the new man, Colin Murray — Edith Bowman’s oppo on Radio 1 but a Fighting Talk debutante — will have his work cut out. Will he be as sharp as O’Connell? Will he too understand that this is a contest that, like sport itself, simultaneously matters desperately and not at all? Good luck, sunshine. Actually, I was hoping that Eleanor Oldroyd would get the gig. She’s done well as O’Connell’s occasional stand-in, but perhaps testosterone radio isn’t quite ready to embrace the 21st century that fully.
Meanwhile, this week O’Connell began his new job as Virgin Radio’s answer to the behemoth that is Chris Moyles. These are, of course, early days but so far the portents are not good. Where has the O’Connell bounce gone? The wit, the joie de vivre? All the things, in fact, that made him make Fighting Talk unmissable?
Granted, he was a little exposed by my listening format of choice. You won’t catch me getting up at 6am to listen to anything that doesn’t involve cricket, so it was Listen Again for me, which contained nothing but the unvarnished O’Connell: no ads, no songs to distract us from the sound of a man recklessly squandering our will to live.
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He should have known that he had misjudged his audience when his competition to guess what film a snatch of dubbed German dialogue came from was won by someone who, rather than guess, had actually translated the words. Then, when he attempted to engage her in Celebrity Big Brother talk, she admitted to neither watching nor caring about it. O’Connell should have recognised that he was dealing with a superior catchment to the usual run of listener, but instead, deprived of a wider audience to indulge him in his apparent Big Brother obsession, he talked to himself about it. He also mentioned his wife a lot and, eventually, his daughter. You just know a broadcaster is struggling when he starts banging on about the wife and kiddies.
It wasn’t all hopeless. He introduced a funny little segment in which he cobbled together a radio advertisement for a small businessman — well, the one for his local newsagent, turning on the line “six Stellas for £4.50”, made me laugh anyway — but inviting listeners to ring in and name a celebrity they’ve seen picking his nose in public is the sort of thing even Moyles would regard as tacky. Even if the first victim, the actor James Nesbit, did actually phone to confirm the sighting. Bizarre, but true.
PS: The digital channel Oneword is embarking on the spoken-word equivalent of Radio 3’s Beethoven and Bach orgies. Starting tomorrow (2pm and 10pm), Neville Jason will read his own adaptation of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. It will last until September, all 45 hours and 200 episodes of it. And if you miss any episodes on account of having a life it’s available on CD from Naxos! I’ll take two, as they say.
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CHRIS CAMPLING