Radio Ga-Ga
This chap, one George Lamb, is said to be the most annoying person on radio. Complaints about BBC station Music6 have gone through the roof since he started DJ duties there. But he's also won an award as best radio newcomer.
Apparently he's been on the box doing various presenting chores, but I've never seen him. He's floated around that strange metropolitan sub-celebrity world where people do promotion work, act as agents, generally know people. He used to manage Lily Allen, for instance.
He is, in fact, one of a rather large and growing number of people, events, bands etc who for me might as well live inside a black hole, another universe. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but certain things just don't make it on to my radar.
Sex and the City, Friends, Pink Floyd, Paul Weller, The Sound of Music, The Fall, Jeremy Kyle, that Never Mind the Buzzcocks bloke, Celtic music, The Apprentice. The list, if I could be arsed to enumerate it, goes on and on.
Which brings us back to Mr Lamb. He does, too, I'm told. Go on and on. Like every radio presenter I've ever heard. That's why I do my best not to listen to them. Steve Wright, for instance. That one who did the schmaltzy letter thing on the Beeb and then switched, I believe, to Classic FM. Kenny Everett, Noel Edmonds, Jonathan Ross and lots more made breakthroughs as radio DJs and presenters.
If I weren't someone with the greatest respect for the principles of the Quakers, just recounting these names would make me reach for a weapon. But, as I say, my answer is to hang on to what little sanity I still possess by ignoring them. I only have so many years left, after all.
But my car radio lets me down.
There's a terrific setting which lets me have it tuned to get all the traffic news as I travel into Birmingham, but at the same time have the volume down during ordinary programmes. When there's traffic news the volume comes up and I can hear all about the queues between junctions 4a and 5 and so on.
I get a lot of stuff I don't want as well, because, depending on the weather, I receive traffic bulletins from stations in Northampton, Leicester, Coventry, Nottingham, Derby, Shropshire, even, at times, Three Counties Radio and Radio Hereford and Worcester as well as the one I want, the WM call sign. I can ignore jams at Gailey and Leicester Forest East and problems at the Dartford Tunnel (from 3CR), but what sometimes catches me out is the chat between the bulletin readers and the radio presenters.
They are all, it seems, no matter where they are based, mindless morons, gibbering away with utter trivialities and pointless jokes. What comes over loud and clear is that they all feel they are worthy of and carving their way towards some form of celebrity career on a path forged by the likes of Wogan.
I imagine the hospital radio people are just the same.
So if George Lamb has been named and shamed as the worst of this breed, I'm just very glad I've never heard him.
Give me Charlotte Green (above left in sensible BBC black and white) reading the Shipping Forecast any day.
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George Lamb isn't a terrible DJ, he's loud, self-obsessed, talks to you like you're ignorant, vapid, uses a tongue-chewing 'DJ voice', but so much is expected of a 'personality' in today's media. Apart from his uncomfortable (to me at least) patronising use and dismissal of black (particularly Jamaican) culture he's just another blot on the intelligence of a ratings chasing BBC, what makes him a target for peoples ire is that he's been parachuted in to one of the UK's only music stations that isn't swamped with celebrity culture.
Radio 6Music was a haven for older music fans who loved the 'evening' Radio One of a few years ago, but the new(ish) controller has decided that focus on the music was costing the station listeners. Cue almost every weekend slot being filled with stand-up comedians and the introduction to the daytime schedule of a man who thinks that saying 'shabba' is a career rather than a one-liner from Phoenix Nights series one.
(As an aside, the Sony award Lamb won was a "listener vote" one — he was one of only two national DJs on the ballot, hardly a huge vote of confidence.)
It wouldn't matter so much, but 6Music listeners had already been painted into a corner by the stomach-churning inanity of "the nation's favorite", the one tempo of Radio 2 (weekdays), and the homogenisation of virtually all commercial offerings leaving nowhere to go for those who wanted to hear "alternative" (for want of a better term) music.
I've got DAB, I've got digital TV, but I've not got a radio station to listen to when Lamb and his ilk are broadcasting. I turn more and more to speech radio, but despite almost all radio being better for being live Radio 4 or WM or Five have nothing in that morning slot.
Thank heavens for podcasts (Collings and Herrin, iPM, Guardian Technology, Brumcast, New Media Junkie) and the wondrous Speechification blog that saves the highlights from (mainly) Radio4 and allows you to listen to them at a sensible time.
All the talk is of increased choice, but it's 100s of stations and nothing on. Lamb is a symptom rather than the disease, but one that treating would bring blessed relief.
I like my music radio presenters to be passionate and knowledgeable about music (John Peel, Mary Anne Hobbs, Zane Lowe, Pete Tong, Gilles Peterson), if not I can accept entertaining/charismatic (Russell Brand) for a change. Ideally they should be both (Shaun Keaveny, Lauren Laverne, Adam and Joe), but definitely not neither (George Lamb and also Scott Mills, Chris Moyles, Chris Evans, Jon Holmes, presenters who need a posse of mates to guffaw at their unfunny jokes, 99% of commercial DJs).
So, it seems, I'm doing the right thing not listening to these buffoons ...
Mr Langley:
I must protest over your use of the word "buffoon".
Around our way, buffoon is a traditional old farming description of forthrightedness, keen intellect and bull-like stamina.
Some of my closest and dearest friends are buffoons.
Yours sternly.
Laura Norder.
PS: George Lamb is a product of today's obsession with all that is shallow and meaningless. As is Dairylea Cheese Dippers.