SO, now he’s had a month to settle in, how is Vernon Kay getting on, do you think? Ken Bruce fans may think otherwise, but tuning into his mid-morning Radio 2 show this week Kay sounded very much at home.
He’s clearly redecorated, mind. The music mix certainly seems to be slanting quite a bit younger. There have been some grumbles about the pop quiz Ten to the Top which has replaced Bruce’s Popmaster, though it seems perfectly serviceable to me. Perhaps a bit easier than its predecessor, right enough?
Actually, before we get to Kevin, Vernon’s producers might be a bit more adventurous in booking turns for this slot. So far it’s been very blokey. The only woman who’s got a look in so far is Jess Glynne as far as I can work out (though I see Joanna Lumley is next week’s guest).
Anyway, Bridges was as entertaining as you might expect, whether talking about school days, his first time onstage, or partying in his West End flat with Paolo Nutini and Winston from Still Game.
He also gave one of the best defences of Oasis I’ve heard for a long time, one worth remembering the next time Noel Gallagher says something stupid about Brian Wilson.
It was hearing Live Forever at a party, Bridges says, that inspired him to send an email to the Stand comedy club asking for an open mic spot. If they can do it, he reasoned …
“A lot of people owe Oasis… especially guys from estates or wherever.”
As for the music, “they’re love songs,” Bridges argued. “It’s the opposite of toxic masculinity. There are guys cuddling and crying their mates during Live Forever or Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
Bridges sounded emotional. He has reason to be. The week-long conversation played out as a tribute to Bridges’s dad who passed away in January.
“It kind of hit me brutal,” Bridges admitted yesterday. “He was my manager, my mentor. Every bit of material I’ve ever done on a stage I would run it past my dad first. He was my Alex Ferguson.”
Anyone else been watching the BBC Two documentary series Once Upon A Time in Northern Ireland over the last five weeks? I’ve sat through it in a state of continuous horror and heartbreak for what happened in my homeland.
But watching this familiar litany of pain, part of me also wondered if we need to tell other stories about Northern Ireland too, stories that didn’t frame the place through the prism of The Troubles. If we don’t move past can we ever move on?
So this week’s The Essay strand on Radio 3 was well-timed. Another Northern Ireland saw five writers offer alternative visions of the place. Darran Anderson offered an Ulster of folklore and myth, while poet Nandi Jola drew connections between Africa and Northern Ireland.
But it was Susannah Dickey’s essay Two Pills, a funny, honest piece about reproductive rights and sexual agency that caught my ear.
Born five years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, Dickey grew up in a post-Troubles Derry/Londonderry, but one still pre-abortion rights. After a failed attempt to study law in Birmingham she moved to Belfast and found herself at home, literally and metaphorically.
“No longer a gangrenous thumb in the peach clafoutis of well-seasoned English teenagers in Belfast, I was exactly what I was supposed to be.”
Sex, though, was still something of a mystery. Until fumbled experiences led her to taking the morning after pill twice in the space of a couple of weeks.
The second time she went to the counter of her pharmacist she had parted her hair on the wrong side, pulled on a woolly hat and put on an accent hoping she wouldn’t be recognised. “I don’t know why the stress of it turned me Scottish,” Dickey said.
“Ten minutes later ‘Taggart’ had had her second morning after pill in 14 days and suffered no real adverse effects except for the life long embarrassment of calling a pharmacist ‘hen’.”
It was a lovely, lively but also painful piece of writing, beautifully read, about Northern Irish potential and also Northern Irish reality. Best of all, there was no heartbreak at the end of it.
Listen Out For: Life Tracks with Amy Macdonald, Radio Scotland, tonight, 5pm
Taking in both The Spice Girls and The Smiths, Bob Dylan and Billy Idol, the Scottish singer-songwriter Amy Macdonald clearly has eclectic taste when it comes to choosing her favourite music.
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