SO, I had one of those big birthdays last weekend. The kind that ends in a zero. I’d been doing a lot of performative moaning in the run-up to it, but, actually, in the end it was fine. Friends and family came over and I had a lovely time, thank you.

Radio 2 then kindly gave me a post-birthday present on Monday morning as Zoe Ball interviewed Billy Joel. And I love Billy. I have no shame about this. He’s the Erasure to Springsteen’s Pet Shop Boys. Never quite as cool, but secretly you might actually like him more. 

Well, when it comes to Billy, I certainly do. (I’d take Billy’s Until the Night over any Bruce song any day. Apart, maybe, from Brilliant Disguise.)

Zoe Ball’s chat with Joel was a fluffy affair. But maybe that says as much about Joel as it does about Ball’s interview technique. He is 74 now and clearly has a relaxed relationship with fame and success these days. He’s even able to question why people are still interested in him all these years after his salad days. “I haven’t written a new song in … I don’t know … 30-something years.”

It probably helps that people are less inclined to call him “the worst pop singer ever” anymore (copyright Slate, 2009; just a bit harsh, that) which also proves if you hang around long enough you will be forgiven anything. Even It’s Still Rock’n’Roll To Me. 

The Radio 2 Joel playlist that accompanied the chat here leaned heavily on the obvious to be honest, though it did throw in Zanzibar which, it seems, is big on TikTok. (News to me, but then I’m as 20th-century as Billy these days). 

I’m not sure that I learned much but it was fun to be in his company for an hour. And we did discover that Joel is a big history nut. Before speaking to Ball he told her he'd been to the Churchill War Rooms.

“I’ve read so much about Churchill,” Joel admitted. “I’m a huge fan of his. I think he saved the world, actually.”

Well, It’s a point of view and would make for a lively podcast discussion. It probably already has. Still, maybe next time the BBC could get Simon Schama to interview Billy. That might be fun.

Last Sunday night Alexei Sayle took the 11.16am Avanti West Coast service from London Euston to Blackpool for the first episode of the second series of Alexei Sayle’s Strangers on a Train. 

If you missed the first series, the idea is that the comedian talks to random passengers and learns why they are taking the train. It’s a bit of a hit-and-miss pick-and-mix format. In this episode Sayle met a Polish ballroom dancer turned judge, a South African women who had left her homeland because she thought it was going to the dogs, a doctor’s receptionist who had previously worked for The Financial Times and the managing director for Blackpool Transport with whom he ended up discussing the death by tram of Alan Bradley (one for vintage Corrie fans, there; it happened back in 1989. Yeah. That long ago. Bet you feel as old as I do now).

Sayle - like myself - is a man of a certain age (though, just to be clear, he’s got a decade on me) and so his frame of reference is a bit Alan Bradleyesque as a result.

Not everyone was quite on the same page. “I had a top 20 hit in the 1980s,” he told two women who were travelling up to Chester to meet their mates.

“Hang on, was that Hello Tosh got a Toshiba?” one of them asked him, a reference to the ad that riffed on Sayle’s Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?

“No. You’ve stabbed me to the heart with that,” Sayle replied. “That was Ian Dury.”

These days, rather like Billy Joel, Sayle is more of an avuncular figure than the angry young(ish) man he once was. But he is still keeping the red flag flying even in amiable time-filling shows like this. 

As the train pulled into Wigan he told us that the town’s most famous son, George Formby, once the UK’s highest-paid entertainer, was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1943 by genial Joe Stalin, prompting Sayle’s best George Formby impersonation: “Turned out nice again. Victory to the proletariat. Death to the bourgeoisie.” 

What a great fact. Turns out a Google search suggests it is also a bit of an urban myth. Ach. Now I’m even doubting Sayle’s claim that the song Oh! Mr Porter is really about premature ejaculation.

 

Listen Out For: Hip Hop 50, 6 Music, Monday to Thursday, 9pm

Hip Hop is 50? So it seems. Another BBC attempt to rub it in that I’m getting on a bit. Anyway, east coast or west coast? Dre or Jay? Answers on a postcard.