IT was a bank holiday on Monday. Except for listeners in Scotland, of course. Always an excuse for radio stations to give the staff the day off and round up a brace of “glorious amateurs” as Dermot O’Leary, sitting in for Zoe Ball on the Breakfast Show on Radio 2, put it. Ken Bruce wasn’t going anywhere (you will know how you feel about that yourself), but Jeremy Vine was replaced by Michelle Visage who, sadly, didn’t bother with a phone-in (might have been fun listening to all those Radio 2 listeners heads explode, right enough).
You also wonder how Steve Wright’s usual listeners felt about Jo Whiley replacing his afternoon show with an extended countdown of the best-selling Britpop singles. Certainly, the stodgy diet of The Stereophonics, Kula Shaker and, shiver, Dodgy at the bottom end of the chart was nearly enough to drive me away.
It was also very blokey of course. Shampoo and Louise Wener and Cerys Matthews, fronting Sleeper respectively, were in the top 50 but the programme had to shoehorn Elastica and Echobelly in even though neither made the chart.
Of course, my own problem with Britpop (over and above the fact that so much of it wasn’t very good), is that I was already too old for it first time around. So, to be reminded that it is already 25 years ago didn’t help. As it was, the show clearly hit home with parents in their forties who were texting in to fondly remember their student days while packing up to take their own kids to university.
Metallica’s Lars Ulrich turned up at one point to rave about Oasis’s Supersonic and the whole thing passed in a bubble of nostalgia and second-rate tunes (with the usual exceptions; Blur. Pulp and, yes, the odd Oasis single, Supersonic being one of them).
“It was a very optimistic time I miss that about it now,” Louise Wener said at one point. We are always nostalgic for our youth. Another 10 years and we’ll be back for the landfill indie top 50.
Listen Out For: Great Lives, Radio 4, Tuesday. Comedian Tom Allen explores the life of Kenneth Williams with Matthew Parris.
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