My life, you might call it my sad, pathetic little life, is about to be improved dramatically by the return of Lauren Laverne to BBC Radio 6 Music. It’s not just that the brilliant Ms Laverne is returning to the airwaves, it’s also that she is replacing Mary Ann Hobbs on the mid morning show. I can’t stand her.
It’s her voice, her amateur hour presentation style but mainly her voice that I simply can’t listen to. Trust me, I have tried so hard to set aside my prejudices. The music she plays is generally okay, despite an over-reliance of electronica, but for once the music is not enough. As soon as her show starts at 10.30 am, it’s time to listen to something else, almost certainly from my own collection, or nothing at all. From 24th February when Lauren’s who kicks off, from 10.00 am, there will be no silence.
I’m afraid I have been there before with radio voices I can’t stand. In the early 1980s, the new start up station Radio West employed local lad Nino Feretto as its breakfast time presenter. He was atrocious, absolutely grim and it did not take long to say goodbye to Nino, though not to the station since the great Johnnie Walker hosted an evening show. Now there was a radio voice I couldn’t switch off.
With radio, the voice is everything. The person talking to you, if she or he is doing their job right, is your friend, talking just to you. I certainly get this with the radio greats like Walker, Ken Bruce, Mark Radcliffe, Stuart Maconie and of course Lauren to name but a few. I do not know if it is a talent you are born with, something you just pick up along the way, something you learn or perhaps it’s a bit of all these things. Either way, you know instantly whether a DJ or presenter, has ‘it’ or not. Listening to Hobbs in the equivalent of listening to a speak-your-weight machine.
The radio, for me, is the last remaining reason for retaining the licence fee. The deterioration in their standards all over the piece is alarming. While they still make world class drama and wildlife shows, so do numerous operators like Apple, Sky and Netflix. The BBC sport portfolio has dwindled to mostly highlights and its lurch to the political right means I no longer trust all of its journalists, who seem more than happy to report on and even broadcast fake news. Take away all of that and what’s left? For me, it’s just the radio.
I was there at the start of Radio One in 1967 and I am still there in 2025, devouring my music via BBC 6 Music. Without it, we’d just have the dreary commercialism of Heart, Capital and so on or the myriad of oldies stations, all of which are punctuated by endless, repetitive advertising. Ugh.
The future may not be live radio as the present is no longer live TV. These days, we prefer to consume in our own time and not when someone tells us to. That I still love the radio probably says more about the dinosaur I have become, loving the unpredictability of what comes next. In such an uncertain world, maybe people cling to the comfort blankets of certainty, familiarity and predictability. Who can blame them? But that’s not me.
I will wake up for Nick Grimshaw’s breakfast show, then devour Lauren Laverne’s mid morning show, Craig Charles in the afternoon and Huw Stephens at tea time, along with Radcliffe and Maconie, Huey Morgan (despite him being so abusive to me on twitter last week) and Guy Garvey on a weekend. Something, actually quite a lot, new, something borrowed and something blue. And from a week next Monday, no Mary Ann Hobbs. Things, as they say, can only get better.
