chrismoyles.net
- Thu Jun 24, 2004 7:49 am
#240940
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Chris Moyles: Shock-jock or satirist? The Radio 1 Breakfast Show host has boosted ratings but managed to upset regulators - and John Peel
An unending war rages for the soul of Radio 1 and it is between John Peel, its venerable musical conscience, and whoever presents its breakfast show. On one side, Peel fights for pop music as a serious art form. On the other, under the various banners of wacky-chappie, celebrity-obsessive, metro-bird or shock-jock, the DJ fights for listeners and career survival. One cannot imagine either having much to say to the other, and since Peel broadcasts so late at night the opportunities for confrontation arise rarely — rarely but not never.
"When I joined I think John thought I was the Antichrist," says Chris Moyles, Radio 1’s breakfast DJ de jour and, at 29, the station’s self-styled saviour. "He accused me of being DLT in waiting."
*
For younger readers, Dave Lee Travis succeeded Noel Edmonds as the breakfast compere in the Seventies. To be compared to the Hairy Cornflake is no compliment.
"So I replied with something shocking, like he’s Kenny Everett in waiting because Kenny Everett’s dead and it’s only a matter of time before John pops his clogs."
Ouch, I say, for Moyles has managed to do what he has failed to in days of assiduous listening: he has shocked me.
"I was a bit of a crazy maverick," he admits.
But this wasn’t on air? "No, no. And he’s never said anything about it, but everyone else went, ‘Don’t say bad things about John. And I’m like, ‘Well, he takes the piss out of me so I’ll take the piss out of him. That’s how it works.’ But then you talk to him and John’s got a fantastic sense of humour."
And now the two get on as famously as Smashy and Nicey. On the morning of our interview at Radio 1’s HQ, quarantined a few streets away from Broadcasting House, they even joshed on air. Moyles and his chatty team had been discussing Action Men with the exclusive "eagle eyes" movement when Moyles, to his evident embarrassment, noticed Peel lurking outside. He was after Moyles’s autograph for his village fête — "small, rural community," he explained — and had been waiting for him to put on another record. "Then," said Peel, "I realised I might be waiting for ever."
Ah, banter-ful Radio 1! But Peel is right in thinking that music is incidental to the Chris Moyles show. Even Moyles does not like most of it very much and, in his postmodern, deconstructivist way, makes no pretence that he, rather than some playlist bureaucrat, has chosen it. Sometimes he’ll forget to back-announce a track, which annoys the purist in me. Otherwise, I tell him, I have found it surprisingly easy to shed my Radio 4 Today habit — and with it all the cares of the world — in favour of the micro-universe of a man whose worries rarely extend beyond the admittedly far-reaching perimeter of his own flesh.
Encouraged by the Broadcasting Standards Council’s upholding of half a dozen complaints against him in as many years, critics and correspondents to Radio 4’s Feedback have called him a cheap shock merchant. But while it was undoubtedly intemperate of him to say two years ago that he wished to rip off the head of a competitor and "poo in his neck", Moyles these days is more a saucy solipsist than a shock-jock. Within his tiny kingdom he is the despot, but a benevolent one. The insults he delivers to his team — Dave, Aled, Jules and Rachel — tickle rather than wound.
"The reviews for our show that still appear really make me laugh," he agrees. "I’m just a sexist, egotistical bigmouth, or lardy-mouth or whatever, who surrounds himself with laughing sycophants who just agree with everything I say. That’s not it at all."
Nor is it, or why would we listen? Since he took over from Sara Cox in the new year he has added 700,000 listeners to the slot’s weekly audience, a fact he did not refrain from repeating endlessly on his return from holiday in May. A new jingle was composed, a Chris Evans-style rant saved only by its punchline:
"He’ll buy a yacht and a villa in Majorca
But nothing’ll really change
He’s still a big fat porker."
Anyhow, I say, congratulations. He really is the saviour of Radio 1. "I actually used the saviour line years before I came to Radio 1. I was the saviour of late-night radio when I was on Capital. I was the saviour of late-night radio at the radio station before Capital, which was Chiltern Radio, based out of Luton. Before that I was the saviour of early-evening radio. So I’ve been using the saviour tack for years. Now I’m the saviour of early-morning radio."
Until, as his own jingle went, "they fire his arse". How will he respond if next time Rajar reports that his figures have fallen (as they did when he occupied the afternoon slot)? "If they go down I’ll probably make a jingle saying ‘whoops, we’ve lost listeners, but it’s not our fault. It’s obviously your fault, listener-people’. It’s the kind of thing we do."
Indeed it is, for Moyles is in a constant state of garrulous catharsis. It was, after all, not entirely good news for him in May. Shortly after it was announced that he had gained listeners, he lost out at the Sony Radio Awards. Treating triumph and disaster just the same, he jingle-ised this, too:
"He’s as cool as the Fonze
But the stupid Sony judges
Only gave him a bronze."
"One thing that I’ll never run out of material about is me," he explains. "Someone asked me a question years ago: ‘Won’t you ever run out of stuff to say?’ and I’m like, ‘You never run out of stuff to say in real life. You don’t wake up one morning and look at your wife and go, ‘I’ve run out of things to say to you.’ Just doesn’t happen."
He obviously hasn’t witnessed the marriages I have.
Moylesey’s self-referential monologue holds its audience because it is delivered in the same tone of voice as its own. Just as a generation of Seventies students involuntarily imitated John Cleese when they attempted to be funny, so now the young customarily mistake themselves for observational comedians. Moyles serves Radio 1’s target audience of 15 to 24-year-olds and the "lower socioeconomic groups" by sharing their vocabulary and attitudes. He conjures up a personal soap opera that is an only marginally aspirational version of their own lives — Corrie, not Dallas. A big adventure, to be related and embellished, is a train ride from London to Birmingham that does not go quite to plan. A huge prize is two weeks’ semi-skiving in Portugal, where his show has relocated for Euro 2004. A satisfying accolade is to hear your car referred to as "nice wheels". Hollywood flash — even Hollyoaks flash — is so remote it is not even worth dreaming about.
Moyles is not being patronising, for he has somehow managed to avoid evolving into a proper celebrity himself. He does not go to film premieres or "showbiz parties". The "stars" he "knows" according to the jingle he plays are Roy Walker, Ant and Dec and Des Lynam. Interviewing Noel Gallagher last week, Moyles reduced him to just another northern lad who liked his cuppa with two teabags. When Fat Boy Slim turned up on Friday, it was to explain how he had smashed up his face falling out of bed. Like you do. He barely even bothers to be rude about the famous. The day we met he had read aloud the tabloid headlines reporting that Gaby Roslin’s marriage had failed but could not think of anything cruel to add.
"A few years ago," he admits, "when I first started I would probably have said something different about the Gaby Roslin thing. I’d never met her and the chances were I was never going to meet her. But no . . . well, I’ve done it before. You’ve just gone off on a rant about somebody and then you bump into them and you go, ‘Hi’, and they go, ‘Oh, I have a fat arse, do I?’ "
In a rare break with human history, Moyles’s success seems to have made him a nicer person. His equanimity, his satisfaction with his little but magnified life, is overthrown by one thing only: young women, a breed he refers to as "top-heavy lovelies". The authorities have in the past rebuked him for an unpleasant edge to his on-air dealings with the opposite sex. The BSC upheld a complaint about his "aggressive and sexually suggestive comments " to a young woman caller to Capital. On his first Radio 1 breakfast show he interviewed Victoria Beckham and jokingly called her a whore. The last complaint upheld was over his wish to lead the virgin Charlotte Church "through the forest of her sexuality".
"I still today can’t believe that was upheld. And I have a problem with that. I thought she was 16 at that point. So in the eyes of the law a sexual 16-year-old woman is exactly the same as a sexual 42-year-old woman."
I say that young men think about women coarsely enough without further encouragement from Radio 1. "But whatever your beliefs, the chances are that on a weekly basis you’ll look at at least one woman and have mucky thoughts," he challenges me.
But I’ve been brought up not to mention mine. "Yeah, but I have a compulsion to do so. I’ve got a three-hour radio show to fill every day where I talk about myself. Gaby Roslin, see now Gaby’s on the market. Would you sleep with Gaby Roslin?" I say the gallant thing. "See, there you go."
And he wouldn’t? "I probably would because she’s famous — no, I’m loved up with my girlfriend Sophie, I’m very happy."
A former researcher on Top of the Pops, Sophie has been with him for a couple of years. She knows that "I’m not this horrible persona I’m made out to be".
Does she ever say to him ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about nipple cups’ (a recent minor theme)? "No, she was as involved in that as I was. That was when we were on holiday. The fact that there was some woman with nipple cups or whatever they’re called sunbathing we both found really funny. Years ago when I was at Capital, I painted some woman’s breasts in Chelsea colours after they’d just won the Cup. I don’t think she’d be massively keen on me doing that now, but she trusts me implicitly. She has absolutely nothing to worry about."
Is this his first major relationship? "No, I’ve had others before. Don’t be so shocked."
It is just that a Guardian journalist wrote that his sexism was the classic revenge of the school nerd. "If they need their little lines, if people can’t survive without them, then they can have them. If I’m the nerd done good or I used to be bullied at school, I don’t care. They can write whatever they want."
The way he tells it, his childhood was happy and unexceptionable. His father Chris is a postman, currently awaiting a heart bypass. His mother Vera (or Hannah Victoria in full) comes from a large Irish family and is a housewife. An elder brother lives near him in London and works in music PR. He went to a Catholic school, St Kevin’s — his collaborator "Comedy" Dave believes that St Kevin must be the patron saint of carjackers. Back then he was big rather than fat but bad at games. "I wasn’t the most popular kid in class but I wasn’t the idiot one either." Like everyone else, he had girlfriends and got dumped on the phone by their mates. He emerged with five GCSEs at O-level standard. "You see, I don’t see grade D as a fail. I just see it as lower than a C. But by then I knew what I wanted to do."
What he wanted to do was radio, and he had known it from the day, aged 11, he had repeatedly phoned a Radio Aire competition line and got on every time. The summer after his GCSEs he used his credentials from hospital radio to get a job on Radio Topshop and spent the evenings helping out on Radio Aire in Leeds. That October, Richard Branson’s superstation Radio Radio, which provided an overnight sustaining service for commercial stations, folded, and Aire handed him the graveyard slot. He would be the first to admit that his career has been dogged by luck.
The only hazard ahead is what to do next. Radio 1 breakfast DJs do not enjoy the durability of rivals such as Wogan and Tarrant. Nor does it seem, from his brief stint in 2002 as a beery chat-show host on Five, that he is a TV natural. He is actually quite good-looking — not the Johnny Vegas I imagined from his porker references — but his body is probably a better fit for radio. He would like to lose three stone.
"See, I’m sizeist as well, about myself. Mind you, I do hate it when a bitch lets herself slide . . ." And again ouch. "See," he enthuses, "this stuff just trickles out."
He is satirising both political correctness and the hooligan element in his audience. You’d have to be a broadcasting regulator not to get it. But it’s a cleverer trick than it seems, which I’d guess is why John Peel has called a truce, recognising a fellow natural. My only concern, thinking about target audiences and so on, is that if I, too, have been won over, the poor guy must surely be doing something wrong.
The Chris Moyles show from Portugal, Radio One 7-10am.
Chris Moyles: Shock-jock or satirist? The Radio 1 Breakfast Show host has boosted ratings but managed to upset regulators - and John Peel
An unending war rages for the soul of Radio 1 and it is between John Peel, its venerable musical conscience, and whoever presents its breakfast show. On one side, Peel fights for pop music as a serious art form. On the other, under the various banners of wacky-chappie, celebrity-obsessive, metro-bird or shock-jock, the DJ fights for listeners and career survival. One cannot imagine either having much to say to the other, and since Peel broadcasts so late at night the opportunities for confrontation arise rarely — rarely but not never.
"When I joined I think John thought I was the Antichrist," says Chris Moyles, Radio 1’s breakfast DJ de jour and, at 29, the station’s self-styled saviour. "He accused me of being DLT in waiting."
*
For younger readers, Dave Lee Travis succeeded Noel Edmonds as the breakfast compere in the Seventies. To be compared to the Hairy Cornflake is no compliment.
"So I replied with something shocking, like he’s Kenny Everett in waiting because Kenny Everett’s dead and it’s only a matter of time before John pops his clogs."
Ouch, I say, for Moyles has managed to do what he has failed to in days of assiduous listening: he has shocked me.
"I was a bit of a crazy maverick," he admits.
But this wasn’t on air? "No, no. And he’s never said anything about it, but everyone else went, ‘Don’t say bad things about John. And I’m like, ‘Well, he takes the piss out of me so I’ll take the piss out of him. That’s how it works.’ But then you talk to him and John’s got a fantastic sense of humour."
And now the two get on as famously as Smashy and Nicey. On the morning of our interview at Radio 1’s HQ, quarantined a few streets away from Broadcasting House, they even joshed on air. Moyles and his chatty team had been discussing Action Men with the exclusive "eagle eyes" movement when Moyles, to his evident embarrassment, noticed Peel lurking outside. He was after Moyles’s autograph for his village fête — "small, rural community," he explained — and had been waiting for him to put on another record. "Then," said Peel, "I realised I might be waiting for ever."
Ah, banter-ful Radio 1! But Peel is right in thinking that music is incidental to the Chris Moyles show. Even Moyles does not like most of it very much and, in his postmodern, deconstructivist way, makes no pretence that he, rather than some playlist bureaucrat, has chosen it. Sometimes he’ll forget to back-announce a track, which annoys the purist in me. Otherwise, I tell him, I have found it surprisingly easy to shed my Radio 4 Today habit — and with it all the cares of the world — in favour of the micro-universe of a man whose worries rarely extend beyond the admittedly far-reaching perimeter of his own flesh.
Encouraged by the Broadcasting Standards Council’s upholding of half a dozen complaints against him in as many years, critics and correspondents to Radio 4’s Feedback have called him a cheap shock merchant. But while it was undoubtedly intemperate of him to say two years ago that he wished to rip off the head of a competitor and "poo in his neck", Moyles these days is more a saucy solipsist than a shock-jock. Within his tiny kingdom he is the despot, but a benevolent one. The insults he delivers to his team — Dave, Aled, Jules and Rachel — tickle rather than wound.
"The reviews for our show that still appear really make me laugh," he agrees. "I’m just a sexist, egotistical bigmouth, or lardy-mouth or whatever, who surrounds himself with laughing sycophants who just agree with everything I say. That’s not it at all."
Nor is it, or why would we listen? Since he took over from Sara Cox in the new year he has added 700,000 listeners to the slot’s weekly audience, a fact he did not refrain from repeating endlessly on his return from holiday in May. A new jingle was composed, a Chris Evans-style rant saved only by its punchline:
"He’ll buy a yacht and a villa in Majorca
But nothing’ll really change
He’s still a big fat porker."
Anyhow, I say, congratulations. He really is the saviour of Radio 1. "I actually used the saviour line years before I came to Radio 1. I was the saviour of late-night radio when I was on Capital. I was the saviour of late-night radio at the radio station before Capital, which was Chiltern Radio, based out of Luton. Before that I was the saviour of early-evening radio. So I’ve been using the saviour tack for years. Now I’m the saviour of early-morning radio."
Until, as his own jingle went, "they fire his arse". How will he respond if next time Rajar reports that his figures have fallen (as they did when he occupied the afternoon slot)? "If they go down I’ll probably make a jingle saying ‘whoops, we’ve lost listeners, but it’s not our fault. It’s obviously your fault, listener-people’. It’s the kind of thing we do."
Indeed it is, for Moyles is in a constant state of garrulous catharsis. It was, after all, not entirely good news for him in May. Shortly after it was announced that he had gained listeners, he lost out at the Sony Radio Awards. Treating triumph and disaster just the same, he jingle-ised this, too:
"He’s as cool as the Fonze
But the stupid Sony judges
Only gave him a bronze."
"One thing that I’ll never run out of material about is me," he explains. "Someone asked me a question years ago: ‘Won’t you ever run out of stuff to say?’ and I’m like, ‘You never run out of stuff to say in real life. You don’t wake up one morning and look at your wife and go, ‘I’ve run out of things to say to you.’ Just doesn’t happen."
He obviously hasn’t witnessed the marriages I have.
Moylesey’s self-referential monologue holds its audience because it is delivered in the same tone of voice as its own. Just as a generation of Seventies students involuntarily imitated John Cleese when they attempted to be funny, so now the young customarily mistake themselves for observational comedians. Moyles serves Radio 1’s target audience of 15 to 24-year-olds and the "lower socioeconomic groups" by sharing their vocabulary and attitudes. He conjures up a personal soap opera that is an only marginally aspirational version of their own lives — Corrie, not Dallas. A big adventure, to be related and embellished, is a train ride from London to Birmingham that does not go quite to plan. A huge prize is two weeks’ semi-skiving in Portugal, where his show has relocated for Euro 2004. A satisfying accolade is to hear your car referred to as "nice wheels". Hollywood flash — even Hollyoaks flash — is so remote it is not even worth dreaming about.
Moyles is not being patronising, for he has somehow managed to avoid evolving into a proper celebrity himself. He does not go to film premieres or "showbiz parties". The "stars" he "knows" according to the jingle he plays are Roy Walker, Ant and Dec and Des Lynam. Interviewing Noel Gallagher last week, Moyles reduced him to just another northern lad who liked his cuppa with two teabags. When Fat Boy Slim turned up on Friday, it was to explain how he had smashed up his face falling out of bed. Like you do. He barely even bothers to be rude about the famous. The day we met he had read aloud the tabloid headlines reporting that Gaby Roslin’s marriage had failed but could not think of anything cruel to add.
"A few years ago," he admits, "when I first started I would probably have said something different about the Gaby Roslin thing. I’d never met her and the chances were I was never going to meet her. But no . . . well, I’ve done it before. You’ve just gone off on a rant about somebody and then you bump into them and you go, ‘Hi’, and they go, ‘Oh, I have a fat arse, do I?’ "
In a rare break with human history, Moyles’s success seems to have made him a nicer person. His equanimity, his satisfaction with his little but magnified life, is overthrown by one thing only: young women, a breed he refers to as "top-heavy lovelies". The authorities have in the past rebuked him for an unpleasant edge to his on-air dealings with the opposite sex. The BSC upheld a complaint about his "aggressive and sexually suggestive comments " to a young woman caller to Capital. On his first Radio 1 breakfast show he interviewed Victoria Beckham and jokingly called her a whore. The last complaint upheld was over his wish to lead the virgin Charlotte Church "through the forest of her sexuality".
"I still today can’t believe that was upheld. And I have a problem with that. I thought she was 16 at that point. So in the eyes of the law a sexual 16-year-old woman is exactly the same as a sexual 42-year-old woman."
I say that young men think about women coarsely enough without further encouragement from Radio 1. "But whatever your beliefs, the chances are that on a weekly basis you’ll look at at least one woman and have mucky thoughts," he challenges me.
But I’ve been brought up not to mention mine. "Yeah, but I have a compulsion to do so. I’ve got a three-hour radio show to fill every day where I talk about myself. Gaby Roslin, see now Gaby’s on the market. Would you sleep with Gaby Roslin?" I say the gallant thing. "See, there you go."
And he wouldn’t? "I probably would because she’s famous — no, I’m loved up with my girlfriend Sophie, I’m very happy."
A former researcher on Top of the Pops, Sophie has been with him for a couple of years. She knows that "I’m not this horrible persona I’m made out to be".
Does she ever say to him ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about nipple cups’ (a recent minor theme)? "No, she was as involved in that as I was. That was when we were on holiday. The fact that there was some woman with nipple cups or whatever they’re called sunbathing we both found really funny. Years ago when I was at Capital, I painted some woman’s breasts in Chelsea colours after they’d just won the Cup. I don’t think she’d be massively keen on me doing that now, but she trusts me implicitly. She has absolutely nothing to worry about."
Is this his first major relationship? "No, I’ve had others before. Don’t be so shocked."
It is just that a Guardian journalist wrote that his sexism was the classic revenge of the school nerd. "If they need their little lines, if people can’t survive without them, then they can have them. If I’m the nerd done good or I used to be bullied at school, I don’t care. They can write whatever they want."
The way he tells it, his childhood was happy and unexceptionable. His father Chris is a postman, currently awaiting a heart bypass. His mother Vera (or Hannah Victoria in full) comes from a large Irish family and is a housewife. An elder brother lives near him in London and works in music PR. He went to a Catholic school, St Kevin’s — his collaborator "Comedy" Dave believes that St Kevin must be the patron saint of carjackers. Back then he was big rather than fat but bad at games. "I wasn’t the most popular kid in class but I wasn’t the idiot one either." Like everyone else, he had girlfriends and got dumped on the phone by their mates. He emerged with five GCSEs at O-level standard. "You see, I don’t see grade D as a fail. I just see it as lower than a C. But by then I knew what I wanted to do."
What he wanted to do was radio, and he had known it from the day, aged 11, he had repeatedly phoned a Radio Aire competition line and got on every time. The summer after his GCSEs he used his credentials from hospital radio to get a job on Radio Topshop and spent the evenings helping out on Radio Aire in Leeds. That October, Richard Branson’s superstation Radio Radio, which provided an overnight sustaining service for commercial stations, folded, and Aire handed him the graveyard slot. He would be the first to admit that his career has been dogged by luck.
The only hazard ahead is what to do next. Radio 1 breakfast DJs do not enjoy the durability of rivals such as Wogan and Tarrant. Nor does it seem, from his brief stint in 2002 as a beery chat-show host on Five, that he is a TV natural. He is actually quite good-looking — not the Johnny Vegas I imagined from his porker references — but his body is probably a better fit for radio. He would like to lose three stone.
"See, I’m sizeist as well, about myself. Mind you, I do hate it when a bitch lets herself slide . . ." And again ouch. "See," he enthuses, "this stuff just trickles out."
He is satirising both political correctness and the hooligan element in his audience. You’d have to be a broadcasting regulator not to get it. But it’s a cleverer trick than it seems, which I’d guess is why John Peel has called a truce, recognising a fellow natural. My only concern, thinking about target audiences and so on, is that if I, too, have been won over, the poor guy must surely be doing something wrong.
The Chris Moyles show from Portugal, Radio One 7-10am.
