FEATURE:
Station to Station
PHOTO CREDIT: BBC
Part Eleven: Greg James (BBC Radio 1)
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I am going back to BBC Radio 1…
PHOTO CREDIT: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian
for this part of Station to Station. Today, I am focusing on the terrific Greg James. His breakfast show is an infectious and fine way to start the day! Even though James is thirty-five, he has been in radio for a long time. Starting his radio career at his students' union radio station, Livewire 1350AM, he has risen to become one of the most-loved broadcasters. I think that James will achieve so much and keep moving up as his career progresses. That said, one can hardly feel he has a low-profile role as it is. Follow Greg James on Instagram and tune into his breakfast show if you have not heard it. There are a couple of interviews that I want to bring in. Before then, this Wikipedia segment discusses when James took over the BBC Radio 1 breakfast show:
“On 20 August 2018, James took over Radio 1 Breakfast from Nick Grimshaw. The pair switched shows, with Grimshaw taking on the Drivetime show from 4pm-7pm. It was announced by the two presenters on Grimshaw's Breakfast Show on 31 May, with Grimshaw joking “It’s time for a change, time for a new show and, most importantly, it’s going to be time for a new wake-up time... preferably around 11:30am”. Both presenters were very excited about the change, with James saying that taking over would be a “big challenge” but he was ready and willing “to give it a go”. His first guest on the show was Wallace the Lion from Blackpool Zoo. The show was broadcast four days a week, until December 2020 when the BBC announced changes to the Radio 1 schedule, with James' Breakfast Show now being five days a week, whilst Matt Edmondson and Mollie King moved from the weekend breakfast show to the weekend afternoon slot”.
The first interview that I want to source is from 2019. Fairly new into his stint as the breakfast host on BBC Radio 1, he spoke with The Guardian. In addition to learning more about the incredible James, he reveals his daily routine:
“The BBC Radio 1 Breakfast show, says its host, Greg James, is about “fun for fun’s sake”. This Wednesday morning, not long after dawn, that involves a lot of chat about bins. There are a couple of stories knocking about, James explains on air. A Nuneaton family accused of having smelly bins have defended themselves on TV. A binman has bought a birthday cake for a woman on his route who was turning 100. Plus, it is James’s bin day today. “And yes, I did remember to put them out before I came in.”
James’s day starts at 5.30am, four days a week, with his show on air from 6.30am to 10am. As I listen at home, getting ready to join him in the studio for his final hour, it occurs to me: sometimes it is not enough just to go out in search of fun, it is more often about making your own – and hoping it translates.
“Our rule is that we all have to be laughing at half five, if possible,” James says later, in a BBC boardroom after the show. “Even if it’s just doing a stupid impression, or saying a filthy joke or doing a dance – we have to be in that mindset of: ‘It’s shit o’clock in the morning, but all of the people listening are having much less fun.”.
It is a rare success story in radio, with Zoe Ball’s Radio 2 Breakfast show – the country’s most popular – losing 780,000 listeners since January to record an audience of 8.27 million in the second quarter of 2019. James’s show has a weekly audience of 5.69 million listeners aged 10-plus, up from 5.44 million last August. Presumably, everyone is very happy with him? “I knew it was good when I heard from every single big BBC boss on Rajar day.”
Had he really had no idea that the show had been a success before then? “We felt it,” says James, cautiously. “We felt like it’s been a really successful year. We attacked the show, the brief of the show, with confidence.” The kind of confidence that led them to propose, just weeks after taking over, a nationwide endeavour to get a Cornish pasty to a listener in Scotland, who said she had never had one. Handed between listeners like an Olympic torch, the pasty reached her after 19 stops, travelling 674 miles in four days.
The world may have moved on, says James, but he is confident in the next generation of radio presenters. “It’s not as if everyone wanted to be a radio presenter in the 80s. You could just substitute ‘YouTuber’ for: ‘I want to be famous.’” Was that his motivation? “Never. I wanted to be well known for being funny.” And he loved radio, in a deeply uncool, anoraky way. He pokes fun at the press cliche of presenters having recorded jingles in their childhood bedrooms – but he really did.
James’s parents, Rosemary and Alan, were both teachers, and mostly happy to leave him to his interests: “Whether it was squirrelling away upstairs recording radio shows, or pretending to revise, or going to play cricket, or whatever. They were happy to leave me alone: ‘Go out and get drunk, but don’t be an idiot.’” A few years ago, James and his older sister clubbed together to pay off their mum and dad’s mortgage. They still tune in at 6.30am every morning, he says, “to check I turned up”.
Although it was Terry Wogan he was “obsessed” with, he gets misty-eyed about being driven to school by his mum, listening to Chris Evans “being mad” on Virgin 1215: “Alanis Morissette’s Ironic automatically takes me back to being that age.”
These days, though, media is so fragmented – I wonder if you can ever assume that everyone is listening to any one song, except Lil Nas X, on repeat, for ever? “I do believe this, but I also have to believe this: you can get new people listening to radio. And that’s what we’ve proven, to a certain extent, so far”.
I think Greg James is one of the most inspiring broadcasters in the country. It is exciting to see where he might head and what direction his career will take. I tune into his show when I can but, as a devoted BBC Radio 6 Music follower, I flip between the two!
The second interview that I want to highlight is from the Evening Standard. James talked about presenting during a pandemic – he also mentions his adorable dog, Barney:
“Taking the breakfast show gig was not something James did lightly. He says, growing up, his only goal was to ‘do radio as a job’ and when he realised it was a viable career he decided to go for it and ‘see what happens’.
“If you want to be on Radio 1, you want to end up doing the breakfast show. I really wrestled with it over a number of years being like, ‘do I want it or not?’,” he adds.
“When I stopped asking myself that question, and got on with it and kept enjoying it, it was offered to me. I never thought I would be on there for more than a year or so. I think when you get that job, you're like, ‘wow, it’s happened. How long is it gonna last?’ And I feel really lucky that I’ve managed to last as long as I have done. The fact that I’ve got my biggest challenge 10 years into a job is something really exciting to me.”
Being at the helm of one of the UK’s biggest radio slots is a tough gig for anyone, especially at a time when media is changing so rapidly - James saw listeners decrease slightly at the end of last year to 4.9 million from 5.1 million in December 2018. But he isn’t getting itchy feet.
“It’s certainly been the biggest challenge of my career, doing the breakfast show, because it takes a whole new level of expectation, a different level of profile and national scrutiny and you've got a huge responsibility to be the spokesperson and be the frontman,” James says.
“I feel like I'll just want to keep doing [this job] as long as I'm being challenged and I find it difficult. A good job is one that can really engage your brain, where you are certainly never bored. And I don't feel like I want to stop doing it any time soon.”
This challenge has only been amplified by the pandemic, but it’s a feat the presenter feels the breakfast team has risen to, and a deep end that’s meant he’s had to learn ‘a sh*tload’ over the last few months. James still goes into the office on his show days, Monday to Thursday, with a producer but the rest of his team is working from home.
“I've had to get better and learn, and really dig deep and draw on all that experience that I've gained. But it's been a really extraordinary challenge for all of us to make sure that we're nailing it and getting the tone right and reflecting the lives of the listeners,” James continues.
To achieve the right balance and tone, James is making sure he stays ‘as clued up as possible’, listening to podcasts, and staying connected with the news, but radio is about escapism, too, which is why he’s been so impressed that his listeners are up for the fun stuff and nonsense.
“If you can't laugh through life, there's no point doing it. The way I deal with everything in life, whether it's a happy thing or a sad thing is to try and find the funny side of stuff,” James continues.
“It's been experimental. The show has changed and evolved over the last couple of months. I'm as frightened and saddened by it as everyone else is. I've always known that the listeners are the most important thing about the show but they’ve sort of gone up another level in my estimation in terms of how much they’re giving to us at the moment. They’re up for the fun stuff and they’re really up for nonsense and really up for being callers and doing stuff because we all want to be distracted and get through this together. It’s something that, when I started doing radio shows in my bedroom, I never thought about. You'd never think about the potential of a radio station being there for a person when they are feeling low, and lonely.”
Besides cooking and hair growing, James also has two other projects on the go: a new season of Rewinder on BBC Radio 4 and he and Chris Smith have just released the last instalment in their children’s book series, Kid Normal.
As a self-described ‘radio nerd’, having at-home access to the entire BBC archive for Rewinder has been a ‘dangerous resource’ for James to have and something he can spend ‘hours and hours and hours’ combing through. In the second series, which started last week, James touched on dog training from the 80s, played a 130-year-old recording of Florence Nightingale and discovered that a Paul Hollywood handshake hasn’t always been so hard to get.
James says: “Because everyone's baking at the moment, we decided that we’d search for Paul Hollywood, and there’s an example of him on an episode of the Generation Game in 2001, where he is the guest baker.
“He was really kind with the scoring, really generous. And the things that they’d created were sh*t. But he's really nice about it. And I was watching that being like, ‘hang on, but in the Bake Off now he’s suddenly turned into Mr. Nasty’. Very, very harsh isn't he in the Bake Off? You can't you can't get the Hollywood handshake for any sum of money, but back in the early noughties, he was giving them out 10 a penny.”
While Radio 4 is a step away from his usual Radio 1 tone, James says he’s excited that he can produce a show for the station where he can ‘be himself’.
“I have to switch my brain slightly into a more journalistic and a slightly more analytical mode, which is good. It’s good for me to go out of my comfort zone. It's a very different field to Radio 1, but essentially, it's the same stuff, communicating something you're passionate about to an audience. Just happens that this audience is just a bit older than what I'm used to, but that’s okay. I think the mums like me,” James laughs”.
I shall end things here. Go and listen to Greg James on BBC Radio 1 and follow him if you can. He is a broadcaster that has a legion of admirers. I am not sure how long he will remain on the breakfast show, though I feel he will be at BBC Radio 1 for a long time to come. Greg James, in my view, is one of our…
MOST talented broadcasters.