Tell Me Why Chris Moyles Is A 'Talent'

1. He is boring

He really doesn't bother me that much. I mean he's a Radio 1 DJ, what do you expect from him?

(Though I was taping a song off his show and left the tape running for like half an hour, then I rewound it and listened to the song and left the tape running again, and didn't even notice I was listening to EXACTLY THE SAME THING I'd heard not half an hour ago. That's when my first started having doubts)

I expect crap from him. But I expect better from some other DJs (in fact *all* other DJs); many of them say quite entertaining things. And I think we should be able to expect better from the BBC.

Anyway, his peculiar crapness becomes an issue because he is so insanely built up the other way - as a 'special talent'. Simon Mayo isn't, and doesn't offend me (as far as I can remember).

Hang on, Andrew, if you turn off bloody Moyles at 3pm and head for R2 you find STEVE WRIGHT - surely the originator of Moyles' inane format and the most tedious "what were they thinking" merchant of the lot when he does the voiceovers for TOTP2.

Wright's brown-nosing of aristos and wealthy Tory celeb guests on his R2 show really grates but I'm not sure Moyles wouldn't be averse to a bit of the same when the time comes.

J Ross on Saturday mornings makes me laugh. Why do I like this man so much?

Fucking cunt.

*she was better once, believe me.

I've never heard Chris Moyles.

(thinks: probably people like my estranged Oasist cousins)

Less enlightened times, I suppose.

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NME (NMEdia issue) 18th February 1984

RADIO ONE GOES GAGA: Julie Burchill (who was halfway decent then)

Pop radio is what raunchy youth has instead of diaries - certain songs spelling out experiences and expectations too hot for prying paper. The radio is *such* an invention, probably the best communications machine ever, with none of the moron-making element of TV and video, the *sitting down and gaping*, with none of the preciousness entailed in fiddling about with records and tapes. Other machines may pout and sulk and demand foreplay and complete attention, but radio LIVES.

The dream DJ works for a non-commercial station, plays lots of Motown and is a mute. The closest to the dream can be found on Radio Caroline, the floating phoenix, where you often get five records back to back and you never get a commercial, where the DJs have the good, gaudy taste of a discerning eternal teen - all Tamla, Steely Dan and Duran Duran, Billie Holiday, Beatles and Boy.

Caroline DJs occasionally mention that the sea is a little choppy, or that a police launch is nearby - "Hi boys!" - but they never *drool*, and they never wheel out geriatric jokes, and they never brag about how many crooners they kissed the asses of last night, and they never natter, and they never mutilate records by singing along with them, and they never talk in stupid voices and invite joke characters - effete homosexuals, surly West Indians - onto the airwaves, and they never make pathetic attempts at playing a guitar, and they do not talk about their FARMS (trans. a horse, a cow pat and a rubber duck somewhere in Surrey) incessantly.

In short, they are not Radio One DJs.

What a pitiful state Radio One has been in for the last ten years! John Peel is still there like an arthritic youth club organizer, huffing and puffing and believing in *something*, playing hopeless records and encouraging one and all - "Come on, *you* can do it!" - even when it's obvious that One And All *can't*. Tony Blackburn is still there, an uncle on Radio One, a drooling depraved down-and-out on Radio London but still managing to play all the best black music six months before anyone else. Mr Blackburn has always loved black music, from Motown onwards, more than any other DJ in the country, and sometimes you feel that it is only love that keeps him hanging on to a tenuous thread of sanity. It is quite likely that one day he will start a scream that never stops.

But those stylish romantic obsessives of the early 70s - Stuart Henry and Johnnie Walker and Emperor Rosko - Wolfman Pasternak! - are gone, replaced by the biggest shower of saps who ever had running sores where their mouths should be. Travis and Bates and Gambaccini are merely bores; the youngbloods (average age 33) are actively offensive.

Take Adrian Juste: he models himself on Kenny Everett, which is a lot like taking a garbage disposal unit as your role model. Take Peter Powell: he recently bought Mr Sting an expensive windsurf board, and embodies the terrible camp follower attitude of Radio One DJs perfectly - groupies of the slimiest, most dishonest kind. Take Steve Wright: he seems to have declared a one-man war against home-taping, poxing up every record he plays with spiel and sound effects. Then there is smarmy Mike Smith: when Boy Bowie played Germany and ye olde Melodye Maker gave it a less than devotional review, Mike Smith exploded in disgust and incredulity - "I don't know - the record company PAYS for these people to GO OVER THERE, which most ordinary people would LOVE, and then *they can't even give it a good review*!"

The ultimate product of this school of slavishness is undoubtedly Mike Read, who has dunked Radio One to new depths. Listen to his show and you will realise that the nation's one pop station has gone from being a music machine to an aural equivalent of The Sun - lots of leering, mindless quizzes for morons and the annual striking of a ridiculous moral attitude. Read's refusal to play the really quite unremarkable "Relax" and the subsequent banning of the record from Radio One was typical Sunthink - drool yourself stupid, and throw your hands up in horror when someone actually shows you what they want.

Mike Read wants more than anything else in the world to be a musician - he actually was one well into the 70s, dragging his guitar around Surrey pubs and singing for a fistful of 5ps. He plays the guitar, pathetically, on his show, and insinuates himself with small-time crooners in the hope of being asked onto a stage with them (you *shall* go to the ball - in March he gets to play the Dominion with living legends "Nick Beggs" and "David Grant"). He is blessed with the endless energy that the very empty often have, and has worked on that monument to uselessness "The Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles" as well as slithering his way through the peddling "Pop Quiz".

TV is where the Radio One DJ heart is, and that is probably why these radio hams are so awful at what they do. They long to follow Noel Edmonds and Jimmy Savile into the flouncy, bouncy end of televisual entertainment. Mike Smith has "Showbusiness", Peter Powell has "The Oxford Road Show"; Paul Gambaccini has his showcase on Channel 4. All the Radio One DJs do voiceovers for commercials, though those with scruples only do them for musical product - cute! These people are treading water, killing time on the precious airwaves, and it shows stupendously.

Radio One broadcasts for 18 hours of the day, and that such a small amount of this material is listenable - those hours filled by Mr David Jensen, Miss Janice Long, Mr Andy Batten-Foster and Mr Gary Davies (! - RPC) that it really is a crying - well, *sighing* - shame. The BBC, ostensibly running the ultimate non-advertising radio stations, has in Radio One a station that is often little more than one long commercial - a commercial for the DJs themselves, begging letters to be whisked away into the lush hinterlands of the small screen.

When you WANT rather than NEED, when you want to be WOGAN, not ALAN FREED, what hope is there for you? If Ambition Minus Talent, that dread disease of the 20th century, is personified by any group of people in particular, it can be caught strutting its shabby stuff day after day on Radio One.

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JOKEYING FOR A PLACE: WHERE STEVE WRIGHT GOES WRONG by Susan Williams

Stevie is a pro. A born talker who presents a programme devoit of dusty old telephone comps and all that *unnecessary* human contact.

Stevie *never* stumbles. Stevie never stops for breath. Steve Wright is *cool*. The audience figures for The Afternoon Show stand at a record five million.

The staple fare is silly tattle about what the rich are doing, snippets of non-news borrowed from the tabloids and imginary telephone conversations with such wacky characters as "Mr Angry" (borrowed from Kenny Everett), "Wine Bar - OK Yah!" (borrowed from Tracey Ullman), and hot poop as to just who JR's going to be screwin' in forthcoming episodes of Dallas (just like Terry Wogan). All of which condenses into a highly original afternoon of inoffensive easy listening. Inoffesnive that is if you happen to be a patriotic Anglo-Saxon homophobe pro-nuker.

Most surprising is the man's insecurity on the subject of homosexuality. "Jervaise the Hairdresser" is probably the most obnoxious of his inventions. Being a hairdresser marks you down as being a knob-hound straight away of course but the poofy lisping voice is well out of order. I'm sure a casual listen to any one of several of his colleagues at Radio One would correct Mr Wright's erroneous assumption that deviating from the sexual norm necessarily involves simpering like a cretinous Duranite. "They" don't *all* whimper and whine Stevie baby.

Recently he has retreated from such unsubtle queer-bashing. Jervaise has been moved well out of telephone range, to San Francisco which we all know is the world's capital for "you-know-what". Innuendo is now followed with Kenneth Williams style "Oooohs and Aaaahs" or "I'd better say no more on the subject!" He doesn't need to. The subject has been squashed flat under several tons of flying mallet. The digs pile in thick and fast. After playing The Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend The Night Together" Stevie quipped "And I bet that's what they're saying down at Greenham Common tonight!" Do you get it? Some of the women peace protesters *might* be - wait for it - LESBIANS!!

This is a suspicion that he holds in common with the majority of our national newspapers (sic). Indeed, Stevie's mixture of nudge-nudge wink-wink quackery, feeble social commentary and ego stroking is remarkably similar to the verbiage to be found in the centre pages of The Sun. They both share a grating obsession with sex surveys, soap operas and sodomy. The difference being that Murdoch's lap-dogs have their politics branded on their balding pates. Stevie doesn't. Stevie is a BBC person. Steve is apolitical and it don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime etc.

His function, like the human interest stories at the end of News At Ten (y'know - Green Goddess squashes cat, Queen grins at dancing black people) is to ease the pressure on our troubled minds. To soothe, relax and reassure like some gurgling aural Radox mind-bath. Stevie says "OK! So we got The Bomb, Bloodsports, Bloody Sunday but things can't be all *that* bad if a recent survey of mid-20s professional women proves that 95% prefer men with small bums!"

BUT!

a.) People seem to like it.
b.) You can always switch off.

Or in the words of the man himself - "I think these so called experts should credit the British public with some intelligence."

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Norman: NMEtal was the first ever NME I bought and read! Early 1984!! I remember letters in that issue's Gasbag about the media spesh so it have been published a week or two after that.

Mind you, only after another three years or so was I able to decipher sense from the writing of such ppl as Kopf, Fadele and (heh heh) one M. Sinker.

Proof-read, proof-read.

I don't know about those articles, Robin C: they seem to me to miss the mark in strange ways. The praise for Blackburn and Gar(r?)y Davies; the reference to Johnnie Walker as 70s-cool; the fact that the second piece is by Wells - none of this inspires confidence.

Nor am I sure that you could transpose 84 to 02. What about the Bannister Revolution and all that? However bad some aspects may have been, I think they have mostly been *differently* bad from in the Beerling days. (And I don't think it has been all bad: reading the book, I still feel affection for Mark & Lard, though they seem to have been doing the same thing every day for c.6 years now.)

R1 is not really for me: most of the music is not for my ears. But still some of the DJs are inoffensive, or semi-likeable enough. Moyles is the one that stands out - he's bad in every conceivable way.

Reynard - I know what you mean, I've always thought Walker is a terrible "classic rock" smoothie, although I vaguely remember him being OK on the original Radio 5. Actually there is a BIG difference in terms of the cultural background of modern Radio 1 DJs when compared to the old guard - the idea of a John Betjeman afficionado (as Mike Read was) presenting the breakfast show now seems like a piece of quaint, otherworldly ancient history - but I do think there is a sufficient common thread between "bad" and "differently bad".

re: the Halle Berry moment - didn't she just call him on being an asshole with that whole 'dance like a big black man' routine, and Moyles was too embarrassed by this to respond with anything other than the most pathetic 'brush it under the carpet' deflection? why again should she 'get over herself'?

Perhaps the Berry/Moyles situation was too much of a crack on the head of the "interview as advertisement" template.

Guests on Popworld got far worse.

Can someone remind John Motson et al of this when commentating/punditing on the World Cup for the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation? kthnxbye

I will now provide a space for those that wish to to slag off said scene:

There was a good Philip Roth interview on BBC4 the other day.

My friend puts this up there as one of the lowest points of his life.

x-post

http://www.ukgameshows.com/atoz/people/r/rogers_ted/tedrogers.jpg

Scum of the earth etc. There you go!

nb: "hyper-intelligent" = as Irvine Welsh said: "nobody likes a smart cunt."