So it was the pursuit of new revenue streams for radio which drove it to develop new programming for the morning audience. But surely this would require a completely different style to those big variety shows that families listened to in the evening?
‘The first radio show I could find with the word “breakfast” mentioned in it was Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club and that ran from 1933 until 1960 with the same presenter, Don McNeil. He totally built the show around his persona. It had music, inspirational readings, philosophy, a bit of poetry, all that kind of thing. It was a variety-based entertainment show, and it was completely unrehearsed, there was no script, they had a live band and the whole thing was done in front of a live audience. There was one famous incident where Bob missed his train, so they just had to soldier on without him. Then in the middle of an interview he arrives and it’s all “Look who’s here!” The whole thing was totally ad-libbed. Meanwhile in this country the BBC wouldn’t allow anything on the wireless unless it was very tightly scripted.
‘American broadcasters were also trying other shows at the time like the husband-and-wife hosted Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick with Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kollmar. This show actually came from their home, and they made breakfast and chatted and he’d say things like, “I’ve got a headache. I shouldn’t have drunk that wine last night…” and all that sort of thing. But the whole approach was very gentle.
‘You always come back to America when talking about breakfast radio because the whole issue was being addressed far earlier than it was here. The first thing that could be called a breakfast radio show ran in the States from 1930 to 1943 and was presented by a man called Tony Wons. It was a fifteen-minute mixture of chat and poetry. He used material that he sourced, but he also used items from listeners, so people would think, “I’ve got a quote he might like to read,” and they’d send it in. So he developed the idea of that relationship with the listeners where they contributed to the show.’
So while American commercial radio was defining the form, the BBC was operating along very different lines. In fact the BBC didn’t start to develop breakfast radio properly until the 1960s. Sean recalls that period quite clearly:
‘The switch came about in this country in the early 1960s with the arrival of the transistor radio. This is the first time that you have music that’s truly portable. And kids who would want to listen to Radio Luxembourg or the pirates or later on Radio One have a means of getting away from their parents’ space. My awakening to breakfast radio was with Radio Caroline and Radio London and that sense that when you were getting ready to go to school there was actually something cool to listen to on the radio and there never had been before. The Light Programme had Breakfast Special presented by John Dunne, but I had very little recollection of what had gone before. For a teenager in the early sixties, having Radio Caroline and listening to Johnny Walker playing really cool stuff was a revelation. I didn’t think getting up in the morning could be fun.’
So the pirates were the first people to make mornings fun, but how long after that did it take the BBC to get on the early morning radio bandwagon?
‘The thing is that the BBC is so often held up as the history of broadcasting in this country and yet when you look historically at it the BBC has more often than not responded to trends rather than creating them. It did it in the 1930s because commercial broadcasting hit a market that they weren’t hitting, which was Sundays. This was because Reith believed that Sunday was the Lord’s Day, and you only broadcast hymns and prayers. In comes Radio Normandy broadcasting from outside the country on a Sunday with a programme sponsored by a firm of bookmakers and blowing the audience completely out of the water. Then the war comes along and they get their act together, and out of the war comes the Forces Network which then becomes the Light Programme. But by the 1960s they’ve lost their way again and suddenly The Beatles are there, the whole Merseybeat thing has happened but on the BBC it’s Bob Miller and the Miller Men playing versions of popular hits. You could only hear The Beatles on Luxembourg and occasionally on Saturday Club with Brian Matthew. Then the pirates come on stream around 1964 and Radio 1 arrives in the August of 1967.’
So, the tardiness of the BBC aside, breakfast radio has been around for years. And there are a number of different kinds, which have evolved from very simple beginnings. Had I known that a live band and a studio audience were an option I might have tried to revive the idea of those early broadcasts. Indeed as part of the preparation for the book I spent a week working at Nerve Radio, the student radio station of Bournemouth University Students’ Union. Our Friday show was held in the cafeteria and students were invited to come and watch. I have to say that there’s a quite natural feeling to doing radio with a live audience in the morning. Everybody in the room is in a similarly fragile state and it’s quite nice to share the whole waking up experience. Maybe Don McNeil was on to something.
But why were breakfast radio listeners so partisan? The wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding Terry Wogan’s departure seemed a little out of proportion for somebody simply not making a radio show any more. I asked Sean why he thought people got so upset about it.
‘People get very tribal about what radio station they listen to because they understand how to listen to a show. They understand the code, they know the format, they never have to stop and think what’s happening now because they’ve got the shorthand. Listeners want that security. If you have a regular spot on your show at five to eight and for some reason you miss it and play it at ten past eight, your audience is completely thrown. People are extremely sensitive at that time of the morning.’
Indeed they are, and that was one of the reasons why I was always very careful to have the inertia of 6 Music breakfast build slowly over the three hours of the show. The low-key opening to the show was no accident. There was no need for me to be chirpy if I was playing music because the music would do that part for me and I could wake up alongside the listeners. But it seemed that in the radio landscape I was on my own. The style of most breakfast shows, especially commercial ones, was much more in your face. Also, lots of stations have two presenters at breakfast time, a man and a woman. But not like the easy-going Dorothy and Bob back in the 1940s. The current style is lively, in your face and above all loud. How has this happened?
‘You tend to think that it’s just because you’re old and it’s not for you. But I do think that commercial radio has lost its way. I don’t think the people who run commercial radio get out enough and just talk to the audience. You look around and see the mess that commercial radio has been in over the past few years and you think, “These are bright people, they’re not stupid, so why are we still wallowing in this?” Why can’t we plan a radio strategy that thinks beyond the next RAJAR, which they can’t seem to be able to do? They would say we’re aiming this at a particular audience, it’s not for you so we don’t expect you to like it. They think it doesn’t matter if the speech is vacuous because it’s having a laugh, isn’t it? It’s a lack of imagination. If the people who ran commercial radio bought Tesco’s, they’d walk in and go, “Well, this is all great but it’s full of shelves. If we got rid of all this stuff, then we could make some more space.” It’s like they’ve got it round the wrong way.’
So while broadcasters are striving to make a perfect breakfast show, are they missing the point that the show is actually defined by its listeners?
‘It took thirty years for Wogan to build that programme, but it comes back to the fact that it was actually the audience that built it. He developed this persona of a presenter who’s talking to people who are like himself, just a year away from a home for the bewildered and are constantly misunderstanding things. And he’s not trying to be chirpy, he’s just being like you are. And that strikes a chord in the audience, they get the joke and they play the joke, and that was the genius of it.
‘It seems an obvious thing to say, but I think that these days we don’t consider the audience enough. We do the brash young presenter thing because we think that’s cool. But are we actually broadcasting to anybody or are we just talking to ourselves? Are we having fun and excluding everybody else? I used to listen to Chris Evans’s earlier breakfast