Most "talk" radio has become dull and uninspired. The robotic presenters all appear to read from the same script with all the charisma of a dying slug. In the social media age it's now a procession of "text in with this", "email that" or "Gary Gobshite has tweeted such and such brainless tripe". The modern style of presenting has become lazy. Press a few buttons, or touch a screen and get the listeners to do all the work. The commercial stations are interspersed with mind numbing adverts and on the BBC network the eternal advertising of future predictable, boring drivel.
BBC Radio 4 is one of the few exceptions that does still broadcast programmes which have some value and are worth a listen. BBC Radio 5Live's exception is the World Football Phone-in which is tucked away from 2am-4am every Saturday morning (available later via Podcast). Dotun Adebayo is a very talented presenter and Tim Vickery's contributions are intelligent, knowledgeable and forthright.
TalkSport(TalkShit) is one of the worst offenders. Ex-footballers preaching to the listener about sports they clearly know nothing about. I no longer listen to this station at all and would rather hand wash a pair of underpants found in a skip than sit through half an hour of Alan Brazil telling everyone who he was brown- nosing the night before.
So this brings me on to the legend of talk radio, the incomparable James Stannage. The only other presenter to ever run him close is James H Reeve. Reeve's curmudgeonly, lugubrious style was wonderful to listen to but you always got the impression he genuinely wasn't enjoying having to take calls from your average moron so he seemed to become more and more depressed to the point where it badly affected his shows. James H. appears to have retired from the talk scene now, which is a great loss, but I'm sure his reasons were the right ones for him.
Anyway, I digress, so back to Stannage. I first heard him on the radio back in the 1970s on Manchester's Piccadilly Radio. I shared a bedroom with 4 older brothers and Stannage had a stint as a late night host for a few years. I was only very young and didn't really understand how unique he was for the times. His show was ground breaking for the UK as calling listeners "boring morons" etc had never been heard on the radio before. He was already a legend in our bedroom. He furthered his career in the USA amongst other places then came back to local radio around 1989/1990, this time on Piccadilly Magic as it was then called. I was very excited about this at the time as I had now grown up, of course, and the anticipation of what his show would be like was palpable.
The first year or so saw his delivery slightly more subdued than I had remembered him. He broadcast from 10pm-2am. In the first hour of his show he invited listeners to ring in with their best jokes. This was all a bit hit and miss. The following 3 hours tended to be more serious debate with plenty of time given to some callers that didn't really have that much to say. I carried on listening every night though as this was still more entertaining than any other late night radio programme on at that time. He gradually procured a few regular callers who tended to play devil's advocate, so it started to become more like his show of old again.
Around Christmas 1994 I rang in to talk to him about how the DE-regulation of the bus network under Thatcher many years previously continued to adversely affected services around Greater Manchester. I didn't have a car at that time and was struggling to get to work on the bus. He gave me around 5 minutes on air during which time he accused me of not having a brain for not advertising my plight on the work's noticeboard. I loved every second of it. He gradually became more reckless in his shows and was regularly getting into trouble with the authorities for some of his remarks to callers. This all added to the edginess of his show and by the late 90s his show was unmissable. I remember my opening line to people in work most mornings had become "Did you listen to Stannage last night ?!".
He was taken off the air under more controversy then re-emerged on Key 103, Manchester's "premier" FM radio station. This appeared to be a ploy to attract a younger audience who would be more suited to his style. It definitely worked. I now had people 10 or 15 years my junior asking me if I had listened to Stannage the night before. His shows from this time have now become YouTube hits and for a few years in the early 2000s his shows were the most cutting edge, controversial, unpredictable and at times truly shocking broadcasts on any outlet in this country. There followed some copyists on other stations but no-one could rival Stannage. His insults were legendary and he told moronic callers exactly what needed saying to them; be they chav; scrote; racist etc.
He was eventually taken off air again for overstepping the mark (I heard this broadcast and agreed with his argument but his choice of words were ill-advised) and he has been off mainstream radio ever since. He is still a man-about-town and has had an online show but I believe he still deserves a bigger stage.
This brings me back to my main point. Talk radio now is designed to be dull and bland and the James Stannage's of this world won't be "risked" by faceless suits in the upper echelons of broadcasting. The world of radio is a much poorer place for it. However, even if James Stannage never broadcast again, his status as a truly legendary icon of radio is set in stone.
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