Some things, Vanessa Feltz, you don’t declare at airports

And to think they once clamoured for Sarah Kennedy’s head over foot-in-mouth disease…

Check out this classic of celebrity narcissism from Kennedy’s Radio 2 replacement; confessed from Vanessa Feltz‘ own lips on yesterday’s early morning show.

Now I’ve always cut Ms Feltz some slack over her supposed ‘meltdown’ in Celebrity Big Brother. It’s standard TV hyperbole to label as ‘meltdown’ what you and I would call ‘letting off steam’. Is the woman mad? Absolutely not.

But now I’m wavering: tune in at the 1:11:50 mark, when one listener confides that she wished she could take a tablet that would stop her daughter going to China for 10 months.

Turns out Ms Feltz has been in the same situation, when her own daughter went to work on ambulances in the Middle East (wonder which side of the Green Line that was?)…

“Saying goodbye wasn’t enough,” Feltz recalls. “I suddenly screamed ‘Saskia, I love you more than any other mother in this airport loves her child…’”

Her daughter apparently gave her a withering look, which was probably mild compared to what any parent within earshot would have liked to have given her at that moment.

I’m still not buying ‘mad’ but it would seem I must now grant you ‘delusional’.

The PR exercise Max Clifford daren’t contemplate

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I could feel the lip beginning to curl yesterday, as Max Clifford talked Radio 5 Live through the implications of the topic du jour, super-injunctions, in the light of revelations over a BBC journalist’s affair.

“The best form of stopping these stories used to be anticipation; to make sure it never came out,” he opined. “To make sure that no-one found out or became aware.”

At first hearing, it sounded like the craven call of amorality, edging around the elephant in the room. Surely a far simpler form of stopping such stories is not having affairs in the first place? You either live up to your vows or bring a dignified end to a moribund marriage but you avoid at all costs becoming one of the wretched in-betweeners who opts to have his cake and eat it.

Then it occurred to me that I was being harsh, expecting Max Clifford to shoot himself in the foot. For isn’t there just a chance that if more people focused on doing the right thing over the expedient thing, he would be out of a job?

£2m in sales says it all for Moyles’ talking shop

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‘Gift of the gab’ is rarely used as a compliment. We have a general, understandable reserve towards people who are rarely minded to shut up.

Then again, that same quality occasionally forms the basis of what such people do for a living and those with a talent for broadcasting at length to millions of people without ever once lapsing into dead air, I believe really do have a gift.

It’s one that should have been pushed to breaking point last week, when Chris Moyles and Dave Vittie elongated their normal breakfast show into a 52-hour marathon that broke both Radio 1′s record for continuous broadcasting and the world endurance record for a radio team broadcast.

The pair raised over £2m for Comic Relief in the process, yet there were those (see Comments here) who were quick to carp at the nature of the task undertaken.

Oh that such critics could be made to put their money where there mouth is and show us all how easy broadcasting is, courtesy of a radio equivalent of open mike evenings. An idea there for someone, perhaps?

I used to try being a DJ when I was a kid; just me, my stereo and an imaginary audience in my bedroom. I have no doubt my efforts nowadays would be little better: promising beginnings giving way to cliché, lame gags and the dreaded silences, growing ever longer.

I’ve also thrown all-nighters before, and nearly came a cropper at university after convincing myself I could prepare for two 9am exams by revising through the night beforehand.

In light of both experiences, I have no qualms about tipping my hat to the Radio 1 duo but especially Moyles. Vittie is a competent broadcaster and an excellent foil to his livewire partner but I suspect even he would acknowledge that Moyles is the true star.

Yes, he can be puerile and yes, his language can become gratingly Jonathan Ross when he speaks publicly outside his employers’ constraints. He is, nonetheless, a master of his craft and somehow sounded as fresh when wrapping up the broadcast as he had when starting it two days earlier.

Sharp, funny and drawing from a well of inspiration that refused to run dry, he is compelling viewing during the clip of the show’s closing moments, his eyes darting around the controls in front of him, never losing sight of the fact that, whatever the buzz and acclaim going on around him, there was still a job to be done and the buck stopped with him.

The stubble and hoodie work against him, belying the fact of a pro at the top of his game. But don’t let that stop his detractors – go on folks, set up your sound system with 50 tracks, get a stopwatch going and just fill in the gaps between tunes for a couple of hours in the comfort of your own home. Easy.

Note how many minutes pass before you become embarrassed by the sound of your own faltering voice. Halve it and you’ll have an idea of when your imaginary listeners switched off.

Congratulations on a great job, Moyles and Vittie. Truly, you have the gift of the gab. In a nice way.

Balding highlights bad taste more than she knows

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While the Sunday Times lands some long-overdue blows in his defence, I am generally with Clare Balding in her dispute with Times TV critic AA Gill.

Gill can argue to the contrary till he’s blue in the face but his review of Balding’s programme Britain By Bike has absolutely no need of the following:

“Now back to the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation.”

“I wonder if the production team noticed that, even through three layers of Viyella and Gore-Tex, Clare has heroically assertive nipples”

This isn’t criticism, it’s the journalist as smart aleck, proffering crass, unnecessarily personal digs that he hopes will bring almost as much of a smirk to his peers’ faces as they did to his own. It is pathetic and there are too many newspaper people who abuse their power in this way, whether it’s a writer or a sub-editor egging him on.

And it’s a shame that the hopelessness of his case detracts from an otherwise valid point made by Gill’s editor, John Witherow, in response to Balding’s complaint:

“In my view, some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society.”

Agreed. Watching homosexuality acquire almost reverential status in recent years has been somewhat bewildering. If only this particular case fit his rhetoric. Prejudice, however, starts with name-calling that goes to the core of what a person is. Unchecked, it becomes legitimised and a civilised society takes a step backwards.

As it does when vulgarity rules and people with the intelligence to do better communicate publicly  in the language of the taproom.

Clare Balding was never likely to dignify her stance by taking it onto Twitter but the following input, as reported by The Guardian, drags the issue down to a yah-boo level, at which point those of us who don’t enjoy watching adults embarrass themselves start to move on:

“Balding, who made her debut on the microblogging site earlier this week to call Gill a “twat”, is now seeking advice from fellow tweeter Stephen Fry. Last night former the Labour deputy leader John Prescott tweeted his support for Balding, referring to Gill as ‘a shit’.”

Balding, I should remind you, was educated at Cambridge University. Prescott, I won’t need to remind you, as you’re probably still wiping the tears of laughter from your eyes, is now a peer of the realm.

There was a time when people in their position, whatever language they might use behind closed doors, would have felt obliged to raise the bar slightly when venting their anger in an open forum.

Nowadays, it seems, anything goes. Propriety is once again subjugated to the cult of self and its overriding need to emote.

Yes, Clare Balding, AA Gill gave us ample cause to wrinkle our noses at the state of Britain’s intelligentsia.

What a shame you then had to go and do likewise.

……………………………………………………………………………………….

Bald truth on Gill is vulgar, vulgar, vulgar – Rhoda Koenig, Belfast Telegraph

Chris Moyles, the rest of your life starts here

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It was an epochal moment on Radio 1 this morning. DJ Chris Moyles‘ irritation (and I stand shoulder to shoulder with him on this) at the vowel-twisting, consonant-dropping urban patois in which Professor Green drenches his lyrics could no longer be confined.

You could hear it simmering a few months ago, when Moyles daringly took the mick out of Dizzee Rascal‘s diction but this morning the dam wall was well and truly breached. This morning, he fulminated, he raged, driven to distraction not by dialect but by lazy, sloppy speech dressed up as hip, uttered by people trying to be something they aren’t.

You can hear his rant here. It starts 1:45.30 in and ends at 1:47.00.

It is effectively a 90-second audition for a job on Radio 2.

I like Moyles a lot and will happily tune in to whichever station puts a mike in front of him. New contract notwithstanding, however, I believe we’ve just witnessed the beginning of the end of his time at Radio 1.

Welcome to middle age, sir.

Examinations or just cursory glances?

Chris Moyles sounds like he’s just beheld a human rights abuse when a listener texts in, announcing that he’s about to sit a three-hour exam.

“Three hours??!!!” Moyles asks incredulously. “In an exam for three hours?!”

Well, yes, why not? There was a time when three hours was standard and I can recall plenty of my own exams where I’d have welcomed a fourth, just to get everything written down.

Thirty years on, my son has a GCSE this morning. Forty-five minutes .

I feel like a grizzled old combat veteran. Which is ridiculous.

It’s ‘Classic FM’, not ‘Classic Right-On’

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One of those did-I-hear-that-right? moments in the car this morning.

A Classic FM presenter actually referred to Peter Tchaikovsky as “Tchaik”.

Even on Classic FM, apparently, three syllable words are becoming a trifle taxing. In which case call him ‘Peter’, surely?

That’s the problem with trying to sound phat. Push it too far and you ending up sounding like something else altogether. Although it does rhyme with ‘phat’.