He tells me that no one talks to him on the Tube and it’s
He tells me that no one talks to him on the Tube, and it’s my hunch that most people don’t even recognise him. “I’ve got a baby coming (his second wife is Tina Richie, Chris Evans’s head of news at Virgin Radio). I’ve got some exciting late-night TV commitments early next year. Moving to Five Live has opened up possibilities that I wouldn’t have dreamed of two years ago.
What I’m doing now I really love so much more than anything I did on Radio One, ever.”It’s hard to credit that just over a year ago he was marooned in the drivetime slot at Radio One, spinning discs from a computer print-out playlist and endlessly regurgitating his impersonation of Jimmy Savile. And three years ago he was still hosting the ITV game show, Wheel of Fortune. Imagine, if you can, Dale Winton in-terviewing Dennis Skinner about Tony Blair and Alan Clark about William Hague (as Campbell did in the fortnight I listened) and you get the extent of the transformation.It’s possible that politicians see him as a soft touch, in the school of matey interrogators like David Frost and Jimmy Young. Thanks to his discreet connivance there have been some spectacular broadcasting collisions An underpaid nurse has skewered Tony Blair about low wages. The father of a child killed by an IRA bomb has civilly pricked the conscience of Gerry Adams.In no time at all Nicky Campbell has become a conduit through whom the nation speaks to itself and to its leaders.
He is now so valued by the corporation that he was recently offered pounds 250,000 to present the breakfast coverage on BBC1. “Right now I can’t see the sense of getting up at three o’clock in the morning,” he says over a post-show cigarette on the balcony at Television Centre, where Five Live moved in July. Within months of taking over the show earlier this year he had won a Sony award for best daytime talkshow. The recent Programme Strategy Review praised his “unpretentious rapport” and “natural authority”. Like a charismatic traffic warden, he smoothly directs the crackling, honking log-jam of public opinion, except that his task is to incite rather than mollify He calls it “dancing”. They’re everywhere because talk is cheap and because Joe Public works for free. In this sense, Nicky Campbell, 37, is merely the host of yet another phone-in show But according to his peers, nobody currently does it better.
Not long after the call, a message flashes on the top of the producer’s screen from Roger Mosey, the controller of Five Live “This is great,” it says The ratings certainly agree with him. Since Campbell took over the show a year ago today, listening figures have gone up by almost 400,000 a week, or 25 per cent.
In the Birtian BBC, radio phone-ins are of a piece with the docusoap and the studio debate. It is policy on Five Live to keep elderly callers off the air – they don’t form part of the network’s listener profile. But this one has a passport onto the show in the form of a horror story. She tells of an estate in the north-east where a 70-year-old neighbour of hers asked a group of youths to make less noise in the streets, “with the result,” she says, “that he is now dead”
There is a sudden hush in the control room It is, Campbell tells me later, pretty visceral stuff.
The first woman doesn’t call until 9.41, and she goes straight to the top of the queue The second follows at 9.43 Surprisingly, she is a pensioner. It’s bog- standard phone-in fare, but it can make for compulsive, combustible radio. Round about now, at 9.20, says the producer, a bear of a man with cropped grey hair, you usually get your first woman caller. Today, even though a majority of the listeners are women, it’s all men on the phone lines.