Middle Class Holes 3 - Jeremy Vine

I heard it through the Crap Vine

‘Should surrogacy be totally LEGALISED - or BANNED? Hard drugs! Harmless bump up the snout on a Friday night - or desTRUCtion of society? And is it finally time for celery to be BANNED? We’ll be taking your calls and talking to Bushra from The Apprentice and Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5 - all coming up after Peter Gabriel with “Sledgehammer”’

Jeremy Vine is more of a symptom than a cause. Unlike many middle classholes he is not actively harmful, or even especially pernicious. But he does belong to the subset of the breed who typify a particular quality - in this case, the irritating conduit of rubbish. He is a walking waste pipe of wasted time.

Plus, he really gets up my nose. And it’s my list.

The particular reason he gets up my particular nose? To explain this I need to take you back to a lost age - a comparatively recent one, but a very lost one. Only twenty years ago, but as lost as Arcadia or vaudeville or happy slapping.

In 2005, whatever else was going on in the world, one could stretch out a hand in the dawn, touch a little button, and then bathe oneself in Radio 2 from 6am to noon. This was the golden age of the Holy Trinity - Sarah Kennedy (0600 to 0730), Terry Wogan (0730 to 0930) and Ken Bruce (0930 to 1200). Each had their distinct appeal. Kennedy the tipsy auntie, rambling and dotty; Wogan with his aimless blather, his country ballads, his arcane lore of ‘Janet and John’ and Chuffer Dandridge; Bruce with his amiability, his Popmaster quiz and soothing Scottish brogue.

That all changed at the stroke of midday, when suddenly the voice of Jeremy Vine burst from the speaker, wondering if was time for Tony Blair to APOLOGISE to the IRA, can David Davis SAVE the Tories, and should carrots with excessive levels of Vitamin A be BANNED - all coming up with special guests Cat Deeley and Amanda Platell after ‘Express Yourself’ by Madonna.

Over the years - I was working from home a long time before it became the thing - I trained myself to switch off Ken Bruce during his last song, at about 11:55. But I couldn’t maintain my concentration forever, and I was usually working using the Trinity as an agreeable background, so sometimes I got distracted and neglected to do my duty. Six hours of tranquillity and affable chatter, of Fran the traffic girl, Dedders and Popmaster, of the occasional chatty rabbi, of Anne Murray’s ‘Snowbird’ and Helen Reddy’s ‘Angie Baby’ - demolished by the wrecking ball of Vine’s wheedling media-screech TV journalist voice, with its deliberaLATEly wrong EMphasis.

Now the Holy Trinity are all gone. Wogan was first. He took the jump himself in 2009, semi-retiring to a weekend lunchtime slot. The BBC, incredibly, replaced him with Chris Evans. We were no longer to be eased gently into the day by some well-adjusted friend’s funny dad, but were to be woken by a hyperactive eleven year old boy jumping on our heads.

This gave the BBC their excuse to ease out Kennedy. Over her years on the ‘dawn patrol’ she had been involved in a series of unfortunate but hilarious on-air incidents, which caused the Sun to dub her ‘Slurrer Kennedy’. In 1999 she stood in for Wogan one morning and called Ken Bruce ‘an old fool’ and the esteemed host of the Thought For The Day slot ‘a stupid old prune’. But her casual declaration one early morning in 2009 that Enoch Powell was ‘the best Prime Minister this country never had’ was presumably the last straw for the BBC, and she retired shortly afterwards. And so another little bite of delicious eccentricity vanished from our lives.

Our Slurrer - note the ginormous ashtray

To their credit, the BBC held on to Ken Bruce for another thirteen years; he was, after all, their most popular DJ. But then, in extraordinarily shabby circumstances that won’t surprise anybody who has encountered the organisation in the last decade, he was ‘let go’, and departed to Greatest Hits Radio taking Popmaster with him.

The three slots are now held by Owain Wyn Evans (no me neither, but he seems to be a Welsh homosexual so can’t be all that bad), Scott Mills (a homosexual from Eastleigh, a far trickier prospect in my experience) and Vernon Kay.

In true Sod’s Law style, Jeremy Vine remains.

This, of course, is just one element of the general cultural encrappening that during the 2010s gulped down all the little things that made our lives more bearable. What is there to lighten our load now, in these days of stabbings, dinghies and a collapsing continent? Take-the-knee bread, and trans circuses.

But back to Vine, and his terrible show. There is the strange idea that there has to be an encroachment into the fluff of Radio 2 from the real world. In the analogue age there might - I only say might - have been some justification for this. Today, when we are never not spoiled for choice, it is ridiculous. If we wanted shouting, hard news and phone-ins, we would choose to twiddle our dials to Shouting, Hard News and Phone-Ins FM. It’s not as if there’s a lack of the stuff; it is very cheap to make, after all.

The middle class are obsessed with breaking into people’s fun with news. I remember then-Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell delaying the launch of BBC3 back in 2002 for months (which cost license payers an absolute bomb, I might add) because it didn’t have enough news. This turned out to be a bored-looking millennial turning up every night for thirty seconds examining her fingernails and saying things like ‘Well, they still haven’t found that plane’.

Now the obvious riposte to my dislike of the Jeremy Vine Show is that I don’t have to listen to it. And indeed I don’t.

But -