Chris Moyles is now the longest serving breakfast show presenter on BBC Radio 1, and with every additional month he sits in the morning hot seat the clucking neigh-sayers (or is that “nay-sayers”?) get louder. Despite his huge audience figures, they say “it’s only a matter of time”, “his days are numbered”, “not long now” with obsessive compulsive repetitiveness.
Eventually when Chris is toppled from his throne, the clucking will of course turn to “told you so”, “I knew it was coming”, “just as I said it would” and multiple variations thereof. Chris Moyles will never win against the cluckers.
Logically, the cluckers are going to eventually be right. Yeah, but only in the same way that if they were pointing at a new born baby saying, “Oh they’re going to die you know,” and then when they eventually died aged 120, they smugly said, “Told you!”.
However, as Chris is unfortunately heading to his own breakfast radio demise (as is every breakfast radio presenter), it is hard to see from this angle what the BBC will do to replace him. Indeed, what will they do with him?
Current policy is to pension daytime presenters off to token weekend shifts for a while before they silently exit stage left. Will he enter the wilderness of obscurity and silence before eventually resurfacing on BBC Radio 2? Does he have a future on TV? Time will tell. Time will tell.
Why can’t we wait for time to pass naturally and just enjoy his journey in the meantime? The cluckers seem to want to get to the end of the story oblivious to the laugh out loud fun that Chris has to offer to entertain us well before he is pensioned off.
At times his radio show can be bad and boring. At other times it is belly-laugh funny, highly entertaining and informative. Like everything it has its swings and roundabouts. Not every episode of Corrie is brilliant either.
For now his show fits the needs and requirements of a huge audience, so to get rid of him would be to get rid of him for getting rid of him’s sake. Much as that would excite the cluckers, it would leave a void.
I’ve speculated that Vernon Kay might step up to take the baton, but in truth his style is not too dissimilar to Chris’s. Is that the audience that the BBC’s yoof station should be chasing?
When Chris is on holiday, the breakfast show is covered by Scott Mills who normally presents the afternoon drivetime. Despite being the same age as Chris, Scott sounds younger and more down with the kids. His show is faster moving with quick fire humour and features with less long monologues and slow patter. Maybe this is the future of a Radio 1 breakfast show. But, this is the future we are talking about. The future.
Back in the present there’s a perfectly fine Radio 1 breakfast show presented by a perfectly fine Chris Moyles. Let’s stop hounding him and enjoy what he brings us for as long as it is right that he brings it to us. I suspect we will really miss him when he’s eventually gone.
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