Hooray. Finally, a high-profile female presenter – and last year's Sony speech radio personality of the year, no less – has been signed to weekdays on Radio 2. Vanessa Feltz will take over the early breakfast slot (5am-6.30am) from January, replacing Sarah Kennedy who left in September. Radio 2 controller Bob Shennan says that Feltz's "zest and passion for life" make her the ideal choice.
She really will need that zest. As well as the early morning show, which will apparently involve a 3am start to her day, Feltz is keeping her BBC London 94.9FM phone-in show (9am-noon, Monday to Friday), and will also deputise for Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 (noon-2pm) when he is away. Afternoons will then be spent recording a new programme for Channel Five, also starting in January.
Keeping the London 94.9FM show is an extremely shrewd move. She's an intelligent, resourceful phone-in host who clearly relishes the debates with callers. She's not patronising, abrasive or shouty, unlike many male phone-in hosts. And yet the transition to playing music and chatting between tracks in the early morning is a challenge: it's hardly the same skill-set as the phone-in. Rather like Simon Mayo moving from his acclaimed 5 Live show to Drivetime on Radio 2, there's the potential for a fine broadcaster to appear somewhat underused. This is presumably where deputising for Vine comes in, and it's a smart mix of roles.
On her phone-in yesterday there were quips about how she would fit it all in ("what about your paper round?") and great warmth from her audience. "Well done, V," one text said, "now I can return to Radio 2". Feltz breezed through the morning's topics, drawing on rhetorical questions and her impressive vocabulary to stir discussion. "I could purloin all the lyrical poetry I learned at Cambridge for adjectives," she offered at one point. That may be less handy on her forthcoming Radio 2 dawn stints, mind.
