For the past week I've ditched my regular radio station, Radio 5 Live, in favour of its commercial rival TalkSport, named UK station of the year at the Sony Radio Academy Awards earlier this month. I now know everything there is to know about "Survival Sunday" and can recite the Autoglass advert by heart (most insurance companies recommend them, apparently) after hearing it approximately 17,000 times.
TalkSport's Sony victory may have raised a few eyebrows but the station "for men who love to talk sport" has come a long way from its not too distant past, when it made up for its lack of live football rights by commentating on games on the TV and piping in crowd noises. Now TalkSport's football output comes close to rivalling 5 Live (in TV terms it's ESPN to 5 Live's Sky) and trumps it when it comes to banter.
Indeed banter and football banter in particular is what TalkSport mainly consists of – there is the ex-professional sportsman banter (The Alan Brazil Sports Breakfast, Call Collymore) the 19th hole men-only banter (Keys and Gray still with tails ever so slightly between legs), laidback banter (Hawksbee & Jacobs) and controversial banter (George Galloway). But this is just the tip of the banter iceberg.
Drive Time's Adrian Durham is an expert phone-in troll, arrogantly spouting inflammatory football opinions in the hope of prompting some indignant phone rage from an uppity fan. On Monday his rant about Celtic boss Neil Lennon being a failure prompted an unexpected call from Rod Stewart, who gave the supercilious Durham a gentle lashing, explaining that Lennon was a "street fighter" and loved by the fans.
As with most callers, Stewart was given plenty of space to make his point, in contrast to 5 Live which seems forever aware of the nation's perceived low boredom threshold. It's one reason why footballers sound more comfortable talking on TalkSport – but one can't help but suspect that callers and interviewees are allowed to ramble at length because the station has so much airtime to fill between the endless adverts for vans, builders merchants and WD40.
That's certainly the case when the station becomes a more regular phone-in network after 10pm. Mike Graham who does a Herculean shift between 1am and 6am seems happy to field just about any caller. On Monday, after questioning why anybody would want to watch The Eurovision Song Contest, he took a call from an elderly gent reminiscing about Katie Boyle and Sandie Shaw. "She sang barefoot didn't she?" piped Graham cheerfully. "Pardon?" responded the listener. "Sandie Shaw," shouted the TalkSport man. "I didn't watch it," said the caller helpfully.
According to Scott Taunton, the managing director of TalkSport's parent company UTV Media, the station has "matured". That didn't seem the case on the show that preceded Graham's. On The Late Show With Ian Collins, the case of the Iranian man who blinded a woman with acid because she refused his marriage proposal was causing a swarm of turmoil. Pub philosopher Collins sympathised with the victim but ("without wanting to sound like a liberal, because I'm not") felt uncomfortable with the punishment of blinding with acid.
Thankfully his request for listeners revenge stories led to a listener reading out a newspaper story about an adulterous man who'd had his penis superglued to his leg while he slept. The tale caused much merriment amongst Collins's studio chums who wondered how the man managed to urinate when he woke up, before we jarringly returned to the Iranian man and a call from a blind gentleman whose only point was that "blindness is serious". "I'm sorry we've got a genuinely bad line," said Collins after a 20-second pregnant pause.
TalkSport is going to seriously suffer for the next month without a World Cup or European Championship to bluster about, but it does cover other sports apart from football. Like, erm, fishing. Last week someone called Fisherman's Blues in the early hours of Sunday morning to tell host Keith Arthur that they "pulled out a metre-long eel from Walton Bridge without a head on". Brilliant. Another phoned to remind him of the forthcoming Carp Cup.
Both were excellently mocked by Hawksbee and Jacobs on their consistently enjoyable afternoon show. "Ah, the the magic of the Carp Cup," thrilled Paul Hawksbee during their Friday afternoon review of TalkSport highlights, "I'll be watching as I always do." "The problem is the Carp Premiership is on at the same time," grumbled Andy Jacobs.
Yes, TalkSport is all too often like being trapped in a pub with the world's most boring men but it is not hard to see why Sony regarded it so highly. It's fun, authoritative (on football at least) and knows its audience extremely well. But what do you think? And if you disagree with the award, who should have won station of the year?
