“Good morning everyone, let’s do this.”
So said Vernon Kay, a whisker after 9:30 this morning, as he took over the BBC Radio 2 mid-morning slot. Aiming, he said, for “tried and tested”, his first song was U2’s “Beautiful Day”, the band’s most middle-of-the-road big hit, as if to assuage the listening millions: don’t worry, it’s business as usual.
Handing over the baton can be an awkward business, if only because the baton can so easily be dropped. Back in March of this year, Radio 2 veteran Ken Bruce shocked the nation when he quit his mid-morning show after a 30-year tenure and took it with him – along with PopMaster – to Greatest Hits Radio. This made headline news, because Bruce’s show was the most popular in the UK. Whoever replaced him had shoes to fill.
If there wasn’t quite as much speculation over his likely successor as there is with the new James Bond, it did come pretty close. In the end, the Beeb played it safe. They appointed Vernon Kay, a stalwart of TV entertainment programmes – and a regular Radio 2 voice already, with several breakfast show cover stints under his belt.
“The adventure, let it begin,” he said in that rich Bolton voice of his that sounds like Bovril dunked in champagne. He followed U2 with Chic and Harry Styles, adamant that that business-as-usual memo will be both preserved and maintained.
Kay is, of course, a very different proposition from Bruce. Where the latter purred like a Rolls-Royce, his successor, even at 49, still sounds like a boy racer on a dodgem that’s broken free of its confines.
His perpetual enthusiasm has always been a little Butlin’s – his is a presentation style that suggests he’s doing jazz hands while he talks – and it felt here as if he might suddenly cry out “Hi de hi!” at any moment. Which, if nothing else, would play quite nicely with the Radio 2 demographic.
It’s unfair to judge him on his inaugural show, of course, especially when he spent so much of it reading through good luck messages from, essentially, everyone.
“We’ve got an absolute stack to get through, and we will get through them,” he said, accurately. He read out best wishes from truckers and tractor drivers, from members of his own family.
There were so many pre-recorded commendations from his new Radio 2 colleagues – Zoe Ball told him that he’ll “smash it, baby”, Scott Mills suggested he’ll “absolutely smash it” – that he had to cut off the new single by Sam Ryder in order to make the 10 o’clock news on time.
Such good vibes are sweet, yes, but it was a little like Sam Allardyce, the veteran football manager recently installed at Leeds, spending the first half of his first game on the pitch alongside his players, waving tirelessly at the fans.
When he was not giving airtime to people telling him how terrific he is, he remembered the task at hand. He played songs, and ably hosted PopMaster’s replacement, Ten to the Top, which has been criticised by some even though it’s essentially the same thing: pop trivia against the clock.
Throughout it all, he sounded his own inimitable self: bubbly, upbeat, comfortable already. He knows which buttons to press, in every sense.
“We’ve only just begun,” he said, playing out with the Rolling Stones.
Ken Bruce was irreplaceable, until he got replaced. Batons dropped do get picked up again. And so while those Bruce disciples who haven’t yet retuned may quibble, Kay will be fine. The show’s in safe hands.
