A Morning Collection of Numpties and Tubes (Talk Sport)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Talk Sport
Date:	07/11/05 (6665 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some great shows, good sports banter, some very good presenters.

Disadvantages: Lots and lots of advertising and product placement

Over the last few years I’ve clocked up quite a few miles doing various jobs. Whilst I’m in the car, listening to the radio becomes very important for my state of mind. After all, chances are you will hit serious traffic at some stage so having the back up of music really helps. I recently wrote about Virgin radio as this is one of the main stations I listen too but an excellent alternative is talkSport.

I’ve been listening to talkSport for a few years now. I’d never really been a fan of talk radio but it was this station that changed my mind more than anything. The station can be found at 1053 or 1089AM, Freeview 723, Homechoice 625, NTL899, Sky858, Telewest 927 or on digital radio. You can also listen online while you’re on the PC. I tend to listen to it on either 1053 or 1089AM in the car but my radio is pretty hopeless only picking up FM and AM (which was a drag when on holiday in Ireland as I couldn’t listen to the Ashes coverage on LW).

talkSport is the nation’s largest commercial radio station and the owners do play on this fact. This means that the station relies heavily on advertisers for revenue and one of the drawbacks of listening is the high profile given to sponsors and advertising in general. I’d never really thought about too much before until I got talking to a friend about it one day who drew my attention to the regular debates that take place usually in a sports café somewhere. He pointed out, quite rightly, that if, say, John Smiths was sponsoring the programme then the sponsor seemed to get mentioned in conversation every 5 minutes or so. He was right! Let’s face it, if the presenters really did crack open a can of John Smiths as often as they suggested during the show, then they would be pretty inebriated by the time the programme finished *grin*

Needless to say, the most popular show is the Breakfast Show running between 6am and 10am. Currently it's sponsored by Ford Transit and presented by Alan Brazil and Graham Beecroft. My personal view is that this duo isn’t as strong as when Brazil teamed up with the ebullient, Scouse numpty, Mike Parry. The problem was that Mike had a heart attack earlier in the year and had since been kept away from the early morning schedules so it’s down to Brazil and Beecroft to wake the nation with their sports chatter. If you like sport then you’ll love the show. Alan Brazil is an ex-footballer formerly of Ipswich, Manchester United and Scotland amongst others. His broadcasting career began with local station Radio Suffolk. He went on to appear on TV for regional station, Anglia which led to appearances on GMTV. Onwards and upwards, Brazil appeared with Andy Gray in "The Boot Room" on Sky TV and led to a job as Sky’s Nationwide League and Worthington Cup commentator.

Graham Beecroft is a self-employed journalist who has been around for ages. Known as “Beaky” on the show, Graham is another Scouser supporting Everton as does Mike Parry. All sports get discussed on the show e.g. Formula One motor racing, horse racing and so on although there is clearly a heavy bias towards football. One of the attractions of listening to talkSport is the endless banter that the presenters encourage. Brazil is always encouraging listeners to text in with humorously abusive messages, usually taking the Mick out of the presenters and often accusing them of being numpties or tubes. I’m not really sure what a numpty is but it’s clearly bad whilst a tube is something with nothing at the top or at the bottom with nothing in the middle!. Alan Brazil clearly gets a kick out of this himself with plenty of sniggering as the messages get read out. Even the news-readers get involved as “Moose” often manages to slip in some excruciating puns and Brazil makes some derogatory comment about Mrs Moose. It’s all laddish, good humour and always puts a smile on my face although it’s Mike Parry’s sparring that used to make my smile the most. One of the best things about last Christmas was the cover version of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” that Parry made with negligible resulting sales. For some reason, the ginger numpty thinks he can sing when everyone else knows he can’t!

One more thing worth mentioning is the convivial relationship that Alan Brazil has with the PR man from Barclays Stockbrokers, Mr Henk Potts. Henk does the financial updates but seems to go out entertaining almost every day with Alan Brazil. The two of them manage to generate yet more banter during the show and I’ll wager that as many people loathe Mr Potts as love him. It’s a daily feature of the show that the duo's plans for the afternoon will be discussed on air and usually involves a trip to a posh restaurant for lunch or a night out at the horses. Rumour has it that Brazil’s off-air good life had got to the point where the producers actually sacked him this year but he did manage to get re-instated again probably with an ongoing promise to behave himself from now on. He still appears to enjoy the good life though!

I often listen to the afternoon show too whilst driving home. Hawksbee & Jacobs are on between 1pm and 4pm and very popular too. I rarely get chance to listen to them due to the hours involved but the little snatches I’ve heard are good. It sounds like an irreverent show and I know that they take clips of other shows where a gaff has been made and play them back to the listeners. No, it’s “The Game” with Rodney Marsh & Paul Breen-Turner in association with The Times that I often listen too between 4pm and 7pm. This slot was formerly done by Patrick Kinghorn and Tony Cascarino and, if I’m honest, I preferred their show to this one. I do find Rodney Marsh and Paul Breen-Turner just too dry for my liking and miss the chemistry of the diminutive Kinghorn and those dulcet tones of the former Villa and Ireland striker, Tony Cascarino. Rodney Marsh made his name on Sky’s "Gillette Soccer Saturday" until he made an unfortunate jibe about the Asian Tsunami and found himself promptly sacked. There seems to be an uncomfortable edge between the two presenters on the drive time show. The banter and chat is still very much based around football and I do enjoy the phone-ins.

I hardly ever make the evening show but, again, from what I’ve heard it’s pretty good. "Kick Off" with Adrian Durham & Alvin Martin is another sports review show and Ray Houghton and Gabrielle Marcotti are frequent guest on the show. Marcotti brings an intelligent angle to the debate as well as being a leading authority on European football, in particular, the Italian League.

I simply never listen to the famous James Whale whose show starts at 10pm. Whale is famous for being outspoken and is almost into “shock-Jock” territory. James Whale tends to discuss the topical issues of the say rather than concentrate on sport and with his almost legendary status, I’m sure he does a fine show.

Something I’ve heard advertised but can’t testify as to how good it is would be news broadcaster Howard Hughes and his new show called "The Unexplained", investigating some of the greatest mysteries. Howard, who presents the programme every Saturday night from 8pm, delves into the mysterious world of UFOs, witchcraft and psychic phenomena. Apparently, Howard has won seven prestigious radio industry awards so if this is your bag then maybe it’s worth a try.

talkSport offer official and unofficial coverage of live sporting events although I find the unofficial angle a tad bizarre as it means the commentary comes via watching the event on a monitor rather than actually being there. I liked the regular updates from The Ashes tests during the summer usually via Jack Bannister and because of my lack of LW in the car, I will always remember the anxious last few overs in the drawn final test from the Oval. I was returning from a day at Alton Towers with the family, desperate to know what had happened and talkSport kept flitting to and from the ground with updates. I liked the extra touch of linking up with fellow broadcasters in Australia but the radio coverage of the cricket was a real boon even if I'd have preferred to listen to continuous coverage from "Test Match Special" (bah)

If you want to know more and/or like doing competitions then do check out the web site at http://www.talksport.co.uk. It carries the latest schedules, talkSport polls, online listening and so much more and whilst it’s not as good as the Virgin Radio site, it’s still pretty good and well worth a look.

I’m sure there will be aspects of talkSport that I haven’t covered but hopefully I’ve given you an insight into the shows that I listen to and the reasons why I like the station. There are drawbacks too like the over exposure to advertisers and maybe some of the current shows not being as good as their predecessors but if you like talk radio and, in particular, sports talk radio then this is a viable alternative to the monolithic Radio 5 Live (which I also listen too!). Of course, if you want to listen to music then this definitely won’t be for you....but then it is talk radio! All I can say is give it a try!

Thanks for reading

Marandina

Summary: Overview of talkSport Radio