Talk Sport - a station in decline

Talk Sport used to be a great station. There were enough quality presenters to make it my staple daytime radio choice for over 20 years. It often used presenters in pairs who (it seemed) were instructed to take the opposite sides of an argument to generate debate and calls. This could come across as horribly false, with people clearly arguing the ridiculous (Mike Parry arguing for wing mirrors on horses in horse racing is one example I recall) but regardless it was fun and normally a good listen.

However in the past few years it has become almost unlistenable.

Losing Alan Brazil (Mon - Wed) was a big hit. The rotation of presenters and guests loses any kind of regularity and familiarity for the listener and doesn't do the station any favours, I switched off the breakfast show months ago.

Giving Jim White the mid-morning show does not work for me at all. Having spent most of his career as a reporter, most recently as a Sky Sports News reader, the transition to presenter for me has not worked. He is obsessed with sensationalism, devoting entire shows to stories that he has made up or those that he thinks will score highest on the tabloid ‘scandal-meter’ while completely ignoring the relevant news sports stories of the day. As an example, this year on the first day of the Open he spent three hours endlessly milking his theories on the crowd problems at the Euro Final at Wembley FOR THE FOURTH DAY IN A ROW, seemingly far more interested in debating to death a topic that ticked the scandal box rather than even give a passing mention to the biggest golf tournament to be held in the UK each year and the return of fans to a golf major on our shores.

Worst of all though is his ‘Smashie and Nicey’ radio voice which is, effectively, just him shouting for three hours. Occasionally the mask will slip and he will talk normally and it becomes almost listenable, but for 95% of the time he shouts which I find simply unbearable. Jim - you have a microphone. Amplifiers. Transmitters. WE CAN BLOODY HEAR YOU, STOP SHOUTING. He also shouts over anyone that he is debating with, be it a caller (not that they let many on, despite asking for calls throughout the entire show) or a studio guest. I feel for Simon Jordan who comes across as measured, articulate and intelligent and while he is clearly fond of the sound of his own voice and can also be guilty of talking over those he disagrees with, is more than capable of arguing a topic logically and without feeling the need to sensationalise unnecessarily. Indeed, he frequently struggles to hide his irritation at White's desperation to create stories that aren't there. He is also particularly scathing about sections of the media which White laughably tries to counter, often attempting to defend the indefensible.

I have read somewhere the essential quality for a broadcaster is to be either ‘entertaining or informative’. To me White is neither and furthermore makes himself even less listenable by endless filler and repetition. It might work on a sports news TV channel where the stories are on a rolling loop, but on a radio entertainment show it is completely unnecessary. We have news and sports bulletins every 30 minutes repeating the same headlines, to follow them each time by paraphrasing what we HAVE LITERALLY JUST HEARD is utter overkill. You are supposed to fill (the ever shrinking) gaps between the news, sport and advertisment breaks with new content, but this seems a completely foreign concept to White.

When I do tune in (which is not often nowadays) Simon carries the show completely and you can't help but wonder how much better it would be with a proper presenter or a football man permanently alongside him, such as Danny Murphy who talks a lot of sense. White left the employ of Sky earlier this year, announcing that he was choosing to move on, but you can't help but wonder whether he jumped before he was pushed. Sky Sports News has undergone a fairly drastic makeover in recent months with a younger and more diverse presenting line-up and its hard to see how he would have fitted in to their new vision. He has held the mid-morning slot with Talk Sport for over five years now and having turned it into an unbearable mess, I would suggest that his departure from Talk Sport is also well overdue.

Other guests such as Trevor Sinclair and Jamie O'Hara who get a lot of air time are, for me, not a good listen at all. Sinclair is utterly unable to be objective when talking about Manchester City and using him (as a convicted racist) to express outrage at racist incidents is the absolute epitome of irony. O'Hara, who doesn't come across as particularly intelligent, is just a hard listen with bizarre opinions. How Tony Cascarino still gets air-time is beyond me, an very average player whose career ended over 20 years ago and despite a lengthy media career since then still struggles to form a grammatically correct sentence.

The shining light of the station is and has always been Hawksbee and Jacobs who are absolute radio gold and seem to have escaped the culture shift that has been applied to the other shows. They make live radio seem completely effortless (as most high quality presenters do) and are capable of entertaining daily without feeling the need to namedrop, talk over people, shout endlessly, constantly repeat themselves or make things up to talk about (JW take note). They are the only show I regularly listen to now, though Goldstein and Cundy were also an excellent listen; while Andy Goldstein absolutely deserves a prime time slot, on the flipside it is a shame that the double act with Jason Cundy has been broken up.

So all in all, a once great station has gone badly downhill and appears now to be even more deliberately provocative, less concerned with quality broadcasting and more with generating calls and social media reaction. It is basically radio clickbait, having become the audio equivalent of a tabloid newspaper and with the advent of easy to access digital radio there are far better alternatives out there.

A real shame.

AG 30/09/2021