At 6am on June 29, 2020 — in the middle of an unhelpful global pandemic — Times Radio broadcast its first breakfast show from its studio in south London. It was the first time a national station was born from a newspaper (or rather two, The Times and The Sunday Times). And it has not stopped talking since: the latest set of audience figures shows that the station currently has 498,000 listeners a week (listening for an average of 3.9 million hours a week)
The presenters — both old favourites and new stars — have been interrogating the great and the good (and the awful) for three years. How would they fare when we swapped round the microphones and made them quiz each other?
Listen to Times Radio online, on DAB and on your smartspeaker
Jane Garvey and Fi Glover
“Dream guest? Queen Elizabeth II. I’d have poured US all a big gin and Dubonnet”
Fi What’s your earliest memory of radio?
Jane My earliest memory of radio is: “What’s the recipe today, Jim?” on the BBC. And I’m sitting on a swirly carpet in the hall playing with some bricks.
Fi Mine is driving to school with my mum. It was a really, really long school run, I think about 26 miles. I used to make her play Radio 1 and she grimaced all the way. And as soon as I left the car her cassette tape of JS Bach went straight back in. What’s your pre-show routine?
Jane I have a hefty lunch in the canteen. I’m looking forward to one right now. I think it might be spicy chicken thigh Wednesday. So that’s on my menu today. What about you?
Fi I have a soya flat white and a wee. What’s the word you overuse?
Jane “Actually.”
Fi Mine’s “absolutely”.
Jane Worst habit on air?
Fi I scratch my face, I scratch my hair, I play with my earrings. I fidget, Jane.
Jane I make statements when I intend to ask a question. I’ve been doing that now for 30 years. I haven’t learnt. Do you ever listen back to yourself?
Fi I don’t listen back to a live programme, but I listen back to the podcast sometimes.
Jane Another broadcaster, who I won’t name, calls it “wankcasting”, and I’m kind of with him. You shouldn’t really do it, but let’s be honest, we all do. Have you ever, ever had a disagreement with a guest?
Fi John Barnes came on, I think when he was at Celtic, and they hadn’t had a particularly good game. It was in my 5 Live days. It was meant to be a post-match debrief. “What went wrong?” “We lost.” “Why did you lose?” “Well, we didn’t score as many goals as the other team.” “What do you put that down to?” “The fact that the ball didn’t go in the net.” It was terrible.
Jane TalkSPORT, you’re missing a trick here. Hire her immediately. I’ve had too many disagreements with guests to mention, but there was a notable one over at another employer when afterwards a letter of apology had to be sent by the organisation to a noted thespian. Dream guest?
Fi I hadn’t really thought of that one yet.
Jane Well, it would have been our late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, because I think she did have some anecdotes, and I think if we’d been on form, we could have dragged them out of her. I’d have poured a big gin and Dubonnet for all three of us, and we definitely would have got some stories out.
Fi That’s a good one. I think we could have done — well, you could have done. I’d go Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish at the moment.
Jane When it comes to the worst guest and best guest, it’s the same answer for me. Hillary Clinton, who would have been my guest had she turned up at the time as advertised, but she had a fall, ended up in a surgical boot and wasn’t able to appear live on the programme I was due to present. Then she rejuvenated herself. Meanwhile I’d been to a lunch, got drunk, had to sober up and did go to interview Hillary Clinton somewhere in London. Can’t remember where. It wasn’t very good.
Fi Fair dinkum, I would say. Can I have two?
Jane If you must.
Fi Lee Child and Jodi Picoult, because they were both just brilliant authors. They were so delighted to be on air and just wonderful guests with wonderful anecdotes. Lovely people, huge, whopping, talented monoliths of creativity. So nice to be around.
Jane Also mention Ken Follett.
Fi You mention Ken Follett.
Jane Ken Follett!
Matt Chorley and Mariella Frostrup
“Rishi Sunak was meant to be a fun interview but it got a bit shirty”
Matt Earliest memory of radio?
Mariella I think when you were a child of the Cold War, then you wanted to listen to the radio every day — speech radio — and be reassured that Armageddon hadn’t occurred overnight. So my earliest memory of the radio is listening to it for exactly that purpose. And it has stayed with me. My alarm is still the radio. I only wake up on the hour or the half hour — I don’t do 15 minutes because you can’t get the news then.
Matt I’m the complete opposite. I never listened to speech radio. I don’t really like it.
Mariella You’re not very good at it, has anyone ever told you that?
Matt Let’s move on. What’s the word you overuse?
Mariella I’m always saying “I mean”. I’ve noticed it and it really irritates me, but I don’t seem to be able to prevent myself from using it. What do you overuse?
Matt I think I say “errrr” a lot. I’m annoyed by erring. What’s your worst habit? On air.
Mariella Eating. I always like to have snacks in the studio. And there’s a big sign that says don’t have snacks in the studio.
Matt Is there?
Mariella Yeah. You’re not supposed to eat.
Matt Did somebody knock Coke or something into the desk?
Mariella They may well have. But I mean, you bring cakes on a regular basis, so we ignore that rule.
Matt Do you ever listen back to yourself?
Mariella Never. I actually think I should because I think you learn from listening back to yourself. But I can’t bear it. I must have been in my early twenties when people first started kind of paying compliments to me about my voice. And I never understood it. I couldn’t even bear to listen to my own voice on an answering machine, back when we used to have voices on answering machines in the 1840s.
Matt I do it. At least a couple of times a week. Normally the intro or if there’s a feature that we’ve started doing, I’ll listen back and see if it works. I do literally love the sound of my own voice. Ever had a disagreement with a guest?
Mariella I often disagree with politicians. For some reason I feel a lot more confident about giving them a hard time than I do your average interviewee — they’ve agreed to come on the show, so I don’t particularly want to be very combative with them. But I do think politicians waffle on and sometimes you do just have to interrupt.
Matt I’ve had loads of stand-offs with politicians, but I haven’t had massive ding-dongs. But the one time I interviewed Rishi Sunak it was supposed to be a fun interview, when he was running for the Tory leadership, and it got a bit shirtier than I was expecting.
He was supposed to do the quiz — “Can you get to No 10?” — and he ran off and claimed that he didn’t have time to do it. It was slightly unsatisfying. But I’m sure he’ll come back and do the quiz because he promised he would and there’s no way he would break a promise. Who were your best and worst guests?
Mariella Best guest — most recently Professor Green. I thought he was absolutely brilliant, incredibly emotional and emotive in talking about his father’s suicide and his worries for his little son, about it being passed down in the genes. And just talking about poverty and how he grew up in poverty.
Worst guest was definitely — though it made me laugh at the time and it still makes me laugh — John Lydon. He got so angry within the space of about five minutes, then swore several times and slammed the phone down. And to be quite honest I have no idea to this day what it was he was angry about. Who’s your dream guest?
Matt Without a shadow of a doubt, Elton John. I’m a massive Elton John fan. I have been since a young age. But not just because I quite like his music, which I do, but also I just think he’s really interesting the way that he had huge success and a huge drug problem. And I think he’s very political, without really doing anything political. The Aids stuff, the foundation, Brexit. But also he’s just a legend.
Mariella Best?
Matt The guest who sticks in my mind is a woman called Clair Fisher, a listener. It was the early days of lockdown and we started doing the coffee break segment because people were at home and they weren’t having a coffee break with colleagues. The idea was, at half eleven you could put the radio on and listen to us blathering on over a coffee. And one day I had a tweet from a listener saying, “I’m just about done on another round of chemo and I’m listening, so make sure it’s a good one.” And I thought, bloody hell, that’s pressure.
We got chatting and it turned out Clair used to be a civil servant and had to give up work because she’d got cancer and launched a campaign trying to improve end-of-life care. We kept in touch and then we got the news that she’d moved into a hospice, and I ended up interviewing her over Zoom in the hospice. She sadly died in January 2022. She’s still one of the most articulate, empathetic, interesting, selfless people I’ve interviewed. And it was a reminder of how good good radio is — and it’s not about politicians, it’s about people telling stories, the connection you get from radio. There are Clairs listening all the time.
Ayesha Hazarika and John Pienaar
“I think people who listen back to themselves are psychopaths”
John Do you have a post-show routine?
Ayesha Because my show ends at quite a nice time, I’ve got the time to go for dinner or for a drink. But often I’m quite exhausted, so I might just go home and have a glass of wine and watch telly.
John I get on my train home. And before I do I pop into WH Smith and I buy a can of gin and tonic and a packet of Quavers. I open my Quavers, have a sip of gin and I think, “Well, that’s that day done.”
Ayesha I can’t think of a better post-match snack than gin in a tin and some Quavers.
John What do you wear to present the show?
Ayesha One of the things I was enjoying about presenting a radio show was that you didn’t have to care about how you looked. Then we came into the studios and there are big cameras in there. I’m very much a jeans, T-shirt and a blazer kind of girl.
John I put a shirt on today because we’ve just had a photoshoot. Otherwise I would be wearing anything; I would look such a total scruff. The only bigger scruff on this station is Stig.
Ayesha I was going to say that!
John Do you ever listen back to yourself?
Ayesha No, I don’t.
John Can’t bear it.
Ayesha I just can’t bear it.
John I just think, “God, that’s awful. Why didn’t I do that infinitely better?” It’s not good for you — I can’t change it.
Ayesha I think people who listen back to themselves or watch themselves back are psychopaths.
John Have you had a disagreement with a guest?
Ayesha I have had quite a few. I think my biggest disagreement was with a very hardcore American man who came on and was very, very angry about Joe Biden and talked about wanting Joe Biden to die. And I had to gently point out that that’s not the kind of conversation we have on Times Radio.
John I disagree with everybody. Even if I agree with them, I’ll probably disagree with them on air because that’s the way to get out of them what they’re saying and why they’re saying it. That’s part of the technique of interviewing — to be the devil’s advocate. Have you ever sworn on air?
Ayesha No. Which is a miracle because I’m Glaswegian and menopausal, so I swear quite a lot. What about you?
John I’ve nearly sworn on air about a million times. Maybe the first thing you’re told is “Don’t swear near a microphone,” whether we think it’s live or not. And I have been known to swear when I’m certain the microphone is off, but you never know. Do you have a dream guest?
Ayesha I would love to interview Barack Obama, to get his views on what’s happening now in America, on how America reacted to him being the first person of colour in the White House. And if Michelle wants to come on, that would be great as well.
John Nice one. If a dream guest is someone living or dead, my dream guest would be Clement Attlee. He transformed Britain after the Second World War, he helped create the state that we see now in so many ways. And he was also famous for being the most nightmare interview it was possible to get: he was incredibly shy and reserved. I’d like to imagine in my dreams I might have got something interesting out of Attlee in an interview.
Ayesha Worst guest?
John I’m not going to name anyone because it would be rude and I might have to interview them again. More generally the ones I call “worst guests” were the ones I just found disappointing — guests who lie. In very recent years lying has got into the bloodstream of politics. When I was talking to politicians on the government side about Partygate — taking the public for fools — that riled me beyond all belief.
On the Labour side, various people in the era of Jeremy Corbyn, who were equally insultingly disingenuous about things such as antisemitism and about the cronyism that existed in the Labour Party at that time. I found the whole thing offensive. What about your best guest?
Ayesha One of the favourite people I got to interview was Nile Rodgers. It was only meant to be a short interview promoting some charity work he was doing and he and I just got on like an absolute house on fire. We talked about the state of the music industry, politics, the trade union movement, American politics. He was an absolute dream. What about you?
John Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine,they sent me off to the Ukraine-Poland border. I spent a week there talking to people getting off the train out of Lviv into Poland, mostly women and young children, because the men couldn’t leave. And the first thing they saw when they crossed the border was this avenue of tents — people had set themselves up there, offering whatever they could. I met a guy called David who handed out pizza and coffee, little bits and pieces to the kids, and this guy’s enormous good humour was the fuel that kept that operation going. What I saw there at the border reminded me that there is such a thing as human goodness.
Stig Abell and Aasmah Mir
“You once wore shorts and sliders. It was too much. You don’t want to see thighs and toes”
Aasmah What’s your pre-show routine?
Stig We wake up in pitch black, it’s three in the morning, we hate ourselves and the world. There’s that moment — there should be a German word for this, for the feeling you have when you’re sitting down, pulling socks on at 3am and you’re questioning humanity and —
Aasmah Life.
Stig Your life choices. And then we get here and we just sort of bang the show together. Is there much of a routine beyond that? Get dressed, get here.
Aasmah There is a pre-show routine. You go to the photocopier and you get a blank piece of paper and you give it to me. You get a blank piece of paper for yourself. And we march into the studio at around 5.56am, and I say, “Oh, it’s very cold in here.” And I turn the heating up and then you take your hoodie off because you’re too hot.
Stig Is that a routine?
Aasmah We do it every single morning.
Stig It’s just crushing repetitiveness, isn’t it?
Aasmah What do you wear to present your show? Do you dress up, Stig Abell?
Stig I just look like a tramp. I once wore tracksuit bottom trousers that were so baggy I didn’t realise I had put them on backwards until 11am.
Aasmah You also once wore shorts and sliders.
Stig I did.
Aasmah It was too much. You don’t want to see your thighs and your toes.
Stig No, the toes are wrong.
Aasmah I’ve got an LBD on today, because it’s the only thing I could find at three in the morning.
Stig Worst habit on air? You’re bad habit free.
Aasmah Oh shut up. There must be so many — I can’t think of one.
Stig I’ll tell you what we do, which is not really on air, but we are the most appalling “hot mike jeopardy” people in the whole business. The lesson that you should never talk frankly on a mike that could come live at any time? Well, we swear. We say awful things about ourselves and other people
Aasmah But I know why we do it. Because it is hard to be on your best behaviour for four hours.
Stig Have we ever sworn on air?
Aasmah We’ve never sworn on air.
Stig We have.
Aasmah What is swearing? It’s saying “crap”.
Stig You said “f***”.
Aasmah I have not!
Stig You said “s***”.
Aasmah Is that swearing?
Stig It’s definitely swearing.
Aasmah No, it’s not.
Stig It was written on the front page of The Times, wasn’t it, “s***storm”. And you read out “s***storm”.
Aasmah Yeah.
Stig We’ve never called the chancellor Jeremy C***. Yet.
Aasmah OK, what is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you on air? This man is never embarrassed by anything.
Stig I was presenting a show and I was really ill, and I knew I was going to throw up. We had a guest in the studio and for three consecutive ad breaks I had to leave the studio, dripping in sweat, throw up and come back and carry on.
Aasmah What was wrong with you?
Stig I had the flu.
Aasmah Mine happened on Times Radio quite recently. I was speaking to Alex Salmond and I misquoted something, and he just laughed at me and said, “Well, you got that quote completely wrong.” I said, “Of course, Alex Salmond, you know you said that the dream had died.” And he said, “Oh, actually, I think you’ll find I said the dream will never die.” It was my fault for not checking it. I wanted the ground to open up.
