Pity poor James O’Brien. The long-suffering remainer has always had a raw, fiery quality unusual in the British phone-in host. Where most of his male colleagues tend to be pear shaped more than bear shaped – and where female radio presenters often resemble head girls sitting bolt upright in the front row of the class with their hands up – O’Brien has always been an outlier. Even if O’Brien sounds the part as a radio host, he has never quite looked it. In LBC promo photographs of the smiley, ‘say cheese’ variety, he looks uncomfortable. O’Brien resembles a bouncer in the background in a wedding album. He has hosted a weekday morning phone-in discussion for LBC for over two decades, but I still can’t help think he is in the wrong job.
O’Brien is, essentially, an overpaid call centre operator who picks fights with angry customers all day
Of late, O’Brien has started to look increasingly haggard and worn down, his head sinking lower and lower over his desk. Is this a surprise? Perhaps not. He is, essentially, an overpaid call centre operator who picks fights with angry customers all day. It must be a miserable existence. He looks tuckered out, done in, and literally battered: he fell off his bike on an icy patch recently, and is sporting stitches and bruises. But these wounds only add to what was already there. His injuries make him look even more like a man trapped, painted into a desperate corner like the antihero in one of the more brutally realistic war movies.
Look at his fellow LBC hosts: Matthew Wright, Shelagh Fogarty, Nick Ferrari or Vanessa Feltz. However salty things get, they all look as if they’re having a ball. O’Brien seems to hate every second of his show and hate his thick, Brexity callers. Even during the less explosive bits, for example recently chatting about dyslexia, he looks bored and resentful.
For social media clipping reasons, we now have to see radio talk shows, not just hear them. But this is a tricky switch, demanding very different skills. Anyone who’s ever done a proper, old-fashioned, audio-only radio interview will know that, however interested they sound to listeners, the presenter’s face may be blank or fallen. Long experience has made them expert at the slightly uncanny art of doing something else while fully engrossed in a conversation: checking their notes or the time, counting down to ads, traffic or news, signalling back and forth with the producer. They are, rightly, concerned only with the voice.
For all we know, even that soul of congeniality Ken Bruce might be rolling his eyes à la Frasier Crane to Roz. Even Ken can sound ever so slightly as if he’d like to lamp those occasional irritatingly chirpy, overfamiliar Popmaster contestants: ‘And what music do you enjoy Brian?’ ‘A bit of everything, Ken.’
One longs for a Fawlty Towers-style outburst from the amiable Glaswegian. ‘A bit of everything, eh? A bit of Showaddywaddy? A bit of Shostakovich? A bit of the old Polynesian nose flute?’ This halfway house between radio/TV is not good.
Many years ago, I used to tune in post-pub to Allan Beswick on Red Rose Radio. Like O’Brien, he was combative, angry and depressed, but entertainingly so. This was long before the Ofcom age, though Alan ran into trouble on several occasions with its predecessor, the IBA (the Independent Broadcasting Authority). I am told Beswick is still about, but has mellowed. That was a different time, but he was, at least, funny and unpredictable.
Which James O’Brien is not. If you’re going to be a know-all and write smug books called things like How To Be Right and How They Broke Britain, you should really look a bit happier about it. O’Brien’s combination of pleased-with-yourself yet angry is intriguingly odd. But then, running the level of cognitive dissonance necessary for a progressive cannot be good for a person.
And boy is O’Brien self-righteous. His enthusiastic involvement in the life-destroying antics of Carl Beech remains shocking. Yes, O’Brien didn’t know Beech was a fraud when he jumped into the story – and he has since conceded that he gave the claims lots of coverage: ‘Hate the Carl Beech story. We gave his allegations against dead politicians a lot of coverage on the show & it turns out he was bullshitting everyone,’ he wrote on X. Even so, I don’t know about you, but after that debacle I couldn’t pipe merrily on about how I’m infallibly, Papally right about everything. It wasn’t so much a howler as an unburiable sin.
Another problem with O’Brien is that he never says anything surprising. For most of us, who also don’t often say something shocking or unusual, this is OK. But remember: it’s O’Brien’s job to say the unsurprising in an inventive way – something he seems incapable of doing. His big viral moment last week was taking JD Vance to task about free speech; yet every word was tediously predictable, copper-bottomed progressive rhetoric.
And what is the good of all that shouting and stamping and huffing and puffing? What light is thrown? It must eat away at you when your job is to stick your head out and invite strangers to have a pop at you, like a hairy Aunt Sally.
My advice to O’Brien would be to chuck in his job, and take up something else. Or even just indulge in a bit of self-care, a spa break, a hot stone massage or blow off some of that steam in a sauna. Poor old James O’Brien has suffered enough – and so have his listeners.
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