How to save a lame duck

Highs and lows on the radio this week. Starting with the good stuff: presented Broadcasting House on Radio 4 for the first time this morning. I love Paddy O’Connell’s Sunday morning tour de force, and loved serving up today’s smorgasboard: Keir Starmer’s future, Iran, Nigel Farage’s £5 million, wild swimming, cheese rolling, and the CIA poisoning Gordon Banks (possibly). It’s also been a great week on 5 Live: Tom Allen on his love of surburbia is well worth catching on the pod.

Less good: I went to the Arias – the radio industry, sorry “Audio” industry –awards for the fourth time and… didn’t win for a fourth time. But then I read news of the loss of a real star of local radio, (see below) and seeing the reaction from listeners is a reminder that radio connects like nothing else. And you don’t need a gong to tell you that.

WE LEARNED… what would Basil Brush as Keir Starmer: A new high/low for my radio career when, on Wednesday, my celebrity guest reviewing PMQs was Basil Brush. He had some issues getting through security (true story), and he didn’t even startle staff by shouting BOOM BOOM.

In the studio later we discussed his own political ambitions, which saw him name his “shadow, shadow, shadow, shadow, shadow, shadow” cabinet, includng Chancellor (Martin Lewis), Agriculture and transport (Jeremy Clarkson and Caleb), Sport and fitness(Keely Hodgkinson). And US Ambassador: “That would be my best friends, Sooty and Sweep because Sooty won’t say much and put his foot in it. So that’s that one worry out of the way. And Sweep is absolutely squeaky clean.”

And if he could ask Keir Starmer a question:

“Have you got another job? Anything else you’re good at? Have you retrained? Have you signed on already? Because I think he’s just got to have that in his back pocket.”

WE LEARNED… how to save a lame duck: I went out voxpopping in Wokingham (ex-Tory, now Lib Dem) yesterday for Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, and it was striking that of the dozen or so people I spoke to, none were fans of the PM, but they also didn’t seem to think he should go anywhere. No southern hankering for Andy Burnham, that I detected (yes I know, totally unscientific etc etc).

A general sense that Starmer should be allowed to see out his term, and then face a general election. Maybe Labour MPs will have a change of heart, although once they’ve called for him to go it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle and get back to governing.

In unrelated news, on 5 Live I spoke Tim Jones, from Sally’s Duck Rescue, which is a bird sanctuary to ask him for any advice he might have for a lame duck politician.

“Eat your peas. Peas contain niacin. Niacin helps lame ducks. So yeah, if they had a handful of frozen peas, you never know. We might actually have a little bit of government going on.”

Eating peas? Maybe John Major was on to something.

WE LEARNED… the only way is politics: We are in the middle of exam season. If you’ve got a teenager locked in revision hell (and in a heatwave too!) I feel your pain. Who better to step forward with some career’s advice than a privately-educated celebrity, who once boasted she didn’t need her maths exam because she was going to be famous, and did indeed become famous for reality TV and occasionally-banned Instagram posts?

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson invited Gemma Collins, former star of The Only Way Is Essex, in for a chat and the internt lost its mind. Now, I like “The GC”. I’ve seen her in a lot of things and she is very funny, with a real charm. Lots of people online still felt she wasn’t the right person for this message.

Phillipson came on my 5 Live show to defend the collab, saying Collins could reach people that “politicians can’t reach”. (We’ll gloss over whether anyone under 25 knows who Collins is.)

“I think some of some of the discussion I’ve seen has veered between outright snobbery and just downright unpleasant, a bit of kill joy attitude, you know, there’s enough doom and gloom in the world.”

The broader message about the importance of vocational qualificiations, and moving away from the superiority of university, is an important one. I say that as a state educated non-graduate.

WE LEARNED… some people go too early: The very first time I appeared as a pundit was on BBC Somerset Sound (as it was then), reviewing the papers while at the Taunton Times. When I moved to London, especially in the run-up to 2010 election and working on the Western Morning News, I was an occasional guest on Emma Britton’s show on the station. Updating her, and the homeland, on political goings on. I have a very distinct memory of standing on the South Bank, outside Royal Festival Hall, speaking to her on the phone, and laughing so loud people around me looked over.

What I absolutely loved about Emma was she was a proper Bridgwater girl, big Somerset accent, cackling laugh. Like a normal person, not a broadcaster at all. Turns out you could be yourself on air. Never forgot that.

She later became the breakfast presenter of first BBC Somerset, and then Radio Bristol, before retraining as a celebrant. She was diagnosed with incurable stage four lung cancer in April, 2025. And yesterday came the news that she had died, at the unfathomably young age of 52.

I didn’t know her well at all, we might have only met in person once or twice, but she was a force of nature.

I spoke to her only a couple of weeks ago. I got her on my 5 Live show to talk up BBC Somerset’s competition to name the dragon on the Somerset flag. Her riposte to those saying the emblem is not a dragon was classic Emma:

“Lots of people think it’s a Wyvern or even a griffin, but it’s definitely a dragon, and I’ll tell you why, Matt Chorley, because it’s got four legs, a reptilian looking head, and, crucially, a set of wings. If you wanna go down Proper Job and get yourself a Wyvern, you’d find it only has two legs, and if you want to throw a griffin into the mix that’s got the head of an eagle and the body of a lion.”

So that’s you told. Sending love to everyone at BBC Somerset, and Emma’s friends and family.

Catch up on the best of my 5 Live show on my URGENT QUESTIONS podcast - give it a listen on BBC Sounds, Apple Podcasts or Spotify and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading this far, if you have. If you haven’t, nevermind. Do hit the like button. Or tell me I’m wrong in the comments.