Phone in radio shows. They go from the sublime to the ridiculous. The sublime only tends to happen at moments rather than consistently throughout a show but good presenters and good subjects can make for good radio.

Lots of radio presenters are pretty crap and their researchers and callers are pretty crap too. Now, that's fair enough. Most of the stuff in this world is pretty crap so it is hard to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Lots of footballers are pretty crap too but they make a living without ever being superstars. Not everyone can be Gerry Rya, the fat cunt, Ryan Tubridy, the famine looking cunt, or George Hook, the Churchill the dog looking cunt. Ahh, I quite like George. He's certainly not a cunt when compared to the übercunts Ryan and Tubridy.

What does my head in though is when they insult your intelligence and the thing that does my head in the most are the staged callers. This is when the radio station gets somebody, perhaps someone that works in the station doing a voice, or a friend of someone who they know can spoof and bullshit, and they get them on to try and drum up a bit of interest or controversy in a story.

Newstalk106 seem to be pretty good, or bad, at doing this. The other week they had a show on about bullying and this bloke was on talking about how he was bullied as a kid and because he was bullied as a kid he became a bully himself. Then he went on to tell us that he had tried to commit suicide loads of times which, if he was a real person, would make it totally understandable that people bullied him because if he was so crap at stuff to fail to kill himself loads of times then he would have been really crap at normal stuff too.

If you can't work it out after your fourth or fifth attempt then you're a fucking clown.

Anyway, at the end the presenter asked him a question he wasn't prepared for.

"So, how's life now, John?", he asked (they're nearly always called John too).

"Er...yeah...it's good, you know...yeah...just ...erm...yeah, good, like. No problems...yeah. Good."

Do they think we're fucking morons? I know it's quite a regular practice and the best at it was Chris Barry when he used to do the late night show on FM104. He'd have professionals on stirring it up with controversial opinions. How do I know? I just do and that's all you need to know.

So a message to Newstalk, if anyone in there ever answers their cunting phones, please improve the quality of your fake callers. You've gone nationwide now. Standards are higher.

Labels: fake callers, newstalk, radio