Robbie Savage is wearing a full Stockport Town tracksuit and giving me absolute pelters. I’m sitting in Salford’s Media City outside BBC Radio 5 Live’s Studio 11, working on the 2019 Cricket World Cup. India are playing Pakistan, and I can hear every hoot and holla from Old Trafford.
In just under ten minutes, Robbie’s shock-jock version of the long-running 5 Live staple, 606, will barge onto the medium airwaves. What was an innocent forum for fans to simply tell David Mellor or Adrian Durham what match they’d been to that day had become a platform for the former Wales midfielder to wind up middle-aged men who never go to the doctor’s about anything.
Answering those phones is closer to being a therapist than it is to journalism. It’s how I, and many others who didn’t do well enough on a good enough course at a good enough university, snuck our feet through the backdoor of the BBC. But because it’s the BBC, the competition just to answer phones was fucking fierce, and the job itself was not easy.
If you said no to a shift, you were back to the bottom of the pile. If you were in a car crash less than five miles away, you’d still crawl to work to not miss an opportunity to impress the best producers and presenters in the business. I first worked on those switchboards early in 2014, and they’d be my insurance policy during career lapses (becoming an alcoholic and trying to become a rock star) right up until I left the network in 2021.
“What you working on today?” Robbie says over my shoulder. He smells simultaneously like my mum’s hairdressers and my dad’s bathroom cupboard in the 90s. His hair is in its blonde Elvis phase, and it’s impressively massive. He’s actually annoyingly handsome, like a Welsh Disney prince.
“Cricket World Cup, mate,” I reply. Four words so clinical and harmless that surely there’s no room for a retort, but Robbie seems insulted by the mere mention of a sport with almost 150 years of history behind it. As he walks back to his desk, which is just across from mine, he perches confidently on its corner and says through the side of his mouth, sounding more Welsh than ever:
“Cricket!? They’re all failed footballers, though, innit?”
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Robbie had not long done an on-air trail, casting his net of shithousery out into an ocean of the aforementioned hungry and angry listeners. That meant the lads and lasses on the phones were typing and talking like their lives depended on it. Fast, thorough and on to the next one, giving them ratings out of five so the producers in the studio could queue the best ones up for Robbie to rip into at 6 o’clock. His “failed footballers” line served the same purpose as his on-air trail did to the British public a few minutes earlier—he was winding us all up.
In that specific, dismissive tone, he’s cucked me in front of the newsroom. His disciples—radio producers who want to keep their jobs—are laughing like hyenas in The Lion King would at another of Scar’s witless remarks. Laughter from the brain rather than the belly.
Because I’d been there for five years at that point, had nothing to do with 606 and had played and lost against Savage at table tennis, I felt comfortable enough to respond:
