It can’t just be the records, although the playlist which ranges from The Animals to Alt-J, Stevie Wonder to Sharon van Etten, Little Eva to Laura Marling is almost always excellent. People, between 959,000 and 1.04m of them on last counts, nevertheless start their day with this show. The Thought for the Day on 6Music is more likely to be about the hummus in Shaun’s fridge going off than the irreversibility of climate change. Listeners are invited to contribute in the shape of an ‘ear worm’ (recent samples – Andrew WK’s Party Hard, Nu Shooz’s I Can’t Wait and Abba’s Thank you for the Music) and Small Claims Court, where a caller might remember, say, the time he met Hi de Hi’s Simon Cadell at Baldock services. Everitt secures plenty of big name interviews from AC/DC and Rod Stewart to Elton John and Kate Bush. Keaveny will also use the Music News as an excuse to unleash ropey impersonations of Keith Richards and Paul McCartney but the real things don’t seem to mind, having both guested on the show. These include the Sid James guffaw (for innuendo), Happy Birthday on the tuba (for birthdays he insists he doesn’t celebrate), horse braying (a tribute to Everitt’s Easter Island-style fizzog) and inexplicable singalongs to Take That’s Greatest Day (a record 6Music listeners would not countenance all the way through). If Pedro Almodovar ever wants to switch the gender of his classic film Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and relocate it to the UK, he should contact Keaveny and Everitt.Īny awkward dead air – other breakfast shows are available but less willing to offer this – is interrupted by dad jokes, impersonations and random clips from Keaveny’s “cart wall” of sound effects. The 6Music Breakfast Show is the sound of a man howling at the moon or, on a day he’s struggling, happy to let dead air speak for his pain. On Radio 1, the thought of Everything being Amazing before the day’s first gulp of coffee can be a bit much and the two hour interview they just broadcast with Harry Styles is not for most of us over 21. On Radio 2, another man may be shouting at the listeners, or colleagues if they have fallen out of favour. The Today programme on Radio 4 remains the preserve of mainly men shouting at each other for telling lies or avoiding the question. Radio at that hour broadcasts to a harsh, unforgiving audience. The 6Music Breakfast Show is a comfort blanket of expectations managed, under the stewardship of producers “Fire warden” Phil Smith and previous incumbent Claire “The Slev” Slevin, music news reporter Matt Everitt and presenter Shaun Keaveny. They even threw a party this morning at BBC’s Maida Vale studio with guests including Maximo Park, Law, Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine and Brian Eno. (She was its guest for the hour before Christmas).
Regular fans include Radiohead, Jude Law and Kate Moss who listens between nine and ten am, a slot since renamed The Kate Moss Hour.
The approved hashtag #TenLongYearsofKeaveny was met with such glowing tributes from listeners as “Ten years of adequate radio”, “feels like longer” and “Ten years. So this week, when the BBC 6 Music Breakfast Show marked ten years on the air with Shaun Keaveny in the chair, producers were keen not to go the way of Browning.
Managing expectations is a peculiarly British trait. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for.”
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