If you ever needed another indicator that Greg James is just like us, when I got through to him last Friday afternoon, he tells me he’s “just been watching sh*t on my phone”.
The BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show host had spent the morning with his beloved dog, Barney, who he rehomed from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in February last year and who, inevitably, has become the true star of James’ one million follower-strong Instagram feed.
“My routine, when I don't have a radio show to do, is to get up early, and go for a good long walk with my stupid, but wonderful dog, Barney,” James says.
“It’s nice to get out of the house and spend time with a creature that doesn't understand anything about a pandemic or Brexit or any sort of sadness other than losing a ball, like in the bush. I think it's a very nice thing to do.”
While he admits the first few months with Barney were a challenge, once he was trained and settled, James says the pup ‘completely changed my life’.
He adds: “I love him so much, I could not be without him. He really keeps you down to earth, like no matter what mad show biz-y element of my job I’ve just gone and done, in the morning I wake up at five o'clock and have to go pick sh*t up from outside. And I know that sounds really gross but it’s a really great leveller, right?”
Taking the breakfast show gig was not something James did lightly. He says, growing up, his only goal was to ‘do radio as a job’ and when he realised it was a viable career he decided to go for it and ‘see what happens’.
“If you want to be on Radio 1, you want to end up doing the breakfast show. I really wrestled with it over a number of years being like, ‘do I want it or not?’,” he adds.
“When I stopped asking myself that question, and got on with it and kept enjoying it, it was offered to me. I never thought I would be on there for more than a year or so. I think when you get that job, you're like, ‘wow, it’s happened. How long is it gonna last?’ And I feel really lucky that I’ve managed to last as long as I have done. The fact that I’ve got my biggest challenge 10 years into a job is something really exciting to me.”
Being at the helm of one of the UK’s biggest radio slots is a tough gig for anyone, especially at a time when media is changing so rapidly - James saw listeners decrease slightly at the end of last year to 4.9 million from 5.1 million in December 2018. But he isn’t getting itchy feet.
“It’s certainly been the biggest challenge of my career, doing the breakfast show, because it takes a whole new level of expectation, a different level of profile and national scrutiny and you've got a huge responsibility to be the spokesperson and be the frontman,” James says.
“I feel like I'll just want to keep doing [this job] as long as I'm being challenged and I find it difficult. A good job is one that can really engage your brain, where you are certainly never bored. And I don't feel like I want to stop doing it any time soon.”
This challenge has only been amplified by the pandemic, but it’s a feat the presenter feels the breakfast team has risen to, and a deep end that’s meant he’s had to learn ‘a sh*tload’ over the last few months. James still goes into the office on his show days, Monday to Thursday, with a producer but the rest of his team is working from home.
“I've had to get better and learn, and really dig deep and draw on all that experience that I've gained. But it's been a really extraordinary challenge for all of us to make sure that we're nailing it and getting the tone right and reflecting the lives of the listeners,” James continues.
“We want to make sure that we're taking the pandemic seriously but not bringing the mood down too much because most people come to us for a laugh. I think radio’s powers and its uses are magnified during a time of crisis, and I think it's always there for people. And it's always keeping people connected and it always makes you laugh and it’s always sort of heartwarming, too.”
To achieve the right balance and tone, James is making sure he stays ‘as clued up as possible’, listening to podcasts, and staying connected with the news, but radio is about escapism, too, which is why he’s been so impressed that his listeners are up for the fun stuff and nonsense.
“If you can't laugh through life, there's no point doing it. The way I deal with everything in life, whether it's a happy thing or a sad thing is to try and find the funny side of stuff,” James continues.
“It's been experimental. The show has changed and evolved over the last couple of months. I'm as frightened and saddened by it as everyone else is. I've always known that the listeners are the most important thing about the show but they’ve sort of gone up another level in my estimation in terms of how much they’re giving to us at the moment. They’re up for the fun stuff and they’re really up for nonsense and really up for being callers and doing stuff because we all want to be distracted and get through this together. It’s something that, when I started doing radio shows in my bedroom, I never thought about. You'd never think about the potential of a radio station being there for a person when they are feeling low, and lonely.”
If you can't laugh through life, there's no point doing it.
One thing he’s learnt over the past few months, from his listeners and also by himself, is that lockdown has made people realise what’s important to them.
James adds: “I certainly fell like I'm listening to the things that I listen to more intently, and making sure that they're definitely part of my routine and doing the things that make me happy. So I think people are taking stock and then going, ‘oh yeah, the thing that I don't really think about that much on in the morning when I’m getting ready for work or school or whatever, it's actually really important to my mental health’.”
Mental health is something James, and his wife of nearly two years, author and journalist Bella Mackie, are big advocates of and he says it’s something they both struggled with when the pandemic first reared its head.
“It certainly hit us both quite hard at the start of lockdown because you're like, what does this mean? And when are we going to see our family again? Bella suffers badly with anxiety and for me, having to balance work, being happy every day trying to entertain people with desperately wanting to be at home and look after the person you love the most, is definitely tricky and a challenge for both of us, but it's something that brings you closer together and because we share a lot with each other, you become stronger through it,” James says.
“That's the exciting thing about being in a relationship, is that you grow together and you work out coping mechanisms for each other. So it's been a challenge, certainly for everyone’s mental health, but something we're getting through together.”
It seems Barney plays second fiddle to Mackie when vying for James’ love. The presenter says marriage is ‘f*cking great’ and before he met Mackie, marriage was something he hadn’t thought about much or even thought he would ever do.
“And then Bella came along, and it was the easiest thing in the whole world,” he says.
“We just get on so well and I love that we are allowed to have loads of time together now in the evenings, we can go for walks, and we can hang out. But we're also very independent, she’s very active doing her own thing, and I really like doing my own thing. It's been great. We’ve been doing a lot of DIY, painting spare rooms. I went mad last week and ripped up the carpet. It's a nice reminder of making sure you look after your actual life and not just to worry about work.”
While the pubs are shut, and with a quieter-than-usual social agenda, James has been keeping himself busy - by growing his hair.
“It started off because I literally couldn’t get it cut but now I'm enjoying it and I am checking in on Jake Gyllenhaal’s Instagram every day, to see if he uploads a new photograph of himself because he is hair goals and I’m not afraid to admit that. I’m trying to go full Jake Gyllenhall, which is a nice aim for me at the moment,” James laughs.
“I am also doing a lot of cooking so I'm going to become a celebrity chef after lockdown ... watch out Ainsley, I’m coming for your gig. I've just realised for the first time in my life that actually making food is more enjoyable than eating it. That's the whole point. I never really understood why people spend hours making food. And now I do. That’s been a big discovery, a big sort of epiphany.”
Besides cooking and hair growing, James also has two other projects on the go: a new season of Rewinder on BBC Radio 4 and he and Chris Smith have just released the last instalment in their children’s book series, Kid Normal.
As a self-described ‘radio nerd’, having at-home access to the entire BBC archive for Rewinder has been a ‘dangerous resource’ for James to have and something he can spend ‘hours and hours and hours’ combing through. In the second series, which started last week, James touched on dog training from the 80s, played a 130-year-old recording of Florence Nightingale and discovered that a Paul Hollywood handshake hasn’t always been so hard to get.
James says: “Because everyone's baking at the moment, we decided that we’d search for Paul Hollywood, and there’s an example of him on an episode of the Generation Game in 2001, where he is the guest baker.
“He was really kind with the scoring, really generous. And the things that they’d created were sh*t. But he's really nice about it. And I was watching that being like, ‘hang on, but in the Bake Off now he’s suddenly turned into Mr. Nasty’. Very, very harsh isn't he in the Bake Off? You can't you can't get the Hollywood handshake for any sum of money, but back in the early noughties, he was giving them out 10 a penny.”
While Radio 4 is a step away from his usual Radio 1 tone, James says he’s excited that he can produce a show for the station where he can ‘be himself’.
“I have to switch my brain slightly into a more journalistic and a slightly more analytical mode, which is good. It’s good for me to go out of my comfort zone. It's a very different field to Radio 1, but essentially, it's the same stuff, communicating something you're passionate about to an audience. Just happens that this audience is just a bit older than what I'm used to, but that’s okay. I think the mums like me,” James laughs.
The presenter has also been able to add ‘author’ to his CV with his Kid Normal series, and he and co-author Chris Smith dropped the fourth and final instalment, Kid Normal and the Final Five, last month. The kid’s series follows protagonist, Murph Cooper, who accidentally gets into a school for superheroes, even though he has no powers himself.
“We did the first one as an experiment, to see if we could write something like that together and we just wanted to write more,” James says.
“It's been amazing. It’s taken us all around the world promoting it and it's been translated into loads of different languages. With the final one, the only thing we are missing is going out and doing school events. We get a lot out of meeting the readers and doing shows for them and encouraging them to keep reading.”
The pair have already started thinking about ideas for their next novel. “We’re trying our best to come up with some ideas together over Zoom. We’re not done just yet.”
One thing James has loved about lockdown is that it’s forced him to sit around more, something he says he doesn’t do too often.
He continues: “Slowing down a bit and focusing on things I enjoy doing and the things I love, and radio shows, the podcast and writing, that’s enough. I’m learning to be better at that. And I'm making sure I'm spending time with Bella and time with Barney, and it’s nice to have the time to call my mum and dad, call my friends and actually have a life outside of work. So it's been a really timely reminder for me to just relax a bit more.”
When I ask him what’s the first thing he wants to do when life returns to a semblance of normality, he laughs and says: “I love thinking about this question, because it just feels so exciting. I promised my breakfast team that as soon as we're allowed to fly somewhere and go somewhere hot, I'm going to take them all to Ibiza, and we're going to lose our minds for a week. That's what I promised. I said whatever villa we want to stay in and whatever club we want to go to, we can pull any favours we want to get into anywhere. And we're just going to go and have an old school mad one.
“Oh, and before that go and see mum and dad. In that order: mum and dad, Ibiza.”
You can listen to the new season of Rewinder here and buy Kid Normal and the Final Five here.
