It is 9.25am in the gleaming studios of LBC, above a TGI Fridays next to the Odeon in Leicester Square. Nick Ferrari, the rotund, rumpled, rightwing former tabloid reporter who presents LBC’s popular breakfast phone-in show, is discussing Boris Johnson with a Daily Telegraph columnist.
In the control room, a team of three producers for the London-based commercial radio station rack up his next few callers like bowling balls.
“With you now, Michelle. Is your phone to your ear?” a producer warns a caller before she is thrust from her home in the north of England to the radios of some of the 1.5 million people who listen to 60-year-old Ferrari’s show each week. Michelle is a first-time caller who has been picked to talk about caring for her autistic son, and the pledge Johnson made on his first day as prime minister to fix the social care system.
“Michelle in Runcorn, good morning. How does this touch your life?” Ferrari asks, shifting his tone smoothly from inquisitor to confidant as she talks about her son. “I have never been so despondent about my country,” she confesses. “Oh, Lord. Michelle, why? Why is there such despondency in your heart this morning?” Ferrari cries, before closing with a warm entreaty for her to call again.
Ferrari removes his glasses, pushes back his headphones and yawns as the news is read before taking another caller, James from Barnes in southwest London. James launches into a monologue about the prime minister’s hypocrisy and the need for another referendum on Brexit, as Ferrari grunts impatiently in the background.
“Oh, hang on, hang on, hang on. James, I sense possibly that you’re a Remainer. Which is, of course, your entitlement,” he adds, seasoning courtesy with a pinch of menace.
Behind the glass, another Remain-backing James lopes into the room with a bundle of well-thumbed newspapers under one arm. It is James O’Brien, the presenter whose show follows Ferrari’s at 10am but whose views on Brexit and other matters are diametrically opposed. “Can you feel the leftwing cloud blowing into the studio?” asks Ava Evans, O’Brien’s producer, seating herself for the handover at the top of the hour.
The odd couple of Ferrari and O’Brien would be difficult for another radio station to accommodate. But the tension between their views, and their joint talent for enticing listeners into debating news live, lies at the heart of LBC’s success.
The London Broadcasting Company was founded in 1973 as the first UK commercial radio station (beating Capital by a week), with a reputation for featuring, as O’Brien recalls the caricature, “racist taxi drivers”. It has now become a national phenomenon, under the slogan “Leading Britain’s Conversation”.
LBC’s audience has grown from 1.2 million to 2.6 million listeners a week since it went national as a digital station five years ago, competing with BBC stations such as the talk-based Radio Five Live, whose weekly audience has fallen from a 2010 peak of seven million to just under five million in the third quarter of this year.
LBC has remodelled itself from a speech station covering a broad range of current affairs and lifestyle matters to an opinionated, interactive debate on the news of the day. It has seized on the political tumult in the UK since the 2016 referendum by appointing hosts including Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit party.
Radio, invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895, is the oldest broadcast medium, long overtaken by film, television and the internet. But it has proven surprisingly resilient — 88 per cent of British adults listen each week, for an average of 20 hours. The BBC dominated radio waves for decades but its lead is faltering: it accounted for 49 per cent of all radio listening in the third quarter of 2019, compared with the 48 per cent share held by commercial stations.
Audiences for LBC, Capital, Classic FM and Heart have steadily risen since they were acquired by Global, the biggest commercial radio group in the UK. Audio is flourishing, boosted by the rise of podcasts and voice-activated speakers.
LBC has raided BBC radio for stars, recruiting both Eddie Mair and Shelagh Fogarty, and tested to the limit the public service broadcasting requirement to be politically balanced. Unlike the BBC’s insistence on its presenters remaining neutral, leaving listeners and guests as the only ones to express opinions, LBC tells its hosts not only to broadcast their views but to share personal experience of everything from divorce to illness.
“They need to say, ‘On the one hand this and on the other hand that’ which makes it very hard to have a normal conversation,” Ferrari says of BBC radio presenters. “It’s almost in their DNA to have an aloofness that people can’t get through, whereas we’re not like that. We are all things to all people. The BBC is caught in the extraordinary position of knowing that they want to match us, and knowing they can’t.”
But LBC’s rebellion against the traditional values of UK public service broadcasting worries others in the industry. One is Jon Snow, the Channel 4 News presenter who started his career at LBC in 1973, the year of its birth. “I occasionally tune in [to LBC] because it’s good to hear what Joe Public says but it’s difficult to listen for long because it’s openly populist,” he says. “The BBC could never get away with it, and perish the day it does.”
When Shelagh Fogarty, the 53-year-old Liverpudlian who hosts a weekday afternoon show on LBC, joined from Radio Five Live five years ago, she found it a shock. She was used to hosting BBC phone-ins, but those callers were politer than some she now encountered.
“I’m not going to lie, there was a transition of, ‘Oh, my God. That person was so aggressive,” she says. “I would go home shaken by some calls that I had because I wasn’t used to this real horns-locking style.”
There is no place for decorum on LBC — the station demands that its hosts are willing to tangle with callers if needed, not only listening to them but taking them on. “It is interaction with the audience and strength of personality that make LBC a success,” says James Rea, director of broadcasting at Global. “We hire presenters who know what people are really thinking and talking about. They pick an issue and throw it hard against the wall.”
It took time for Fogarty to adapt to what she calls “muscular conversation” with her listeners. “Callers to LBC require something of you, not just a voice saying, ‘And why do you think that is?’, or nice, open, simple questions,” she says, recalling on the night of the Brexit referendum having to share the news that she had voted Remain. “Can you imagine? I’ve worked at the BBC for 25 years and someone’s asking me to say on the radio how I voted? It nearly killed me,” she says.
LBC demands opinions from both hosts and listeners, and if arguments spill over into irate confrontations that are turned into clips on YouTube or Facebook, so much the better. “People may forget what you said, people may forget what you did, but they’ll never forget the way you made them feel,” runs the slogan on a screen at its head office. On Capital and Heart, emotions are expressed in music; on LBC, Rea says, “the callers are our hit records”.
The rhythm of LBC often feels like that of a music station, replaying the same hits relentlessly. After years under owners with different visions, its formula after Global bought it in 2007 was set by Richard Park, a veteran radio programmer and former judge on the BBC reality show Fame Academy, who Rea succeeded in September.
“The Park formula is brutal repetition: you always know what you’re going to get,” says a former LBC host. “There are six stories engaging people on any day, and you only talk about those.”
“Richard was never a fan of the leisurely, lifestyley thing: if it’s Friday, it must be cooking; if it’s Tuesday, it’s health,” says Ferrari. “Even before Brexit, he sensed we were entering a more serious phase of life.”
Chit-chat on topics that O’Brien claims included callers’ favourite biscuits and colours for front doors gave way to hard-edged news. “[Park] very deliberately steered it towards strong opinions based upon the news. That’s when a rather magical transformation began,” O’Brien says.
Several of LBC’s hosts were trained as news reporters, and are at home with filtering stories for topics that will spark debate. “The raw material is in the news. I go through the print editions with scissors and I cut out the stories that I like,” says O’Brien, who formerly worked as show-business editor for the Daily Express, and whose father was a Daily Telegraph journalist. “My sensibilities are more broadsheet by nature but I love the tabloid tactics, the cut and thrust.”
“I am a newspaperman all the way down to my boots,” Ferrari says. His father Lino Ferrari, known as Dan, founded an agency in 1945 that still supplies many stories to papers, and Nick worked on tabloids including The Sun and Daily Mirror before joining LBC’s rival TalkRadio 20 years ago (he moved to LBC in 2001). He learnt his craft on doorsteps, persuading people to talk about their lives. “‘Oh, so your wife’s run off with the vicar? This must be a terrible time for you. Shall we talk about it over a nice steak at the Berni Inn?’” says Ferrari, recalling the old patter.
Tabloid training helps in sensing what most people want to talk about — “We’ll tell you the news from Syria but you’re going to ring me because your child’s school is running out of books,” Ferrari says. It also pays in the delicate moment with a new caller when the host is unsure what to expect, despite a summary of the person’s opinions flashed on the studio screen by a producer. Is she amused or agitated? Does he have a family or is this his first conversation of the day?
“I’ve got quite good at identifying people’s ages through their voices and you always hear emotions. You hear when a voice is starting to go and then you either press the throttle or you back off,” Ferrari says. “I’m a tabloid bloke so I’ve got six paragraphs to tell the story. I’ll sub the end of the world into a paragraph, so I need you to come to the point quickly. But if a young woman is ringing in to say she was a victim of the black-cab rapist, it goes at her pace.”
Eddie Mair, who presented BBC Radio 4’s PM news programme before being recruited by Rea for LBC’s drivetime show last year, says that this moment of uncertainty is exhilarating. “You’ll see a name on a screen, maybe no more than that, and off you go. They may be upset, or they are struggling to explain themselves. It’s like setting off on a helter-skelter, the same kind of ‘whee …’” He reflects. “Actually, that’s a bad analogy because you know where you’ll end up on a helter-skelter.”
Brexit and the polarisation of UK opinion was made for the Park formula. While LBC’s hosts cover a range of topics, Brexit is a core. LBC followed the lead of Michael Bloomberg’s weekly radio show as New York City mayor with a Call Clegg segment on Ferrari’s breakfast show in 2013, letting listeners directly question Nick Clegg, then deputy prime minister. In 2017, it went further in allowing politicians to become hosts by giving Farage a weekday show, on which he interviewed Donald Trump, the US president, in October. (His show was suspended for the election campaign under impartiality rules.)
Despite a liking for controversy, LBC remains some way from the “shock jock” tradition of US radio. Presenters such as Howard Stern specialise in outraging audiences and pushing the limits of radio decency, while the rightwing host Rush Limbaugh was an early backer of Donald Trump for the US presidency. “I am no more likely to be a shock jock than to be on the next edition of Love Island; it’s not what I do,” Ferrari says.
Politics gave O’Brien an opportunity. He is one of LBC’s veterans, having joined in 2003, but the angry chaos of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have played to his radical sensibility, and his reflective, often anguished sense of his broader role. “Pomposity at 10am. That’s why I’m in the schedule. It’s Reithian,” he says, referring to Lord Reith, the BBC’s first director-general, who defined its mission as being to “educate, inform and entertain”.
O’Brien resigned as an occasional presenter of the BBC’s Newsnight last year after complaints that he lacked impartiality, and a Sun editorial dubbing him “a professional lefty propagandist”. He regrets it but not too much. “Newsnight was an Everest of journalism, but I had to leave because the rules meant I couldn’t talk. I felt from the start that Trump was a dangerous, racist provocateur and that Brexit had been sold to people on a succession of false promises.”
His shows often feature a monologue that builds from quizzical disbelief at a political event to rhetorical outrage. “We put the hecklers on stage. We’ve let the clowns take over. We’ve given the liars the prominence,” he declaimed last year. Clips of O’Brien’s Top 10 Brexit Calls (“5. Caller who voted Brexit because of three-pin plugs”) are shown on its website like the music chart on Capital.
Ashley Tabor-King adored radio from an early age. The only son of Michael Tabor, a gambling entrepreneur and thoroughbred racehorse owner from east London, he presented and ran a hospital radio station in Watford while he was still at school. When he left at the age of 16, he got a job as an assistant to Richard Park at Capital Radio, helping him to produce shows and plan the playlists.
“I love the Chris Tarrant show, and listen every morning,” Tabor-King gurgled in a joke voice on one Capital jingle (the breakfast DJ’s hands were grasped around his neck as he spoke). He became friends with his mentor Park by the time he left Capital in the late 1990s for the music business, forming a company called Global Talent. Tabor-King worked with the impresario Simon Fuller in the heyday of Pop Idol and co-wrote the theme music for the X Factor, as well as managing X Factor acts, including G4 and Shane Ward.
In 2006, he warmed to radio again, intrigued by the potential for consolidation. The following year, he and his father acquired Chrysalis Radio, which owned Heart, Galaxy and LBC, for £170m. A year later, they took a bigger leap, buying GCap Radio, owner of Capital, for £375m and putting the then 30-year-old Tabor-King in charge. He had support — the Tabors brought in his old mentor Park and Charles Allen, former chief executive of ITV, to help run Global.
Park brought his radio expertise, Allen his corporate skills and Tabor-King his family’s wealth and an entrepreneurial spirit. The Chrysalis acquisition was reported at the time to be backed by Michael Tabor along with John Magnier and JP McManus, Tabor’s fellow partners in the Coolmore Stud, the Irish racehorse stable that has produced many of the world’s most successful thoroughbreds. But people close to Global say that Michael Tabor is sole owner of the company.
Tabor’s bet on radio turned out to be highly profitable. Last year, Global had revenues of £388m and operating profits of £83m; it was liable for £9.9m in corporation tax, thanks to its debt-heavy balance sheet.
It is financed by £800m in loans from the Tabors and banks, and paid £55m in interest although the tax deduction was capped at £30m. This structure, common in private equity, tends to reduce pre-tax profits and taxes: in 2017, it paid £65m in interest, made a pre-tax loss of £3m, and got a tax credit of £2.3m on operating profits of £52m.
Tabor, who lives in Monaco, was estimated to be worth £626m by The Sunday Times earlier this year, thanks to his ownership of BetVictor, an online betting group, but Global alone is worth more. The son has also risen. Ashley Tabor-King (he changed his name from Tabor on marrying his partner George King this year) keeps a low profile but made headlines in 2017 when he bought a £90m Knightsbridge flat to knock it through to his adjacent one, and was refused permission. “The Tabors have done something extraordinary,” says one rival. “Global is a huge financial success.”
The family’s coup came from realising that the BBC’s dominance of UK radio was eroding, and grasping the opportunity. The BBC started broadcasting from Marconi’s London studio in The Strand on November 14 1922 and held a monopoly, apart from pirate stations such as Radio Caroline, until LBC, Capital and Radio Clyde became the first licensed commercial radio stations in 1973. Even then, the BBC had the choicest AM and FM spectrum with the widest range and clearest reception.
The switch to digital, which started in 1995, made it easier for commercial radio stations to broadcast in high quality across the UK, and to compete on equal terms. Some 57 per cent of radio listening is now digital, with 23 per cent of this being online, using phones and other devices. Global’s stations control 24 per cent and reach 25.4 million listeners a week on radio alone.
“Commercial radio is doing incredibly well,” says Gill Hind, director of TV and radio at Enders Analysis. “Its reach is growing as the UK population increases. It had record revenues last year and is taking audiences from the BBC, which is getting older and losing its younger listeners.” It does not help the BBC that it faces poaching of its top radio hosts — since Chris Evans left the Radio 2 breakfast show last year, its listenership has fallen by one million under his successor Zoe Ball.
But the value of LBC and other Global stations is due to more than listener growth. Commercial radio’s roots lie in local stations such as Capital and Radio Tay in Dundee, each with their own studios, shows and hosts. The model served communities well but stations struggled to compete with their better-funded BBC rivals. In the past decade, local requirements in licences have been relaxed, allowing radio groups to go national.
“We are approaching pretty much an entirely consolidated radio industry,” says Matt Deegan, creative director of Folder Media, a consultancy. “There has been a big transition from local stations with shared content to national with some local opt-outs.” LBC is a prime example: in October, it launched a national LBC News station, taking stories from 140 journalists in 13 of its local newsrooms. Global merged its 14 Capital local breakfast shows into one national show earlier this year, with Heart following.
LBC played no direct role in persuading the government and Ofcom, its regulator, to ease restrictions on commercial radio. But it does no harm for LBC’s studios to be a short walk from the House of Commons. “Ministers are coming through your door as you lobby for regulatory change,” says an executive at a competitor. “How did they do it? By knowing everyone.”
In May 2017, after the bombing of the Manchester Arena during an Ariana Grande concert, in which 23 people died, the controversial LBC host Katie Hopkins called on Twitter for a “final solution” to Islamist terrorism. She agreed to resign immediately, her blend of incendiary rightwing rhetoric too much even for a station that wants hosts to express opinions bluntly. Hopkins’ departure was popular among staff but it exacerbated LBC’s problem of gender imbalance.
Sixteen of its 17 presenters are male, with Fogarty the sole exception, although it has used female guest presenters including politicians Anna Soubry and Jess Phillips. “This is a shame in 2019,” tweeted Beverley Turner, a weekend presenter, when she left in January. “I know that LBC is criticised for not having enough women,” Fogarty says. “Again, I know from talking to James Rea that he genuinely hires people he wants to hear . . . Plenty of women might be able to do what I do.”
“It is a good programme maker’s job to have a range of characters and personality on air. There is a never-ending search for new talent but it is about the best broadcaster for the role,” Rea insists. The broader issue is that talk radio disproportionately attracts male callers who like mouthing off. LBC’s listeners are 64 per cent male and 36 per cent female. “I’m not a regular listener but the times that I have, I’ve never heard a woman calling in,” says Jon Snow.
The fact that Hopkins was an LBC host at all highlighted its revolutionary approach to the UK’s public-service requirement to retain balance in return for being allocated radio spectrum. “They have pushed brilliantly the regulatory limits on impartiality,” says Roger Mosey, master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and a former head of television news at the BBC. “The political balance is broadly there across its schedule but Farage doing an LBC show is very striking. It is a rock thrown in the pool of speech radio.”
“We’re regulated in the same way as the BBC, by Ofcom,” says Rea. “We have to offer a balanced output, and we have a wide range of presenters, with opinions from across the spectrum. But imagine being at a party or a pub and everybody was qualifying what they said all the time: that would be bizarre. It’s not how conversations go, and we’ve moved away from the robotic balance of one person says yes, one says no.”
This is not the only way in which Global does things its own way. Each quarter, when industry figures come out, staff gather in a cinema to hear the news from Rea and other executives. “They take a very close interest in what’s performing well, what needs to be tweaked, which programmes need action,” Mair says. How, I ask, is that expressed? “With a cosh,” he replies.
He is being facetious but there is an element of truth. Global is tightly managed to ensure that its stations keep expanding. “We want as many new callers as possible. It always says on my screen, ‘New caller’,” Fogarty says. Hosts are employed on personal contracts and can be highly rewarded for success (Mair was reported to have doubled his BBC salary of about £300,000 by moving). If they underperform consistently, they may lose their slot.
In practice, LBC’s line-up is steadier than many rivals’, thanks to its success — Steve Allen, its early-morning-show host, has been broadcasting at LBC for 40 years. “I wondered before I arrived, does that mean there’s going to be somebody with a graph at my door in a week?” Mair says. “Well, I’ve got, and I think the others have got, freedom to be ourselves. As a veteran, it’s great to be told, ‘Sure, go and do your thing’ . . . You get the support here and, so far, no cosh.”
The pressure to perform is the nature of the medium. On crowded airways, with audiences distracted by social media, talk radio cannot be a background noise: it must grab its listeners. LBC provokes them to ensure they never turn off, and its formula is working. “The thread that runs through my career is interaction with listeners,” Fogarty says. “Especially around Brexit, people are dying for an exchange and to have it moderated a bit. They’re dying for it.”
“You’re in a room on your own but there’s a million people listening — it’s intimate but very public at the same time,” O’Brien says. Sitting in an empty LBC studio, he delves into his pocket, pulling out a phone to find an email from a friend about the death of the latter’s father.
“‘He was fairly trapped for a few months,’” O’Brien reads out. “‘His great comfort was LBC, which he’d never heard until recently. He loved listening to you. You were his friend even if you never met and you gave his last few months great structure, something to look forward to, and comfort, so thank you.’” He looks up from his phone. “When I got that yesterday, I had a little cry.”
John Gapper is the FT’s chief business commentator
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