Shambling Inadequacy.

Sat at my expansive desk at New Job, I like nothing more than to piss the company's practically limitless bandwidth up the wall streaming music all day. I'd been without a DAB radio for a while, and Old Laptop, whilst a masterpiece of design that stands up to this day, was full of loose change and spiders where complex computer components should be, and so wasn't really up to the task.

Finding myself in possession of Unnecessarily Swish Computer as part of New Job, I started listening to BBC 6 Music again. This was a station I used to love. Lots of exciting new music, good presenters who were both entertaining and knowledgeable, all good stuff. Somehow though, in my absence, the dribbling font of inadequacy that is George Lamb crept in.

If you ever listened to Mark and Lard on Radio 1 about ten years ago, you'll know the sort of show I'm talking about here. Canned sound effects, phone-ins, endless gibbering. At least with Mark and Lard they showed that they had nothing but contempt for the format, and actually tried to get decent music onto Radio 1, something that would be impossible now. Still, it was infuriating.

George Lamb is so much worse. He revels in the vacuous shit that he pumps out. He has cronies (two who gurn and chuckle at his every feculent utterance, and a producer who sounds as though he should be on suicide watch). He shows utter contempt for the music he's meant to playing, because all he really wants to do is educate the masses as to the merits of Jamaican Dancehall. That's fine, but it should be on at two in the morning, because 6 music is the whitenest, middle-classingest radio station you could possibly imagine, and quite frankly it jars next to the Arcade Fire.

Perhaps the worst thing about it is that he knows that he's shit, but he thinks that if, every now and then he claims that it's ironic, his entire career takes on the form of sort of gigantic meta-textual joke the likes of which the world has never seen before. His inadequacy is, to him, the route to true genius.

He's not solely to blame for this. His Handler, Lesley Douglas is the one who brought him in. Amazingly, she also has ties to the talent (never less appropriately used) agency that manages Georgie boy. They also manage Dermot 'Oxygen Thief' O'Leary, who is also getting a slot on a station she manages. But don't worry, it's all above board. As was his recent Sony award for best newcomer. If the reports are to be believed, Lesley was on the judging panel.

Not to worry though. All this quasi-legal nepotism is in a good cause. Apparently, there weren't enough women listening to the station. Now, Lesley says this is because the shows were too smart, and women need some eye candy. On the radio, that most visual of all media. That's it, the justification for fucking up my morning is that this imbecile seems to think that women are dumb. By essentially changing the format to exactly resemble the Chris Moyles show (for those unfamiliar, it's an unfunny man grunting dispassionately for 4 hours - pretty much like a night in the pub with me), purely in order to lure these imaginary cretins to her station.


Lesley in her secret volcano base, yesterday.

I think this is closing in on being the longest post I've ever written here, and it essentially boils down to the fact that these two goons have forced me to switch off the radio for three hours in the morning. I'll leave the final word on the matter to someone with less decorum than I.