I had never listened to his show until preparing to meet him. I had merely picked up the consensus view that Chris Moyles is rude, crude, politically incorrect and a signifier for some – Wogan, Noel Edmonds, Stonewall – of how low public broadcasting has plunged, but that despite these flaws, or maybe because of them, he is very funny. So tuning in at 7am, I was puzzled. Moyles is no British shock jock: you can’t imagine him, like the American Howard Stern, playing “butt bongo” on naked women’s backsides. And Moyles’s show isn’t that belly-achingly funny. By which I mean there are no great gags, none of Chris Evans’s mad, brilliant interplays with callers or Jonathan Ross’s lightning repartee. But that’s to miss the point. It’s the very ordinariness of the chat which the show’s listeners love, and which makes them feel a part of Moyles’s gang. What you get for three hours daily is Moyles and mates – his sidekick, “Comedy Dave”, Rachel, his producer, Aled, the gay assistant, and others – chatting about what they did at the weekend, making slightly coarse remarks about a celebrity, or speculating on the size of Rachel’s breasts. The week I listened, Moyles, in his flat, curmudgeonly Leeds accent, spent whole licence-payer-funded minutes whingeing about the iniquities of parking rules in his London borough. And not even with the satirical rage of, say, Jeremy Clarkson. I’d bet most people have friends who are funnier than Chris Moyles.
He bangs on about his parking permit in his autobiography, Chris Moyles: The Story of a Man and His Mouth, which I read with wonder. Who would buy such a charmless, boring book? On his break, aged 12, as a DJ broadcasting to a mental hospital he reflects: “We had jingles. We had studios. Yet we couldn’t be bothered to collect requests or talk to the patients. And why should we? F*** ’em.” He settles old scores with every sadsack local radio boss who failed to recognise his genius. He opines on celebrities he’s met: Nicola from Girls Aloud is “the ropey-looking ginger one”; Madonna has “great breasts”.
Hardly Alan Clark, then, but Moyles’s observations and asides will obviously appeal to his listeners. In three years on the breakfast show, he has added more than a million of them, halting years of decline and a leaching of listeners to commercial stations. He is the highest paid Radio 1 DJ, earning a reported £630,000, a figure he will not confirm because “talking about money is uncouth”, although his book chippily catalogues every dire wage slip at Radio Aire, Chiltern Radio or Capital FM.
A night out boozing with Chris Moyles: I had braced myself for laddish excess. But the man I meet (with his PR guy, Julian) is rather contained, even prim. He relaxes when he learns I’m a fellow northerner: Moyles was born in Leeds to a Yorkshire postman father and an Irish mother. Having lost and regained 35lb, he is once again properly fat: not merely burly, but with a bay window of a belly that makes him look older than his 32 years. But he is no slob: he moisturises, is only unshaven because he thinks it suits his face, and he smells lovely. “Vera Wang,” he explains, with slight campery.
He is just back from the Radio 1 Roadshow in Newquay, which involved a 10-hour car journey because he is scared of flying. “It was very chavvy,” he says of the resort. “Horrible ugly women everywhere with ankle tattoos.” He has a respectable working-class boy’s highly-tuned snobbery for low-life; the only time he gets furious is discussing “that waster” Pete Doherty: “My dad would kick me down the stairs if I took heroin.”
I’m sure most of his listeners would share his boozer’s righteous disgust for the junkie. The secret to his mass appeal is that he is a sharp mirror of the social and political attitudes of young Britons. “I say what I think and I think most people of my upbringing and my generation think the same,” he says. “For example, most people agree that Chico is some cheesy singer who you love to hate. And you don’t want him to release another record, but we love to watch him make an arse of himself.”
Probing his views on subjects beyond The X Factor I find that Moyles is against the Euro (“I like the pound because it’s British”); is untroubled by global warming; doesn’t recycle because he thinks it’s the binmen’s job; fears there is too much immigration, but on the other hand his mother came from Dublin, “so… let’s all just get along”. He doesn’t feel middle class, but rich working class. What does he think of how lads’ mags portray women? “Well, they’re portrayed as fit birds with big tits,” he says, puzzled by the question. Fat, older women in sexy gear appal him, though: “Get dressed, you sluts!”
But this is said with an ironic twinkle. For all the accusations of sexism, Moyles emits not a whiff of misogyny. He reflects a generation so at ease with the opposite sex they can make lewd knob or tit remarks yet still be great, platonic friends. He is not a shagger or a shit, didn’t lose his virginity until he was 21, doesn’t bed the bimbos who flock around all DJs – “They’re all ugly, chavvy types or psychos, anyway” – but has a history of long-term relationships with attractive, feisty women who are his equal.
He has been with Sophie Waite, a freelance producer, for four years. He says she doesn’t live with him, although she’d dispute that, since she spends five nights a week at his flat where she “has too much f***ing say about how it looks”. He was aghast on returning to Leeds for a wedding to discover the last of his mates had succumbed to marriage and babies. “I’m too selfish,” he says. “I’m 32 going on 20.”
In his autobiography, Moyles writes, “I’m not a bad person. I genuinely don’t want to upset anybody. Off the air, I’m quiet, shy almost. On the air, I come alive. It’s just the way I am. So sometimes I say things for a cheap laugh. You know the kind of comments you make down the pub with your mates. It’s a joke. They’re just words.”
And certainly he is not a bully in real life. When his fags run out, he is grateful that Julian offers to go to the newsagent because the owner “is the rudest f***ing man in the world”, not that Moyles would dare tell him. When he took part in The X Factor: Battle of the Stars he chided fellow contestant Dr Gillian McKeith because she didn’t say please when asking for water: “An ego like that and her job is to look through people’s shit!”
Only on air does he give vent to his fury about stupid service or uppity stars. And those “just words” are tricky things. In May, during a skit with the actress Halle Berry, Moyles said, “I’m a big fat American black guy,” to explain who he was playing, because he is rubbish at accents. Halle Berry asked, “Are we having a racist moment here?” and Moyles, tomorrow’s headlines spinning in his head, was appalled. And you can understand why he feels she acted like a humourless, hypersensitive Hollywood android.
Yet it is his use of the word “gay” that has won him most enemies.
Stonewall marched with “Sack Chris Moyles” placards after he commented on air that he didn’t want a particular ringtone on his mobile because it was gay. The BBC backed him, said his definition meaning “lame or a bit rubbish” was a third and widespread usage after the pre-War “jolly and carefree” and the modern “homosexual”.
But isn’t gay being used as a pejorative term because homosexuality is seen as a bad thing? Doesn’t he have a responsibility to a young audience not to spread such attitudes? Moyles isn’t one for semantics: “I’ve never set myself up to be a role model. I’m a disc jockey. I have a certain amount of responsibility, but if I thought about that enough, then I wouldn’t have a show. I don’t not talk about Mother’s Day in case there is someone who has just lost their mother and it might upset them.”
