Galloway's fiery rhetoric proves that left-wing talk shows can attract listeners
George Galloway TalkSport
In America there is an orthodoxy that, for a phone-in to work, it must be driven by a right-wing host such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage or G Gordon Libby (that's right, the Watergate burglar). The conventional explanation for this is that the young listen to music on their radios, leaving older Republican-voting men to tune in to talk. But a nasty suspicion lingers that left-wingery is simply not box office.
A few years ago, the Saturday Night Live satirist Al Franken challenged this orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the radio station he helped launch, Air America, was a disaster - amateur, long-winded and within a few years facing bankruptcy. His own show in particular failed, his deadpan sarcasm no match for his plain-speaking political rivals. In February he left, and in May Air America, under new ownership, relaunched with only one of its original hosts in place.
In Britain, too, since the early Nineties, there has been a shift to the right in phone-ins. With more stations opening and a loosening of regulation, a rougher tone began to develop. Richard Littlejohn on LBC and his spiritual successor David Banks, the late Mike Dickin, James Whale and Jon Gaunt on TalkSport have made British airwaves sound, politically, more and more like America's.
For a year now, the Respect MP George Galloway has challenged the trend on a remarkable late-night weekend phone-in on TalkSport. It is a hell of a show, although it sometimes makes you feel as if you are being held with a knife to your throat down a dark alley by the most articulate man in the world. His three-hour epics are not without wit. In a nod to the embarrassment of his Celebrity Big Brother sojourn, in which he impersonated a pussycat, they begin with the Top Cat theme. The combination of socialist firebrand and commercial radio station provides unintentional humour, as when Galloway has to read out a promotional script ("Have you got your TalkSport prepaid credit card?"). On the whole, however, Galloway has mastered his new medium - mock him at your peril.
On Friday, proceedings started with a Buffalo Springfield song from the Summer of Love that segued into Galloway's retelling of the My Lai massacre. It ended with the coda: "I have to tell you, dear listeners, that is what happens with occupations." His dark, sonorous voice made it like listening to a terrible ghost story. Soon he was fulminating against George Bush, "a draft dodger in power sending other people's children to their deaths".
He wins much agreement and dissent is dealt with brutally. "You lunatic!" he lacerated a contributor on Friday. "I hear the flapping of white coats there," he said of another on Saturday. A man rang claiming Galloway had voiced a conspiracy theory about Israel. "I have never uttered those words, so take it back right now. It is a lie or you are off the radio." And off he went. "Your howler was going to Iraq," he was told. "Not as great a howler as George Bush and Tony Blair going to Iraq," he replied.
More people are willing to take him on by text than by phone. One called him a scumbag and warned him to be "very afraid". Galloway thanked him for including his mobile phone number; it would be passed directly to the police. Another texter said he looked forward to seeing him at Glasgow Airport, a reference not to the terrorist attack, but to an assault he had suffered there last month. "That's three being sent to the police already," he noted. And so it went on: praise, hero worship ("It is a privilege to talk to such a great man") and hatred.
Galloway, who can barely hide his contempt for the station's morning presenter Gaunt, is the far left's radio revenge. On Saturday a caller mentioned Littlejohn, the journalist I would credit with moving the airwaves rightwards. "Richard Littlejohn," Galloway responded, "is a drivelling guttersnipe who long ago fell out of the gutter into the sewer . . . This man is a moron. This man is a boor. This man is an idiot."
Whatever else he is, Galloway is not an idiot, nor is he a commercial liability, as his ratings are excellent. You may think that in him radio has found a cure worse than the disease, but you have to admire his indefatigability.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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