On air with LBC's Nick Ferrari

Jasmine Gardner
6 May 2010

Barely off-air, Nick Ferrari has taken one look at me and launched into a comedy routine. He's having pictures taken and is trying to embarrass the photographer. “You want me to undo WHAT?” he shrieks, and giggles at his own joke.

I expected not to like Ferrari much (we don't share many views) but I can't help myself from laughing. He's infectiously chirpy.

Before I set up this interview, Ferrari's name meant very little to me. Yes, the radio wakes me up every morning but the only people I entrust with the job of disrupting my slumber are the Today team. In fact, I haven't listened to anything but Radio 4 for five years. So it was with a demurring finger that I changed the settings on my radio alarm to welcome LBC 97.3 and Ferrari's voice into my bedroom at 7am.

To say I was pleasantly surprised would suggest that Ferrari is comfortable listening. In actual fact, hearing him ask: “This is ridiculous … Why the hell are we giving £16,000 to this young man and his girlfriend? [Two NEETs — Not in Employment, Education or Training — who are claiming benefits]. They have probably never done a day's work in their lives”, or listen to a caller recount a story about being bullied at school because he sat next to a boy with learning difficulties who “dribbled”, is enough to make you cringe —or start chucking clothes hangers at the radio.

But it does work. You find out what the day's news stories are — though granted only the ones that Ferrari thinks are important. “We only do stories that I'm interested in. If you're in tune with your product, you're making your product for you because you know what your listeners want,” he says. You get a bit of debate, and it's exactly those strong opinions that encourage Londoners to put down the clothes hanger and call in.

“I would listen to my show because I would like the blend of what's going on,” says Ferrari. “You give a politician a kick in the bollocks, which is great fun. You find out they're closing the North Circular — have they all gone mad? You shout at somebody about something else and then talk about girls' knickers. Fantastic.”

In the past year Ferrari has seen the number of Londoners tuning in to his breakfast show increase by more than 40 per cent — while the Today programme has seen a three per cent drop. As if in acknowledgement of this feat, he has also received a record-breaking five Sony Award nominations, for Speech Radio Personality of the Year, Speech Broadcaster of the Year, Breakfast Show of the Year, Best Speech Programme and News Journalist of the Year. He'll find out the results at a ceremony on Monday night.

Despite all this, Ferrari is still a long way off matching the listener figures for his Radio 1 breakfast rival, Chris Moyles — who tops the charts with more than seven million. “He's better known because the BBC spends an inordinate amount of money promoting him, including adverts in the cinema that have me hurling popcorn at the bloody screen,” says Ferrari — and of course Moyles has music, and the whole of the country to pull listeners from. “There are some music shows that we're not far from beating — Magic, for example. So it can be done, but we're not going to do it overnight.

“If I win five Sonys I will run stark naked through the streets of Rochdale with Gillian Duffy,” he promises. Yet if he doesn't win, Ferrari still believes he's on to something.
“As the whole world moves towards tweeting and every television programme and paper is asking you to “tell us what you think”, it's all about opinions — everyone wants an opinion. You'll always have the BBC boring everyone to death — sorry, providing balance — so where is the radio station that says you can have your opinion and, guess what, we've also got a presenter who will have an opinion? There's no problem getting the news, you can get it on your mobile — that's easy. Opinions are what count.”

The trouble is, Ferrari is a fifty-ish (he won't reveal precisely how old) divorced father of two grown-up sons (21 and 23), who was privately educated at Eltham College in south London and who lives alone in sedate Blackheath. So why would edgy, cosmopolitan Londoners care about his opinions?

“[The BBC] tried a while ago to work out why I was scoring so well and they found out that the majority of my listeners are exactly what I'm not. I spent my formative years on titles like The Sun and the Sunday Mirror. I've been there for riots, I've been there for shootings, I've been there knocking on the door trying to get pictures from a mum who has just lost her 18-year-old daughter in some hideous bloody accident, so I know what these people are like. I've not come through the BBC school.”

In fact, Ferrari has been working in newsrooms since he was a child. (His father, Lino “Dan” Ferrari, founded the Ferrari Press Agency where future Sun and Mirror editors Kelvin MacKenzie and the late Richard Stott cut their teeth.) He went on to become editor of Bizarre, The Sun's showbiz column, launch Sky News as its first editor in 1989, work for Fox News in New York and subsequently the Daily Mirror and L!ve TV before he joined LBC in 2001.

“I would get home from school at the age of 10 and something would have happened, like a teenage motorcyclist had been killed on the Orpington bypass, and I would be dictating the story over the phone to a Ferrari copy taker as I had a bowl of cornflakes,” he recalls of his childhood working from home for his dad's agency. “That's how I learned to speak.”

Ferrari does, in fact, speak without the normal hesitations of dialogue. He still talks twice as fast as the average person and never pauses to consider before answering — he thinks and edits himself on the go. And, while he says “one of the major contributing factors [to the programme] is what the people are telling me”, he adds that: “I'm the only presenter in the world who does a phone-in show and refuses to read out the phone number. You have to show that, if necessary, you will talk for three hours. If you project that, people will want to get involved.”

In 2003 the Broadcasting Standards Council upheld a complaint from a listener that Ferrari had encouraged comments from callers who made racist remarks about asylum seekers. These days he is strict with his “card system”. A red card will be given to anyone who starts a sentence with “I f***ing hate …” “They are cut off — my finger is always near the controls,” he says. “If someone says something like: I haven't got a problem with homosexuals …' my finger is immediately there, but I couldn't do my job if I lived in fear.”

In the past month his guests have included Alistair Darling, Vince Cable, George Osborne and David Cameron (the Tory leader has been on the show four times — Gordon Brown has rejected his advances 15 times).

The 2003 incident placed Ferrari in the “shock jock” category but it's a term he despises. “The only thing that is likely to anger me more than spending a night at the Grosvenor House [for Monday's awards] and not getting any awards is to be called a shock jock. I don't just sit there and say Gordon Brown is an idiot' … that is shock jock bollocks. It's what I don't do. This is opinionated, informed but serious.”

Yet, of course, it's not all serious and one of the great appeals of Ferrari, for me at least, is that with him there is a gag in everything.

Of his future plans he says: “My career can go further if I can become Piers Morgan's hairdresser. Because there's a lot of work to do there.” His age, or his lack of disclosure about it, has become a running joke that he has got his listeners involved with — as was his dog, whose name he wouldn't disclose for years. (The dog is now dead, so he reveals it was called Manhattan.)
Even his divorce from Sally Ferrari is not off-limits. It might have been such a “suitably seismic event” that they now barely speak, but he is still prepared (on the morning I meet him) to make a joke on air about her causing the recent unrest in Bangkok because she went there on holiday — and bounces in his seat with joy as he does so.

“If you just sit there ponderously intoning about the Greek fiscal crisis you'll see people jumping off tall buildings all over London.”

If anything, it could be that this sense of fun could stop me from switching back to the Today programme.