Jamie Theakston has been bigging up his new Heart 106.2 breakfast show, and he is promising London listeners a more intelligent and engaging show than that provided by his main competitors – in particular Radio 1’s Chris Moyles, Kiss’s Bam Bam, Virgin Radio’s Pete and Geoff and Capital FM’s Johnny Vaughan. Whether the Heart 106.2 listeners, who have been waking up to the intelligent and engaging sounds of Jono Coleman for the last few years, are ready for the revamped breakfast show remains to be seen, though bosses at the station will be hoping so – after several years of being the “station on the up” in the capital they now find themselves positioned as the “struggling ones”.
Theakston: "There are a lot of white middle-class men in their late 20s and 30s doing a similar brand of presenting. If you put Pete and Geoff, Johnny Vaughan, Bam-Bam and Chris Moyles in the same room it would get quite noisy, with people talking at each other and nobody listening. Our show will be very different - the audience will be at the front, they are the most important element of the show, not the presenter. If you listen to some of the other shows they seem far more interested in themselves than the audience. That schtick is quite tired, it's a spin-off from the Loaded [magazine] era and I don't know whether people find that way of interacting that interesting any more. We've got a great opportunity to take advantage of a gaping and obvious hole in the market." Can’t wait.