Michael Ball has just been announced as the new host of Radio 2’s Sunday Love Songs programme, and that sound that the more attuned among us might have picked up on over these last couple of hours is likely to be a collective sigh of relief. An entirely different kind of presenter from his predecessor, true, but a safe pair of hands nevertheless. Perhaps even (whisper it) a better pair…?
Sunday Love Songs began in 1996 and has since been amongst the station’s most popular shows, and certainly one with an especially devoted listenership. For decades it was presented by Steve Wright in what it would be fair to say was his “inimitable” fashion: this was radio at its most interactive without actually letting the listeners on air.
Nevertheless, while it offered up a revolving selection of Lionel Richie, Gladys Knight and the Bee Gees, listeners dictated its mood, and kept it at a perpetual “syrupy”: oozing warmth, sentiment, and public proclamations from David from Doncaster that he would continue to love Debbie “to the Moon and back” until “the end of time”, and possibly even longer, because true love is rarely quite so easily restrained.
In an era of streaming, where it seems fairly pointless to ask a DJ to play your favourite song when you can simply cue it up on Spotify, Love Songs allowed all of us the opportunity to declare private feelings to our partners before an audience of millions. Even someone as energetic as Steve Wright – who, on his old afternoon show, could behave as if the records were getting in the way of his on-air jocularity – understood that this was the people’s show.
His successor, then, needed to have a comparably natural warmth in order to complement, say, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack, or something anguished and octave-scaling by Céline Dion. Michael Ball is the perfect fit.
A star of musical theatre, and quite comfortably the most effervescent broadcaster all across Planet Radio, Ball already has a mid-morning Sunday show which for years has followed Love Songs, and is the kind of giddy delight that even those listeners for whom “less is more” find themselves helplessly enjoying.
True, he’d never be asked to sit in for Steve Lamacq on 6 Music, but his perpetual ebullience is really rather charming. There are times during his show – particularly the phone-in competition, On the Ball – when the man (who has previously confessed to bouts of depression) sounds simply like the happiest human alive. Everything is a hoot, a giggle; his listeners adore him just as he does them.
But he does empathy just as well, and the show he presented in the wake of Wright’s untimely death earlier this year confirmed that he could both read, and navigate, any situation, and do so beautifully. With a style very much his own, he’ll likely make Love Songs his own too, and quick.
“I’m beyond excited and more than a little nervous to be tasked with the chance to continue [Steve Wright’s] extraordinary legacy,” Ball said earlier today. Nerves are a good thing, but he doesn’t need them.
In many ways, his represents an old-fashioned appointment for a Radio 2 otherwise trying to rebrand itself as youthful, and looking towards tomorrow. Michael Ball, 62, is a throwback to a more traditional presenter: no irony, no snark, just a great barrelling sincerity.