His producer calls it the kennel, and when James O’Brien is on his own in his cramped studio, he does sometimes look a bit like a bulldog chewing on a wasp. Today on LBC, he’s taking calls about the news that Ashya King, the five-year-old whose parents were detained by police after taking him abroad for brain tumour treatment, has gone into remission. As he sets out the terms of the discussion, asking listeners if the development makes them sceptical about received medical wisdom, producer Michael is getting excited. “He is a bit of an alsatian,” he says, chucking another dog into the mix. “And sometimes we take the lead off.”
“Gavin’s in Farnham,” O’Brien says. “Gavin, what’s made you pick up the phone?” Gavin, it turns out, is an enthusiastic believer in the internet’s ability to cure cancer – it’s something to do with acid in your blood – and he thinks doctors are being sent to prison for telling the truth. O’Brien, his eyes fixed to the desk, has been stroking his chin and bobbing his head throughout this explanation, but at the last bit his head snaps up, and you can almost see his hackles rise.
When he thinks about his approach afterwards, he’ll say that he’s not as fierce as he used to be – that turning 40, and coming to terms with the death of his father, have given him a different perspective. But just at this moment, he has only one target in mind. “Doctors are being sent to prison?” he says, something ominous in his control. “Can you remember any of those examples?” “Not off the top of my head, no,” says Gavin, and O’Brien is away.
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“Oh, you had so much off the top of your head,” he says. “Can’t you remember any doctors who’ve been sent to prison for giving good advice to patients? ’Cos that, as a journalist, even with my ludicrously ill-equipped news antennae, that’s got scoop written all over it.” Before long, the caller rings off: Gavin, from Farnham, is vanquished. “You have to be very strong,” says Michael, and although he’s talking about the demands on the production team, you suspect it applies to the callers as well. “If you’re not, he’ll ride roughshod over you.”
This is what a lot of people think of when they think of talk radio: affirmative outrage, the world set vigorously to rights. O’Brien, a rare creature in this game, coming as he does from the left, has been doing it for a long time now, with a fulltime slot on LBC for more than a decade. But in the last year or so, at the age of 43, something has clicked.
The hyper-articulate takedowns of his less thoughtful callers – such as Richard, who demanded British Muslims apologise for the Charlie Hebdo attack, and was asked when he would be apologising for his namesake, the shoebomber Richard Reid – are endlessly popular online, but it was the application of the same forensic haranguing to Nigel Farage that really brought him to a wider audience. In 20 minutes of electric radio, O’Brien made a more compelling case for the prosecution than any other interviewer had managed – so successfully that the Ukip leader’s PR man felt compelled to enter the studio and cut things short. Once, his best-known clip had been an awkward conversation with Frank Lampard, when the footballer called up to complain that O’Brien was traducing him on the air in the aftermath of his separation from his girlfriend; now, the attention was of a very different sort. Before long, an invitation to guest-host Newsnight arrived, and with it considerable speculation that he was a dark-horse candidate to replace Paxman.
While that didn’t materialise – Evan Davis’s more honeyed tones being preferred in the end – it remains clear that O’Brien’s star is on the rise. He’s back for his latest guest gig on Newsnight this Thursday. And, more importantly, he’s been given his very own property on ITV: a two-week test run of a daily daytime debate show, with the prospect of a more permanent slot in future if it all goes well. O’Brien has been previewing the electoral debates on LBC this time around; with a bit of luck and a following wind, it’s not impossible to imagine him hosting one next time, instead.
Over a sandwich shortly after the show ends, O’Brien is self-effacing about the combative style that has brought him this success. “Partly it’s just … I have all this stuff to say. And I want to get as much of it out there as possible.” But the funny thing, he says, is that he’s not such a firebrand any more; that version of his work is a bit out of date. And his show, it’s true, has much more to it than mere bombast.
“If your feelings are high and you’re adrenalised, sometimes you can go in a little too hard,” he says. “I reserve that now for racists and homophobes. But it’s a work in progress.” If he was doing the Lampard segment now, he says, he might refrain from using words such as “scum” and “weak” that so exercised the footballer. Explaining the change, he mentions the death of his father, also called James. It’s not the only time he comes up. “Losing my dad shortly after I turned 40, that shook everything up, really. I loved him to pieces, and all I ever wanted to do was make him proud. And then … I can’t now.”
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He looks away and out of the window, his eyes visibly pricking with tears. “My certainties got shaken up. Since that happened, I just think – if you’re not being mean and you’re not attacking someone else, you probably don’t deserve to be attacked. Whereas previously, winning the argument was the absolute dog’s bollocks. It was everything I cared about.”
It was while listening to the Today programme in the car with his dad that his career ambitions formed. “Journalist,” he says, smiling. “Yeah. Like my daddy. It’s all I ever wanted to be.” But in the early days, the definition didn’t include talk radio host. His ambitions lay in book reviewing, and a career as a Fleet Street political correspondent. Instead, he found his way in through the gossip columns, and wound up as showbiz editor of the Daily Express. “You rush through whatever door is open, you clamber up whatever ladder presents itself,” he says. “But then I started to think: would you rather be writing about Norman Cook or Norman Lamont? I couldn’t understand why anyone went into the politics side of things.”
There are those who hear a thwarted intellectualism in his broadcasting – his almost parodically elevated vocabulary, his tendency to give a running commentary on the value of the format as he goes along, his preference (excepting the occasional Gavin) for the callers with authority on their subject. But O’Brien says this is just snobbery. “There’s a subtext I don’t like – which is, oh, a phone-in show, here’s someone sounding clever, getting clever callers on – that’s a turn up for the books. No it isn’t. Why on earth wouldn’t clever people call a show like mine?”
Things will be a little different, he admits, on the TV show, in which two experts will debate an issue along with an on-the-fence observer and an audience that includes a number of people with relevant experiences of their own. “I have a fondness for absurdly long words which I can indulge in a three-hour radio show,” he says with a smile. “I don’t think my sesquipedalian tendencies would fit quite so well into an ITV daytime show. You have to be a bit more sledgehammer than scalpel on the telly. But I like using the sledgehammer sometimes.”
It is, again, not a view his 21-year-old self would have taken. But doing diary shifts for a tabloid and a broadsheet, and hearing the difference in the voice of a colonel on the other end of the line depending on which outlet he said he was working for, awoke a contrarian urge to step away from the establishment. And it spoke, too, to the son of the man who never quite fitted in on Fleet Street. O’Brien may be a privately educated LSE graduate, but he carries the slights he feels were inflicted on his father – who left school at 15 – with him to this day, and the contrast in their experience of social class weighs heavily on him.
“My dad came up by a tough route,” he says. “The Hull Daily Mail, the Shipley Times. And then he paid for me to go to a posh school. And if he hadn’t, I don’t think I could have called the Express and told them they should jolly well give me some shifts. I don’t think I would have had the front. My dad bought me a golden ticket because in his own career, the fact that he had a Yorkshire accent, and maybe didn’t quite fit the Telegraph way of doing things … ” he breaks off, and his voice cracks again. “I think maybe Dad felt he didn’t fit in. And he got made redundant. And he sent me to a school that gave me all the attributes that the people who looked down on him had.”
He pauses again, and it feels like time to end the interview. “I didn’t realise I was going to get emotional,” he says, suddenly a bit embarrassed. “Soft old sod. It’s my fault. When he used to answer the phone, we used to take the mickey out of him, because he’d just go: ‘O’Brien.’ And now that’s the name of my show.”
• O’Brien starts on Monday 30 March at 12.30pm on ITV.