Christian O'Connell

"Get out! Go on, I mean it…and you! Put your beer down before you leave." We are beginning to think maybe this wasn't one of our better ideas. Live on air Christian O'Connell is a man very much in control of his breakfast show and can seen somewhat intimidating. He doesn't hide behind a false persona and in reality what you hear is what you get - he's genuinely nice but likes to keep you on your toes. As he unexpectedly starts asking us questions live on air, we realise that to our horror, he is expecting answers and we are in for a bumpy ride.

Christian O'Connell and news-monkey Chris Smith have been the voices you've been hearing on the Xfm breakfast session for little over a year, and listening to their rapport on the radio, you would be excused for presuming they have been working together for longer. They first met when Christian joined XFM where Chris was already reading the news at breakfast. "We just got on with it," he explains, "I was told he was quite funny, but a year later...you've just got to give it time, don't you? You've got to see what happens." Christian studied Communication Studies at the Nottingham Trent University because he had hoped it would qualify him for the job he is currently doing, but he soon discovered it only qualified him for a career in sales. He went from his job in sales straight into radio by telling the Group Programme Director for GWR that he could "do a better job than most of his crappy morning crews." As luck would have it, someone had just left the company and so Christian sent in a demo tape. "At first, they didn't want me doing it so I would come in and do a free show at the weekend. For five hours. Which was an absolute nightmare for me, and I'm sure, the listeners." It took him about six months to master the technical stuff and then he "fucked off" at the next opportunity.

"You know, we're 15th in London, it's terrifying isn't it?
Literally tens of people."

Having started his radio career on Dorset's 2CR-FM, Winchester's Christian O'Connell, joined Xfm at the start of 2001 fresh from Liverpool's Juice 107.6, where he had transformed the station's Rajar figures. "It (Juice 107.6) was a station even smaller than this, so I'm making a career of working for very small stations." For a while previously, the breakfast session had no real direction, recruiting Robin Banks, Tom Binns, Mark Webster, and Helen Chamberlain amongst others but to no real avail. None of them lasted longer than a matter of months or made such a lasting impression. Since then, London's gig-going public, and one or two "loony listeners", have embraced the breakfast session with Christian O'Connell, taking it from number 18 to number 15 in London in it's first year, prompting a new batch of Xfm t-shirts to be pressed and given away to begging punters.

We were lucky enough to be invited to drag ourselves out of bed at 5am to venture into the Capital building to see how the breakfast show is lovingly crafted and put our questions to Christian and Chris. Produced by Roque Segade Vietio, the show never fails to be original and entertaining, lead by Christian's unique sense of humour and ability to change the show's direction on a whim or given an interesting internet link. The show sounds to the listener, not scripted but planned in parts whereas in reality Christian and Chris try to plan as little as possible in order to keep the feel raw, as Christian explains, "it's more fun for us to do and I think the listeners appreciate that, so it sounds more exciting, hopefully, to listen to. (It's) like Chris Evans when he was at the height of his powers…just having fun and pissing around, and that's what we try to do."

Christian: "Jonathan Ross is becoming our kind of…."
Chris: "Bitch?"
Christian: "Yeah, our bitch. It's great news. I mean he steals a lot of material from me, and he nicks songs from XFM."

Surprisingly, being such a spontaneous and unpredicatable show, there are very few ideas that they come up with, that they aren't allowed to carry through. "We're kind of self-censoring, we're all on the same wavelength," says Chris, "like this morning with the Richy Edwards stuff*." Christian continues, "I think we handled that in the best possible way, rather that actually doing it and getting into a lot of trouble. We still made the joke without upsetting a lot of people, which it would have done. Roque's not very cencorous and I programme him that way." Producer Roque is the man responsible for the smooth running of the show and ensuring the show's content is listener-friendly, "we found him in the street one day and we offered him a job, and he's doing alright. He makes a nice cup of tea," jokes Christian, "but as you've seen today he's very rude to some listeners on the phone, so actually we'll probably fire him."

For a show that is so close to the edge and on at such a prime slot in the schedules they have received very few complaints. "There's been the odd one," explains Christian, "I think the listeners of XFM want that kind of a show, and they appreciate what we're doing. I think it's because of the station that people expect it. They have people like Ricky Gervais on and they want to be challenged and hear stuff that makes them go 'I can't believe they just said that.'" "And it's done with intelligence," adds Chris, "it's not just done for the shock value."

"We can start Monday anywhere. We can pack up and go in the middle of the show. If the call came, we'd be out of this shit hole."

However, there was one incident a few months ago which comes to mind causing Christian to cringe as he recounts it. Chris Morris, the award winning writer of Brass Eye and The Day Today, cut and paste various speeches made by George W Bush during the September 11th atrocities and posted the file up on the internet. "We just dubbed it off and didn't really listen properly and were thinking 'this is really good, you can't hear the c*nts.' But you can. You really can." This failed to go unnoticed by the Head of Xfm. "He told me he counted seven of them," says Christian, "at ten past eight in the morning." But to this day, the station hasn't received a single complaint, "which is incredible and which goes to show…there genuinely is no-one listening!" The chief executive of the Capital Group, Europe's biggest median owner, was also listening that morning. "I watched my whole career flash in front of my eyes. I had to go and see him. He said 'Everyone gets nine lives, you've just used up all nine.'"

With the last quarter's Rajar figures came the news that the XFM Breakfast session with Christian O'Connell has moved from 16th up to 15th biggest in London in terms of listening figures. These figures are clearly important to the companies who use XFM as a platform for advertising, but are they important to the show's host who nearly jumped off the top of the Capital building on the day the figures were released, fearing the worst? "It's nice to do well. It's better than not doing very well. And most importantly it keeps the management off our backs… and they let us carry on doing the show we want to do and that we enjoy doing." And with Steve Penk, drafted in to replace Chris Evans at Virgin, now sacked, Christian couldn't be more pleased to have picked up a few of his listeners. "I could easily do a show to 3.3 million. When you're in the studio you kind of lose track of that really. You just do the show and imagine that you're just chatting. It's very hard to imagine people are listening to it. I still find it really weird when I get into a taxi and they're actually listening to XFM. I think 'I wonder if they actually listen in the morning.'" And having broadcast an hour of today's show from the back of a listener's hackney carriage with a London tour guide, he now has proof that some cabbies do listen.

Christian: "The exact number (of listeners) is um…"
Chris: "It's 12 or 13 isn't it?"
Christian: "Billion"
Chris: "Somewhere in the region of about, per half hour, sixteen billion people."
Christian: "Yeah. It's hard to actually get that in your head, but trust me, that's true."

Before Christian made his name on the radio, he spent four years from 1994 as a stand-up comedian, and despite his own claims that "it didn't go very well" he won the Leicester Comedy Festival New Act of the Year, the Nottingham Evening Post Comedian of the Year and reached the final of SYTYF? at the Edinburgh Festival. "It's very lonely when you're up there and no-one's laughing at you," says Christian. "It wasn't really something I wanted to keep doing." "It's the hardest game in the world, that game, the old stand-up," suggests Chris. Christian continues, "I do enjoy doing this and it's nice when we go out and do live stuff like the Nativity play and when we get punters in every once in a while."

The last breakfast session before Christmas was broadcast live from O'Neills in Leicester Square where they were joined by Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jonathan Ross and Armstrong and Miller. As Christian tells us, they are very lucky that so many of the people they respect and admire, have become almost friends, "Xfm is that kind of station where those kind of people like that kind of music, which is fantastic and it means a lot to get that kind of endorsement."

"I've just got a new dog called Digby who is a six month old cocker spaniel. So now I'm married with two dogs living in Surrey. Very very rock and roll. In fact Tarrant, Penk and me all live within a couple of miles of each other, I don't know why we don't hang out more."

They have also just been given the go-ahead to do some breakfast sessions live from the Edinburgh Festival. "We don't do a lot of O.B.s like Tarrant does when he's in Saint Tropez where he's 'I'm here and you're not, I don't give a f*ck!'" "Now here's something funny out of the Sun," adds Chris. "That will be fantastic fun," says Christian, "but also on air we'll be able to get a lot of comedians on and get people on who we haven't come across before." And the exciting news for listeners is that they are planning on taking a few listeners with them on the six hour train journey. "We might actually have to get the National Express up. Sixty seven days to get up there." For Christian, it will be a complete contrast from the last time he went to the festival and had to sleep rough. "That's when I thought, actually, I'm not sure the stand up thing is really going to happen for me. I'm in the most exciting comedy festival, and I'm sleeping in a doorway. This isn't really going to take off."

Christian has no immediate ambitions but jokingly suggests one, "to get out of here, get out of XFM, put it behind me, move on." Recently, he is facing this question increasingly often. "I'm sort of having lots of those meetings at the moment where people go, 'and what do you want to do?' I don't really have a big idea. Radio is my first love." "And it'll be your last," jokes Chris.

The head of XFM interrupts...
XFM: "These are the website people?"
Christian: "Yeah, Comedylounge.co.uk, big time…we're big time now"
Five minutes later Christian returns.
Christian: "Sorry, I've just been fired."

Listen to Christian, Chris and Roque as a matter of urgency on London's 104.9 XFM, online at www.xfm.co.uk or on Sky Digital Channel 864 every weekday morning from 6.30am til 10am.

*Read *HERE* to find out about the Richy Manic stuff.