Ken Bruce: ‘I had the biggest show on radio – the BBC didn’t think it was worth a mention’
After decades as a ‘foot soldier’ of the Corporation, Bruce has a new home on commercial radio – and he’s taken his fans with him
In the basement studio of a Soho office block, Ken Bruce is presenting his mid-morning show. The atmosphere is so serene – Bruce effortlessly switching between music and low-key chat, his voice as soothing as a hot toddy – that it’s easy to forget he’s broadcasting to an audience of 3.8 million.
It’s a figure that might haunt Bruce’s old bosses at Radio 2: since his move a year ago, more than one million listeners have followed him to Greatest Hits Radio. His arrival has helped to boost the station’s overall audience by 70 per cent, in what his delighted new employers are terming “The Ken Effect”.
Not that Bruce likes to dwell on the numbers. “You’ve got to think, ‘I’m still talking to the one person.’ And that’s been the case ever since I was doing the farm prices on BBC Scotland.” He started there as an announcer in 1977, adopting a distinctive approach he describes, in his affable way, as: “Just do the job as best you can and hope that somebody’s appreciating it.”
During his latter years at Radio 2, where he worked for four decades and hosted the mid-morning show for 31 years, Bruce began to feel a lack of appreciation from his bosses. When, in 2019, he overtook Zoë Ball to become the UK’s most listened-to radio presenter, the BBC barely acknowledged the fact. “If you’ve been somewhere for a while, there’s an expectation that you’re going to deliver. And you always do,” Bruce says now. “They push this person and that person” – as the high-profile replacement for Chris Evans, Ball was the focus of the Corporation’s PR efforts – “and the everyday guys get left to get on with it.
“I didn’t want any hoo-ha, so when my show became the biggest show on radio, I didn’t want to say anything about it but I kind of thought the BBC should. I wasn’t expecting to be carried on a litter with people strewing palms in front of me, but I thought, surely that’s worth a mention? As far as I’m aware, it wasn’t mentioned by the BBC at all. Ever.” To paraphrase the Barbie soundtrack: at Radio 2, he was just Ken. Anywhere else he’d be a 10.
