Jeremy Vine exclaims as he’s undertaken by car
Jeremy Vine has claimed his predecessor Sir Jimmy Young refused to accept his lunch invitation after the former took over his BBC Radio 2 slot.
Speaking in an episode of Kaye Adams’ How To Be 60 podcast, he discussed how his fellow journalist, then 81, left the station in 2002 after decades of broadcasting his lunchtime show – and he’d replaced him for the 12pm to 2pm slot.
Jimmy had insisted that it hadn’t been his decision to leave, branding the BBC “brutal” and announcing they’d decided to “axe my enormously successful, award-winning programme”.
“When Jimmy Young left, he was so angry about it… When I said, ‘Can we meet for lunch, can we talk about it?’ he sent me this little note [saying]: ‘I do not have time for lunch,'” Jeremy claimed.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s so cross, he’s angry with me!'”
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At the time, there had been plans for Jimmy to move to a weekend show instead, but in the end, he chose to retire altogether from the channel.
He wrote in his Sunday Express column at the time: “I was going to write that I had enjoyed that relationship [with the BBC] but that wouldn’t be true.
“Sometimes enjoyable, often not, would be a more accurate description.”
The veteran broadcaster, who died in 2016 aged 95, also expressed his discontent with the license fee.
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“People no longer automatically tune to the BBC as the authoritative voice of the news. ITV changed that when it proved it could mount news programmes as well, sometimes better than the BBC,” he wrote.
However, at the time, a spokeswoman at the station responded: “It was his decision to leave. He was offered a weekend programme which he chose not to take, so he has left the BBC of his own accord.”
Meanwhile, discussing the prospect of ageism in the media and being ousted at a certain age, Jeremy made it clear he didn’t feel threatened.
“As a journalist, when you get older, you get better,” the 58-year-old declared, adding: “I don’t really go for public panic – let’s see.”
Discussing what he does pre-emptively to tackle ageing, Jeremy told Kaye he was committed to listening to the opinions of others, even if he doesn’t agree with them, to try to avoid getting set in his ways.
“I’ve become more liberal actually… [I’m] the grumpy old men who grumps at all the grumpy old men because I don’t want to be [one]!” he chuckled.
“If you just listened to people who agree with you, you’d die 10 years earlier!”
He added that he also tries to listen to music he doesn’t like, in order to “reprogram” his brain against dementia and “shake things up”, leading Kaye to declare him “nuts”.
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