I gave up on Radio One completely soon after I got the full time job in local radio. Instead, I immersed myself in that station - and as I was working there all hours (really, all hours), I never had any time for listening to anything else anyway.
Until.
Until Mark 'n' Lard.
I'm not sure how I ended up getting into Mark 'n' Lard, but I'm pretty sure it was through the recommendation of others. They made quite a stir, coming from virtually nowhere to replace the egotist supreme, Chris Evans, on the Radio One breakfast show, and although they were an ill-fit for that time of the day, they soon found their place on mid-afternoons, at which point I became addicted.
This was the height of Britpop, a very laddy time, and on the surface a lot of Mark 'n' Lard's humour was laddy too: smutty and foul-mouthed, yet laced with an undercurrent of irony and self-deprecation that Evans never had. I was in my mid-20s, at the height of my gigging history, and Mark 'n' Lard soundtracked late night drives home and long, lonely walks across the moors on my days off.
They did this because I taped their show. This seems such a long time ago now, such an old-fashioned way of doing things in this era of iPlayers and on demand, but I had a hi fi with a timer and a dual cassette deck, so every afternoon while I was at work it clicked on about 15 minutes into their show, recorded a full C90, and then clicked off just before they were done.
I loved that show. Fat Harry White. Beat The Clock. The American Sports Network. The Cheesily Cheerful Chart Challenge. Slim & Shady. The Shirehorses.
Yes, it was puerile. Yes, it was corny. But it was too northern blokes (with northern accents - no elocution needed!) having a laugh, and it felt so natural (even though I suspect much of it was tightly planned, maybe even rehearsed) that it reflected everything I always thought radio should be. I didn't have a lot of friends in my 20s, and those that I did were mostly in radio. But Mark 'n' Lard were my radio mates.
I cried when they broadcast their last show, but I understood why they had to go. They'd become an anachronism at Radio One. Two middle-aged blokes on a station aimed at teenagers? It was time for them to move on. Me too. The day they left Radio One, so did I. There was nothing to keep me there. It was another of those Last Time For Everything moments I keep mentioning here. We all put away those childish things.
