In tune with his audience

This cemented our friendship. Nearly seven million listeners tune in each week to his mid-morning show – that vital 2½ hour bridge between soon-to-go Terry Wogan and Jeremy Vine at lunch. He began broadcasting for BBC Radio Scotland in 1977, arriving in London seven years later. You might not recognise him in the street, but apart from the day job, you’ll have heard him on airline music shows and voice-overs; his handover banters with Wogan are legendary, as were their joint Eurovision Song Contest ventures over the decades. He is one of the regular presenters of Friday Night Is Music Night.

He lives in Towersey with his third wife and their three children (he has three other older children from previous marriages) and commutes early to be ready at 9.30 every morning; he wrote most of his autobiography (fun, but gossip-free) on a laptop to and from Marylebone Station.

He seems to be part of the furniture on Radio 2: others get the publicity for good or bad reasons, but he soldiers on whatever — Uncle Ken, as he was recently described by a reviewer.

“My interest in radio,” he told me, “ was not that I wanted to be in show business or to be ‘in the media’: I wanted to communicate, and this was the way I felt I could. Although it appears to be a sexy job, it’s not: it’s just a job. I don’t want to be famous.”

I pointed out that he has just written his autobiography.

He giggled. “Yeah… well, that’s all right, that’s just communication again. Of course there’s a certain amount of attention seeking, or performance, but I’m not out for fame.’ In that case, why did he leave Scottish broadcasting?

“Without wishing to be offensive to my homeland, I wanted to work on the big stage of the BBC which is – was, certainly – London. It’s perfectly understandable why people want to work in local radio or regional radio, but what I wanted to do was work in British national radio. It’s a thing about acceptance, really: if I could work there, I’d cracked it: I’d come to the peak of the business – the craft or trade I’d gone into.”

And that’s where (wanting fame or not – I’m still not absolutely sure!) Ken Bruce has stayed for more than two decades; often in the direct shade of Terry Wogan, who goes just before Christmas. “He could have stayed on, but he’s entirely right to go with what he feels is best: to a great extent, he’s the setter of the style of the network. Largely because it stretches from him to the sharper end, Radio 2 is in good shape.” He also robustly defends the BBC, as you’d expect, from suggestions that it should be sold off: “You can’t sell me, you can’t sell Chris Evans, the commercial radio stations are just bleating.”

There is, a private side to Ken Bruce. It was largely because of his seven-year-old son that he and his wife Kerith moved to Oxfordshire. Murray is autistic, and as Ken puts it in his book “doesn’t speak”. “We knew about the Chinnor Autism Resource Base, part of St. Andrew’s School, and we’d wanted him to go there if possible. It’s ideal. He’s enjoying it, but we haven’t had that breakthrough moment yet and you just don’t know when that’ll come – or if it will come. We think he can say more than he ever does, but we don’t know. We’ve had one sentence ever, ‘I want my mummy’, when he caught his finger in a door.”

Back to the mid-morning pro (“My contract’s extended to 2012, but the details aren’t inked in”). I asked what his own Desert Island musical choices would be.

“A Motown track, a Sinatra or Fitzgerald, a bit of accessible classical music, and maybe a couple of recent songs — New York, by Paloma Faith, is just wonderful — and Kenneth McKellar singing My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose.”

I raise an eyebrow. “No, seriously, listen to it: it’s a beautiful arrangement”.

He’s no eclectic John Peel, but Ken Bruce is certainly in tune with his audience.

* Tracks of My Years is published by Sidgwick & Jackson at £18.99.