Keith Lemon and Lucie Cave are starring together in new podcast Back Then When
(Picture: Eamonn M McCormack/Getty Images)Keith Lemon and Lucie Cave believe that cancel culture is a trend that will soon be a thing of the past - well, they, along with the rest of us, live in hope, at least.
TV star Lemon and award-winning editor Cave’s new nostalgia-filled podcast Back Then When sees them revisit the Nineties and Naughties on a bonkers “do-you-remember-when-THAT-happened?!” trip down pop and TV memory lane.
While we currently seem to live in a woke, overly PC world, where everyone is afraid of getting cancelled, hearing them chat away to the likes of Peter Andre, Emma Bunton, and Natalie Imbruglia, you would think some of the stories that their guests come out with could never happen now - could it?
“I think cancel culture is going to cancel itself. And then we’ll go back to how it was back then and, hopefully, people will go, ‘Oh, it was a joke.’ ‘Oh, was it?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Didn’t get it.’ ‘Oh, fair dos,’” Lemon tells the Standard.
“I’m not saying because it was all social media, but I think because there wasn’t social media there, to sort of stir things up or turn something that was meant in a light-hearted way and turn it into something bigger and negative,” added Cave.
The idea for their podcast came about in lockdown, but Lemon took some convincing.
“My missus always said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a podcast?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want to do one’. She goes, ‘You should do one, everyone does them’. And I went, ‘I know, that’s why I don’t want to do one’. I’m surprised my mum hasn’t got a podcast!” Lemon explained.
‘And then, out of the blue, Lucie goes, ‘Do you want to do a podcast?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do one’. She goes, ‘We’re gonna go back in time and talk to people from magazines from the past’. I’m like, ‘Have we got a time machine?’ She went, ‘Yeah, if you want’. I went, ‘Are you Doc Brown and I’m Marty McFly?’ She went, ‘If you wanna be’. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it then’.”
“You said to me, ‘Have you got a white jumpsuit?’” laughed Cave, referring to the outfit Christopher Lloyd’s character Doc Brown wears in time-travelling movie Back To The Future - Lemon’s all-time favourite.
Cave and Lemon first met back in the Nineties when she was a presenter on kids’ TV channel Trouble and he was still trying to make a name for himself under his real name, Leigh Francis, while moonlighting in a TV art department. Cave went on to find success as the editor of Heat magazine, and also as a celebrity ghostwriter. Reinventing himself with his new alter-ego, Lemon found fame in the controversial comedy series Bo’ Selecta! and then Celebrity Juice, among other shows.
“Everyone was kind of hanging on to the good days and the good times even more in lockdown and I think that’s just probably where we came up with the idea, because you always look back at certain times in pop history, like particularly the 1990s, I think, and just go, ‘God, wasn’t it amazing then and stupid and fun and everyone had a laugh,’” recalled Cave.
“I think popstar and celebrity was more fun, wasn’t it?” agreed Lemon. “I don’t know if it’s because they are too accessible now, with social media, but it was more shiny and it was more exciting when you saw someone and, ‘Oh! We’ve got a new song! Have you seen the video?’ You know what I mean? I can’t remember the last time I said, ‘Have you seen the new video?’ ’Cos now we don’t care because everything’s just there all the time.”
Cave continues: “I think it is a bit pre-social media actually because you’ve got it in your face all the time, whereas you had time to build up that excitement about different things that were like TV shows that were launching or when some kind of celebrity got together you’d read it in a magazine and you’d be hearing things for the first time and have enough time to get excited by it.”
Because their podcast calls for their guests to “transport” themselves back to a certain year based on the episode, it can lead to some comical confusion.
“Obviously, it’s hard enough to remember what you did last week let alone what you were doing in 1996, but that’s what’s quite funny because they’ll be saying something and going ‘oh’ and I think, in the future, maybe this might happen,” said Cave.
“You know what, I like now when we have people like Blue or 5ive on, and they are like grown-ups now, and they tell you what actually happened where, back then, they weren’t allowed to. That’s what I like because now they can,” said Lemon.
“Yeah, because you and I probably interviewed them at the time, but they were in the thick of it and they had an image to upkeep and they had to behave in a certain way, so you never really got the truth, whereas now in this podcast you get them telling these mad, funny stories of things and really opening up about what it was like,” agreed Cave.
One example is when they interview Scott Robinson and Ritchie Neville, from boyband 5ive in an upcoming episode, who reveal that not only did they once enjoy a drunken game of Bop It! in Noel Gallagher’s hotel room in Rio, member Sean Conlan got into a heated argument with the Oasis star because he told him his sideburns were too long.
“It was like, one minute they were telling mad tales like that, but then they were talking about just how much [being in the group] had affected their mental health. So it was kind of like really mad, fun stuff and then talking about… because Sean left. They are kind of like 5ive now, but there’s three of them.
“They had a video where he became a cardboard cut-out because he had basically had a mental breakdown and hadn’t turned up for the video but they still carried on with him as a cardboard cut-out but they couldn’t say all that then,” sighed Cave.
Another guest who surprised them was Kerry Katona.
“She was so open! But I think because she has come full circle, and is in a good place now, she’s earning loads of money on OnlyFans now,” added Cave.
The sky is the limit when it comes to who they would love to have on as future guests.
While Lemon cites Kylie Minogue and Patsy Kensit, Cave wants David and Victoria Beckham.
“The dream scenario would be going back to Posh and Becks, when they got married on those purple thrones, and reliving that day with them because it was so over the top and that was like, proper celebrity, wasn’t it, because they were unashamedly just over the top [and] lairy.
“I mean, they look back, like we all look back, quite embarrassed of old outfits, but I think that was them at their most brilliant and people talk about it now, and talk about that they became our sort of royalty, and they did and they owned it.”
