Vernon Kay is trying to explain what it will be like to present the most popular radio show in Europe. We are in studio 6A, on the sixth floor of the BBC’s Wogan House in central London. Outside the room is a Yamaha DC7 piano donated by Elton John in 2010, and recently tinkled by Benny from Abba and Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, and a loo that is reserved for Radio 2’s star presenters, who can quickly nip in there while a song is playing. In the studio, Kay jumps up and takes two long strides to a mixing desk. It’s a messy jumble of monitors, buttons and lights that looks – to the inexpert eye – like the cockpit of a basic aeroplane.
“Let’s say you’re my producer and there’s two of us in the studio,” he role-plays. “It’s pre-show and we’re just chewing the fat: ‘What did you do last night? Blah, blah, blah.’ And I’m sitting here, looking at the clock and the fader is down, right? So there’s two of us. Then all of a sudden, when you do this…” Kay pushes a yellow slider knob, which controls the microphone, to the open position. “Now you are live to 8.4 million people. It’s the most bizarre experience ever.” He continues to slide the knob up and down, almost lost in a daydream: “Just us two… Eight million… Us two… Eight million… Us two… Eight million.”
From Monday 15 May, Kay will be spending a lot of time in Studio 6A. In February, it was announced the 49-year-old would be the new presenter of Radio 2’s midmorning weekday show, taking over the 9.30am-to-midday slot from the beloved Ken Bruce, who left the station after 31 years for Bauer’s Greatest Hits Radio. The news was hardly a tea-spitter: since 2021, Kay has been Radio 2’s super sub, the first-choice stand-in for when regular hosts went on their hols. He has a familiar, approachable style – honed over the years on Radio 1 and Radio X – and has the ability, as he often notes, to talk and talk and talk.
But still, the gig is clearly the most high-profile of his career on radio and TV, which stretches back more than 20 years and includes long stints on T4 and All Star Family Fortunes, and truncated ones on shows such as Beat the Star and Splash! During Ken Bruce’s decades in the job, he turned the midmorning slot from an Alan Partridge punchline into the prime real estate of British radio, overtaking all of the breakfast shows and becoming – as Kay alluded to earlier – top dog in not only the UK, but all of Europe.
So, no pressure then? Kay slightly swerves the question. “Everyone’s saying to me, ‘Just be yourself,’” he replies. “I can’t put the mic up and pretend to know everything about every artist we’re playing, because I’m not that type of person. But I will say, ‘What is everyone doing right now? How are people going about their daily lives?’ Coming from a Northern working-class family… It’s a sweeping statement, but I think it’s easier to connect with what people are doing. My dad’s a lorry driver, didn’t really see that much of him, up and down the road, proper grafting, to give me and my brother a good living. My mum worked in a department store and she did exactly the same.
“My first ever job at 14 was putting stickers on boxes of bananas at a ripening factory,” Kay goes on. “I was a caretaker. I used to clean phone boxes. I’ve done all kinds of jobs where you meet all kinds of people. And I think it’s nice to just be one of them. Because I am one of them.”
Kay, who is married to the Strictly Come Dancing’s Tess Daly, with whom he has two teenage daughters, begins to well up as he thinks of what lies ahead. He dabs tears from his eyes. “Yeah, it’s massive,” he says. “Absolutely. Massive. It doesn’t get any bigger. But also for me, Tess and the kids. It’s mega and it comes with a lot of responsibility. So yeah, it means an awful lot. It really does.”
Twirl the dial to Radio 2 these days and, if you are a Gen Xer, you’re likely to feel a powerful throwback to the period either side of the millennium. In recent years, a number of longstanding presenters have either moved on or been gently nudged: Steve Wright, Simon Mayo, Chris Evans and Ken Bruce, among them. In their place, the station has filled the most high-profile slots with faces and voices who made their breakthrough in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Enter Zoë Ball, Sara Cox and Kay: reformed Ibiza stalwarts who now have children and lived experience.
Kay’s break came as a model, but not in the way it usually happens. He was scouted in his early 20s at BBC Clothes Show Live in Birmingham by an agent from Select. The agent convinced him to quit his job in his cousin’s DIY store in Bolton, which wasn’t a tough sell admittedly, and a week later Kay had moved to a flat in Peckham Rye, southeast London, that he shared with two other wannabes. One day he was flicking through GQ magazine when he came across an interview with the actor Ashton Kutcher. In it, Kutcher said he had written a private list of 10 things he wanted to achieve by the age of 40. Kay decided to do the same.
Even now, having ticked off nine items, Kay is reluctant to reveal the details of what ambitions were on the list. But a move into TV was one. That started when he was picked for a fly-on-the-wall ITV documentary, Babewatch, which followed aspirational models. This led to doing vox pops on a Play UK show called The Phone Zone and then in 2000, at 26, to presenting Channel 4’s T4, which he did for five years. T4 made Kay famous, certainly if you were a bleary-eyed student looking for something on the telly on a Sunday morning that was diverting and at times anarchically brilliant.
“Making a list really works,” says Kay, who is tall and strapping, with buoyant hair and gleaming teeth (which, according to legend, he brushes four times a day). “The secret is about really focusing on something so that your whole energy is about going and grabbing it. And that’s what I did. When I interviewed Ashton Kutcher for T4 I went, ‘Oh, you’ve got your list. I’ve done the same, because I read your interview.’ And we had a chat about that. About manifesting.”
Another item on the list was getting married. He and Daly were models, but never crossed paths: “I was only doing really lame stuff and she was all over the world.” But Daly also wanted to break into TV and ended up doing Kay’s vox-pop job when he moved to T4. They met at a Christmas party in 2001 and married two years later. “I fell in love with Tess instantly,” he says. “It was that simple. Just boom, wow! She’s a woman, an independent woman. That’s what was so attractive and even to this day what I find extremely attractive is that she is focused and driven. Which is fab, but then when you watch her with the kids…” Kay puffs out his cheeks, “She’s unbelievable.”
Kay and Daly’s eldest, Phoebe, is now 18; she was born not long after Daly started as co-presenter with Bruce Forsyth on Strictly Come Dancing. Their younger daughter, Amber, is 13. “Some people choose to have kids later on to see whether they can establish themselves, not necessarily in media, but in any career,” says Kay. “For us, it just felt natural. Both my parents and Tess’s parents – Tess’s father, sadly, passed away on our honeymoon – were together for a long time, and had kids quite early in their marriages. That was a big influence for us.”
When Phoebe was born, they moved from London to Buckinghamshire, where they still are. Kay smiles, “Noel Gallagher lived in Chalfont St Peter and he used to say: ‘It’s close enough that you can get to an emergency meeting, but also far enough away that no one comes and visits you.’”
Kay and Daly’s relationship has had its complications – in 2010, he became prime tabloid fodder after admitting to exchanging compromising messages with a glamour model – but in September it’s their 20th anniversary. “There’s something planned, I can’t say what,” he says. “But after 20 years, you need some personal time, don’t you? Nice glass of wine, nice dinner, good conversation, reflection, moving forward, all that stuff. It can only be positive. I feel really content and happy at home, happy at work.”
As for the list, what’s the final ambition? Kay shakes his head, “To sit down with you! No, no, sorry! It’s in the distant future, but it’s coming. I can feel it.”
While Daly’s career has been notable for its long association with one show, Kay’s has been more peripatetic. He loved working on T4 and was crushed when he was told in 2005, at 31, that Steve Jones was taking over. “Oh, no, T4 wasn’t a choice,” says Kay. “I would have happily signed another contract. God, yeah.” It was a similar story at Radio 1, where he presented a weekend show for eight years. “I remember as clear as day when I got the call saying they weren’t going to extend my contract. And that’s because I was 37 at the time. But I get it. It’s some of the most complimentary trolling I’ve ever had.”
A happier turning point came when he agreed to go on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2020. “I’d been asked to go on loads before,” says Kay, “and it was primarily because the kids are a bit older. Phoebe in particular watched it and loved the Harry Redknapp series, which was a couple before mine, I think. So when I told her she was like, ‘You’ve got to do it! Please do it!’”
So Kay’s children have taken the place of his agent now? “Haha, they’re not getting 15%,” he shoots back.
It turned out to be a good call from Phoebe. The 2020 series, which took place in Wales rather than Australia because of the pandemic, and was broadcast during the second national lockdown in the UK, was one of the most popular in the show’s history, with ratings that peaked at more than 14m. Kay, who came across as genuine and unfussy, eventually placed third behind Radio 1 DJ Jordan “Happy Place” North and the author and podcaster Giovanna Fletcher. “Going on I’m a Celeb,” says Kay, “and just being me and having a laugh and enjoying myself, I won’t say it was an eye-opener, but it made people go, ‘Oh yeah, he’s all right, him.’ And that was it, really.
“Two days after I came out, I had an ITV meeting,” he continues, sipping his tea. “Because you can’t escape audience research these days. It’s everywhere. ITV had a show lined up for me: Game of Talents. And I was like, ‘Yeah, great, do it, back on a shiny floor, bit of jazz hands!’”
Alas, Game of Talents only lasted one season, but Kay was back on the map. The shifts on Radio 2 started rolling in, serving as another reminder of what an adept and likable frontman he could be. This is very much his gameplan for the midmorning slot: keeping much of the Ken Bruce DNA, but throwing in some of his “Northerner, two lattes in” energy. “It’s a case of if it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it,” he says.
Kay is known for his love of dance music, but he has no plans to inflict that on his audience. “I’ve had loads of people tweet me, ‘Oh, please don’t be 24/7 dance music,’” he says. “And I’m like, ‘No, no, no…’ They think I’m going to turn up with a pair of Technics 1210 [turntables] and a box of vinyl: ‘Here’s some Sven Väth for you, ladies and gentlemen.’ It’s not going to be that, don’t worry. When I first met Bruce Forsyth, via Tess, he gave me a brilliant piece of advice. He said, ‘It’s called show business: show business is two words. Let them deal with the business. You deal with the show. If you do a great show, great business will come. If you do a bad show, it’ll be bad business. Don’t join the two.’ Never a truer word said from the great man.”
Experience tells Kay he needs to take his listeners on the ride with him, and if he does that maybe he’ll keep going for three decades, like Ken Bruce. If he doesn’t… “Well, you do realise I’m 50 next year,” Kay says. “It’s just evolution and I don’t think you can stop that. It’s always been going on and it will always go on. There’ll be a day when I guess I’ll get a phone call to say, ‘Right, let’s move on.’”
When Kay’s 80? His booming laugh fills the studio: “Fingers crossed!”
Vernon Kay is on BBC Radio 2 weekdays between 9.30am and 12 noon, and on BBC Sounds from 15 May
Fashion editor Jo Jones; grooming by Tara Hickman; photographer’s assistant Jomile Kazlauskaite; fashion assistant Roz Donoghue
