Picture the scene. Your life is in crisis, knotted up in a thick web of personal crises that makes Requiem For A Dream look like an episode of Fun House – so your immediate reaction is to phone up Kelly Osbourne to see what she thinks.
Unlikely, right? Well, try telling that to Radio 1, which has just signed up Kelly Osbourne to be the host of its Sunday night agony-aunt show The Surgery even though we'd imagine that the only advice Kelly Osbourne gives will either be "eat some cakes," "ask Mummy for a new car" or "embark upon a failed, quickly-abandoned musical career." This is all just speculation, of course – for all we know Kelly Osbourne is a deep well of empathy who is able to find simple, common-sense solutions to the messiest of personal problems.
Kelly Osbourne's first album was entitled Shut Up!
Radio 1 is the voice of Britain's youth – something that scares the shit out of us because that means the voice of Britain's youth is Vernon Kay. It also means that DJs don't usually hang around for too long because the more listeners grow up with them, the less the station loses its youth appeal, something that Radio 1 occasionally fixes by culling its DJs like infected cattle. It happened in the early 1990s when Simon Bates and Dave Lee Travis got the shove, and now it's happening again. Bad news for JK And Joel, but better news for Kelly Osbourne.
You'd think that Kelly Osbourne would have a lot on her plate at the moment, what with starring in Chicago and weeping hysterically and all, but that hasn't stopped Radio 1 from signing Kelly Osbourne up as the host of The Surgery, the station's weekly agony-aunt show that covers everything from bullying to teen pregnancy to self-harm. Obviously the host of a show like the Radio 1 Surgery needs to be effortlessly calm, understanding, level-headed and knowledgeable. But Radio 1 clearly couldn't find anyone like that so hired Kelly Osbourne instead. The Mirror reports:
Radio 1 announced a radical change in programmes today, with Kelly Osbourne joining the station and JK and Joel getting the boot. Kelly will join as host of The Surgery, in which listeners phone in with medical or personal problems. JK and Joel, who presented the early morning breakfast show and Sunday chart show, will leave the station after three years and the Chris Moyles breakfast show will start half an hour early at 6.30am.
This is just a long line of jobs that Kelly Osbourne has had as she tries to find something that she's actually good at. So far in her life Kelly Osbourne has been a failed pop singer, an occasional actress, the star of a musical, the quickly-replaced host of an ITV2 reality TV show spin-off, the star of a house fire and the face of Woolworths, without any of the jobs ever sticking for long. But maybe we should reserve judgement until we've heard Kelly Osbourne sensitively handle a call from a glue-sniffing single mother teenager who cuts herself for the first time.
Hiring Kelly Osbourne isn't the only step that Radio 1 has taken to ensure a younger audience, though – it's also given Dick And Dom their own show and moved irritating old Fearne Cotton over to present the charts. It's also thought that Radio 1 is keen to hire Igglepiggle from In The Night Garden to present a specialist show about heavy duty Jamaican Two-Step Dubcore Ragga.
Oh, and Jo Wiley still has a job at Radio 1, too. Because the kids love nothing more than smug barefoot witchfaced interviews with George Michael, do they.
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Izzy says
With kids increasingly turning to the ipod, Radio 1 has to rethink strategy and cater for a wider age range. Hiring Kelly Osbourne is a step back, unless the idea is to turn the show into cheap comedy. Chris Moyles should be moved to 3am. Jo Whiley’s fine and George should visit more often. Their interviews are always good fun.