Tim Lihoreau

Breakfast radio shows aren’t for the faint-hearted. Just when you’re feeling at your most fragile, you’re suddenly confronted with a barrage of... shoutiness.

At one end of the spectrum there’s an aggressive presenter grilling a politician over something trite; at the other, there’s a bouncy Timmy Mallet-a-like interspersing his ‘hilarious’ observations with equally bouncy pop music. It’s painful. It’s exhausting. It’s enough to send anyone back under the duvet with their fingers rammed firmly in their lug-holes.

Fortunately there is a middle ground, and it comes in the shape of Mr Tim Lihoreau.

Tim presents Classic FM’s More Music Breakfast and, every weekday between 6am and 9am, helps to ease nearly two million listeners into the World of the Awake with a mix of wry humour and beautiful music.

And before you dismiss classical music as fuddy-duddy, just have a proper listen. “If you’re anything like me, you’ll feel better when you do,” says Tim. “There’s just something about it that makes you feel better. Very often people walking past the studio look oddly at me because I’m dancing…”

Tim's enthusiasm must be infectious: last August, official figures showed that he'd added a whopping 80,000 listeners to his audience in the space of just three months. Not bad for someone who admits he’s “not a morning person at all”, yet has to get up in the wee hours to commute from his Cottenham home to London’s Leicester Square.

“I get up at three, and leave at about half three,” he says, with a slight wince. “I try and be at my desk by five, looking at the papers. I've got to be honest, there is a blessing in that hour and a half's drive - by the time I arrive at work I’m slightly more compos mentis.”

So when’s bedtime? “About nine, which is rubbish! Going to bed before your children is wrong. Totally wrong. I fight against it, but I find that if I do it, everything's better in the morning.” And, he adds, it's all worth it for the music. “I'm very lucky that I'm playing music I give a monkeys about. If it was any other way it would be... nightmarish.”

Music has long been in Tim's blood. He studied the subject at Leeds (“I went to my home town university, like an idiot”) before moving to London and becoming a professional jazz pianist. When radio station Jazz FM was born in 1990, he took a job in the music department, then moved to Classic FM three years later, eventually becoming creative director. He first took to the airwaves in 2003, and has been presenting the breakfast show since May 2011.

“I used to get nervous, but it’s like performing - once you're on, you're just thinking 'This is great!' It's total fun,” he says. And the key, it seems, is not to think too hard about the million-plus ears listening to his every word: “Radio’s a privileged medium in someone’s house; it’s usually in a room that no one else is in - the bathroom, the kitchen – you're in someone's private space. So rather than broadcasting to a whole bunch of people, I imagine there's one person. You're thinking of ‘you'.”

Like with anything that sounds seamlessly good, a great deal of work goes on behind the scenes. “I'm a bit anal,” admits Tim. “A couple of weeks before, I'll have researched everything that happened on this day if I need it. Not in an Alan Partridge sort of way,” he adds quickly, “it’s just that if I'm able to programme a piece that premiered on that day, I will.” The music is deliberately scheduled to appeal to the listeners too, so don’t expect any dramatic arias at dawn: “We ask our listeners all the time what they want, and they say that first thing in the morning a soprano can often cut through a little more than you might want.”

So what’s the ideal music for the bleary-eyed? “If you're a 6 o'clock riser, something easy like Grieg’s Morning is perfect; because of the shape of the piece, it gently eases you in. 7 o'clock is when you're trying to get up, so something like the overture to Don Giovanni, because you don't want to go back to sleep – we're all in it together, we all need to get out of the house. And from 8 o'clock it's more or less anything goes: a bit obscure, but something like Litolff’s Concerto Symphonique is fantastic. Perfect in every way.”

Aside from his radio work, Tim, who's 48, is also an author. He's written several books about music, as well as Modern Phobias, a very funny compilation of all those little things in life that cause undue stress (“my wife used to call it my autobiography”), and Schadenfreude, an equally funny round-up of dark delights in everyday life (the secret thrill of being on a train that somebody else misses, or noticing how ugly your friend's baby is.... You know the kind of thing).

Together with his wife of 22 years, music teacher Siobhan, Tim also runs community choirs from their converted triple-garage: TongueTwisters for kids, VoxPop for teenagers, and BigMouth for adults: “and when they sing together we call them TyrannoChorus.”

His daughters and son, aged 15, 12 and 9 respectively, are all musical too: “Yeah, they’ve had it beaten into them,” he chuckles. “I think they'll get to the age of 40 and realise they were the luckiest kids in the world because they’re immersed in it. It’s all about exposure, and they’re exposed to everything.”

Does he have a musical guilty pleasure? “I wouldn't call anything ‘guilty’,” he muses. “Our choirs sing arrangements of whatever I happen to like at the time, so I'm afraid when everyone else was singing Get Lucky we were singing Get Lucky. Equally we we'll sing a bit of Blur, a bit of Oasis... OK, that sounds a bit ‘Dad rock’, and it probably is, but I don’t see it as guilty pleasure.”

Yet Tim freely admits that classical is his greatest love, and he’s on a mission to share it. “I think there is a problem of putting the right music in front of people, but once you DO put the right music in front of people, I don't think there's any problem whatsoever.”

And, he adds, at Classic FM they're determined to make classical music as 'normal' as possible, rather than worshipping it. “I watch Strictly with my kids, and I want to be the same person who watches Strictly on a Monday morning; I don't want to be all reverent, just because the music's Mozart,” says Tim. “Treating it like it's in some sort of glass case is just nonsense. If you're exposed to it, most people would just think 'This is absolutely great'.

“Mozart is the man who gets you up on a Monday morning, that's why he's there. And he sounds like the sort of person who was up for a laugh: if you read the letters, he wasn't stuffy in any sense of the word. Apart from having a bottom fetish – he genuinely has a bottom fetish, and signs a lot of his letters 'Kisses on your arse, Mozart' – he was just a slightly juvenile, fun bloke, just like a lot of people you know now. With bottom fetishes. So there's no reason under the sun to treat this music that makes you feel great any differently from any other music that makes you feel great.”

Perhaps ultimately, concludes Tim, classical music simply suffers from its name, “because 'classical' is a period in history. But it’s music like any other! It makes you feel good, it makes you feel better. It does the same job.

“Our original programme controller used to shout, at the top of his voice, ‘Let’s Rock!’ His view was ‘Does no-one realise this music’s still really popular?’ There’s a reason why it’s still around a few hundred years later.

“We’re loving it, and everyone who listens to it loves it. It’s still the same popular music it always was.”

January 2014 (c) Cambridge News