Answering the capital back

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As Ken Livingstone starts work as an LBC presenter, the former mayor of London tells Rob Shepherd why he plans to take abuse from his listeners, reply to his critics and meet Keira Knightley.

Ken Livingstone has a more turbulent history with the media than most. The former London mayor hasn't had the easiest relationship with the Evening Standard and in the run-up to his re-election campaign he was the subject of an unflattering Dispatches documentary on Channel 4. You could forgive him if he hated the media forever.

Instead, he has decided to join its ranks as a talk show host for Global Radio's LBC - and is bracing himself for abuse from the public and his famous guests. "I have no idea how it will go, to be honest," he says, looking relaxed and tanned. "I join at the end of the month, standing in for Jeni Barnett on her weekday afternoon show because I need to learn the ropes before they let me loose on my own show. I used to talk on a Sunday morning show on LBC but that was back when there were no TVs in the studio. It was an interesting time because LBC was on its uppers after the whole Lady [Shirley] Porter fiasco."

 Livingstone's return to radio will consist of two hours every weekend in which he takes calls from the public and speaks to special guests. The first hour will be reserved for people "who need their 'I must be rude to Ken' fix" while the second hour will consist of more esteemed guests.

But Livingstone doesn't discriminate: "We'll take any bugger we can get," he says. "I'd like to get US ambassador Robert Tuttle - the man who refused to pay the congestion charge. But I think most people will cop out, which is a shame because all the people who had a go at me before now have their chance. I think Campbell and Gilligan will come on, though."

Nevertheless, he says he sounds a lot more confident about hosting the show than he actually is. "My biggest challenge will be stopping people falling asleep," he explains. "I know I did radio before, but I am not a natural. If I'm down I sound down. I am not like these professional DJs who come in with a hangover and whose girlfriend has left him in the middle of the night and yet can still say 'hey kids'."

Speech radio has moved on quite a bit over the years and Livingstone is the first to admit he is a bit "out of date" with it. "I only really listen to BBC Radio 4 and LBC so I can't speak for all the stations, but when I listened to radio a decade or so ago it was disgusting." He refers to a period in the mid-1990s when he was invited on as a talk radio show judge, which involved him listening to 24 hours of it. "Some of it was good," he says. "I thought David Mellor was good at presenting 606, but some of the other stuff was nasty, especially the night time shows aimed at sleepless bigots. All you would hear was how nasty Myra Hindley was and how we must kill all homosexuals because they are the devil."

He thinks most of today's crop of talk show hosts are right-wing. "Apart from myself and George Galloway, who is anywhere near the left? I am surprised there aren't more of us, but then I would imagine advertisers are probably keener to pump money into those other stations than left-wing ones. Just look at the US."

Livingstone says he is not going to refrain from airing his colours, despite the experience of former Talk Sport host James Whale, who recently fell foul of the broadcasting code on impartiality, and was fired for drumming up support for fellow mayoral candidate and winner Boris Johnson. "There have to be clear rules," he says. "The press can say nasty things and get away with it and yet one man showed his support for someone else [on radio] and got sacked. I will certainly be making my political affiliations clear. Why else would they get me on the show?"

He cites the Chris Evans case when the former Virgin Radio boss was heavily fined years ago for publicly saying he was giving Ł200k to Livingstone's first mayoral campaign. "This only happens in the commercial sector," he says.

Livingstone is also critical of the BBC's political coverage and gives an example of its reporting on the Middle East. "I won't say the whole corporation is biased because there are so many different areas," he says. "The presenters on the Today programme are very fair. But look at the coverage of Iran and the nuclear weapons when it first appeared - there was detailed analysis on it and heavy criticism. Yet nobody questions why Iran wants those weapons. It's because Israel has them but nothing gets said about that."

Livingstone also claims the BBC is "very risk-averse". He says it "didn't go near him" after he lost the London mayoral election. "The commercial sector came straight to me with offers of work, but where was the BBC? It's a very cautious place."

He is happy that Channel 4 has decided to enter the area with the launch of its own speech radio service because he thinks UK radio "lacks diversity". "I know we have lots of individual, niche broadcasters," he says. "But how many of them get healthy audiences? We need more players."

Although Livingstone thinks coverage of UK politics could be improved, he doesn't blame its coverage of the mayoral race on his reasons for failing to be re-elected. "The C4 documentary was just flimsy. I watched it and then watched it again because it was so funny. The Evening Standard campaign was nasty, but I could handle it because I have been around a long time. Had the hate been aimed at someone new to this game it would have ruined him. But it's not the words they used about me that hurt, it's the negativity of London they portray. It causes fear."

That said, Livingstone is keen to enjoy his time outside the political glare and is already lining up his first guest. "I'd quite like to kick off with Keira Knightley," he says. "You don't ask, you don't get."