Nightime Treasure: Joanne Good
Original, honest, entertaining, funny and unabashedly real, BBC London radio host Joanne Good is the slightly tamer, female version of the King of All Media, America’s Howard Stern. Fearless, she talks about her personal life, her weight, her insecurities, her cheating ex-husband, sex, impressions of other entertainers, the news making headlines and pop culture, especially her favorite show, hands down, Big Brother (which originated in the UK before being imitated in the States).
With her deep, husky voice and contagious laugh, Good is the lovable, kinda shocking captain of her popular and highly rated 10pm radio program, Late Show with Joanne Good, for 4 hours every night.
A former actress, the well-connected Good brings in a mélange of guests from TV personalities to West End theater performers to newspaper columnists to lawyers (and dentists!) to holistic therapists to the owner of a strip club – and many others – to discuss their business, their lives and the news of the day.
I happened on Late Show on a Friday night this past May, it’s designated “date night” when Good tries to set up two listeners on a blind date, and was immediately hooked. “Who does this?” I wondered and how fun. I listened, enthralled, for the two hours of the show before Good invites call-ins from the audience. It’s those two hours when I think the Late Show is best; when Good is interacting with her variety of in-studio guests, playfully extracting their opinions on a common subject and sweetly forcing them to connect it to their private lives; after all, she's not shy, why are you? You better love opening up or you’ll be very uncomfortable here.
“I’m never interested in the product,
just the people,” Good says. “The
studio door opens and another ego
or crazy person enters my world.
I love to play one off against another
and sit back and listen. It’s never the
same twice. Sometimes it’s car crash
radio… but that actually sends my
adrenalin up… very addictive.”
One gets the impression that if Joanne
Good was allowed to really soar,
uncensored by her more conservative
Daddies at the BBC, the even more
entertaining, R-rated, adults-only side
of her would easily come out. But right now, the show is PG-13, fine and really, no pun intended, good.
Listening to Jo – as she prefers to be called – is like being a fly on the wall at a very sophisticated dinner party where you’re eagerly awaiting what every guest and the host has to say; this is all light, delicious fun. Fun that was a bit too hot to handle in her previous early morning slot, “I think I was becoming too risqué for daytime listening,” and so she was moved to late night to accommodate her big personality and sometimes saucy and naughty subject matters. More
