This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Morning, three minutes after ten is the time.

I'm going to roll the dice a bit, actually, this morning.

I changed my mind during the news

about what I would open the programme with, such as the joys of live broadcasting, although

this is generally the point at which I think management have a small fit of the vapours. Don't

worry. It's all on board and all above board. I just occasionally occasionally I do open with anecdotes,

just in the sense that they may be canaries down coal mines.

You know, it may be that something that's popped up in my personal experience

is an indicator of a broader truth.

It certainly holds with your personal experiences. I, it's hard to know which

example is best from the last 18 months. Probably the people working from home on test and trace.

Do you remember that? Long before it made newspaper headlines or indeed any other broadcasters

had woken up to the story, which isn't a criticism. We just got lucky. I can't remember how. But it was an anecdote. It was like, I think one person texted me or wrote to me to say, I'm working for the test and trace system and I haven't done anything for three weeks. I've literally not done anything. I've made one phone call in three weeks. And we didn't believe it. Do you remember? And then we opened up the phone lines, as we

often do. What do you mean often? As we always do, it's a flipping phone-in show. And the queues

were round the block. You know, it was like a barber's opening up after the first lockdown. And

people were queuing up to tell us stories that the more we heard it, the harder it became to maintain

our original levels of skepticism and incredulity.

How can? And 37 billion pounds later, potentially, how can something be so bad? And of course,

the political answer is, don't look over there. Look over here. Ceramics. But the truth was

that we got there first. Thanks to you, we absolutely got there first, I think, on that story. I may be indulging in rose-tinted retrospection, but I don't think I'm. Even Keith is nodding. We opened the door. We opened the phone lines on that story and people were queuing up to tell us, yeah, no, this is not the exception, this is the rule.

Huge numbers of people, goodness knows how many, thousands upon thousands of people, were being

...