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

Good morning. It's three minutes after ten. Are you going anywhere nice for your holidays? No, don't. Don't. Don't ring in yet, please.

I don't quite get it.

You'll know by now, if you're kind enough or mad enough to listen to this program on a regular basis, I am not possessed of what you would traditionally call news sense. As I get older, I wonder

whether that's quite as big a curse as I used to consider it to be when I was actually on newspapers.

What I mean by that is when I was a newspaper journalist a hundred years ago, quite often

having been monstered by the news editor for failing to come up with any scoops at all for several

weeks. I would open up a rival organ, the Daily Mail usually, because they kind of led the

field in the kind of showbiz

journalism that I was supposed to be provided for the Daily Express, albeit with a slightly

kinder approach to proceedings. I would open the Daily Mail, see a story on page three or page

seven, and I'd turn to my deputy or my PA and I'd say, oh God, we knew that, didn't we?

We just didn't realize it was a story.

That's how bad I was.

Quite how I ended up in charge of that department is anybody's guess.

But as I get older and I see sometimes the arbitrary nature of, I'll give you an example.

If a busker got offered a one million pound record deal,

which would occasionally happen.

I loved that story a lot more than when Chris Evans

went backstage on top of the pops,

and it turned out he was having a relationship with Jerry Halliwell,

ginger spice.

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