Guess which record nearly got My Guilty Pleasure taken off air? | Rick Jackson

Each weekday morning on the show about 8:35am I have a feature called My Guilty Pleasure in which listeners own up to a song they secretly love.

You know the song, you wouldn’t ever ask a DJ for it at a party or play it in front of friends as one of your favourites, it only gets played when your are on your own!

I introduced the feature when we entered our first lockdown, knowing that hearing some of the worst songs ever recorded would lift spirits and put smiles of faces.

We’ve had it all, Star Trekkin’, Shuddup Yer Face, Making Your Mind Up, Ernie The Fastest Milkman In The West and so it goes on.

Where else would you hear the likes of Bucks Fizz, Dollar, Englebert Humperdinck or Chas & Dave all in one place but on my breakfast show?

Well it’s been going strong every since and looks like no sign of drying up and I’ve just started doing My Christmas Guilty Pleasure with Showaddywaddy and Jose Feliciano already played.

I’ve always said we should never mock someone’s personal choice, if it’s their guilty pleasure, who are we to diss it?

Well, last Thursday I played one such guilty pleasure that I’m still getting people talking to me about, asking if I got into serious trouble for playing ‘that’ song.

It was a song which incredibly went to No.2 back in 1981 by an American woman called Laurie Anderson and it’s called O Superman.

It’s eight minutes 20 seconds long and you would have heard nothing like it before, with a repeating ‘oh, oh, oh, oh’ all the way through it.

Well, the phone lines lit up and emails flooded in. The boss was unhappy I’d played all eight minutes of it and subsequently banned the feature for fear of losing listeners.

Happily the thousands of pleas from people wanting the feature to stay saw him do a government-style U-turn as long as I stay out of trouble. As if!

YES SON, YOUR MUM REALLY WAS ‘OFF HER FACE’ DURING YOUR BIRTH

Hard to believe, but my daughter Holly was six on Tuesday. How did that happen?

Freddie and his sister are at a lovely age, seven and six. Hard work yes, but still cute. They are growing up fast and developing senses of humour and say the funniest things.

On my phone I have the moment Holly was born and placed on mummy’s chest before I cut the umbilical cord. She loved it apart from, as she put it, ‘the mess’!

Freddie wanted to see his video and watched mummy cuddling him. I said: ‘Let’s call him Freddie’ to which mummy replied after lots of gas and air, an epidural and forceps delivery, ‘I don’t care’!

‘Mummy looks off her face,’ Freddie said. She was Freddie, she was!

THIS TIME AROUND IT’S THE CLEAR PLASTIC VISOR FOR ME

This new strain of coronavirus is rather worrying as many friends and family have caught, and thankfully recovered, from the ‘old’ version of the virus.

In a way, some of us who haven’t had it want it to get it out of the way before Christmas. That sounds daft but kind of understandable.

I’m trying to book my booster jab and have my flu jab next week. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep life normal. I’m happy to wear a mask too, especially in this really cold weather! However this time around I’ve decided to try the clear plastic visor. It might be a faff to carry around, but at least the face recognition on my iPhone still works when I get to a checkout when shopping!

A message from the editor, Mark Waldron.

Subscribe here for unlimited access to all our coverage, including Pompey, for just 26p a day.