Jeremy Vine looks to make sense of life at Sutton Coldfield Town Hall
“What the hell is going on?” It’s a question we seem to have asked more and more often since the start of the 2020s.
And now Jeremy Vine is heading to Sutton Coldfield to try to make some sense of life.
The popular TV presenter is visiting the Royal Town on September 24, staging a show at the Town Hall.
In an exclusive chat with Chronicle Week, he said: “I’m looking forward to hearing from the audience in Sutton, as well as seeing their faces!
“It will be great to be back in a room with people in all honestly. I’m so excited about it.
“Sutton Coldfield is the moment I reappear properly in society, the touch down, a big moment. I might just stand there staring at people, if they will allow me.
“I’m delighted to be able to stand in front of an audience again. It feels like world is coming back together.
“I saw Ann Widdecombe the other day and she’s doing a show called Strictly Ann. She had just done her first one and said the excitement of being in a room again was great.
“These are things we have taken for granted the whole of our lives and walking into a roomful of people was suddenly taken away.
“Anyone who has any kind of performance job – actors, presenters, dancers, comedians, like my brother Tim – they have had it taken away. Ann was quite emotional about it when I spoke to her.”
Jeremy says he’s relishing interaction with an audience, something he enjoys on his own shows on Channel 5 and Radio 2.
“Pre-Covid, I was starting to do this tour and talk about how we made sense of our world,” he said. “And then the whole world fell apart!
“So this is the first time back for me, and I’ll be trying to make sense of life. We are all going to have to try and do it together. I’m not sure, in fact, none of us are really sure yet, where the jigsaw puzzles have fallen.
“The last 16 months, apart from the general chaos, it’s been fascinating hearing from the audience on my shows about what they think is going on.
“You get the classic divisions of the experts and amateurs, the young and the old, all opening up in such a fascinating way. We are a country that loves to argue with itself and that’s not such a bad thing.
"So I think there’s quite a lot to say. We have had the biggest news period, with Brexit and Covid, probably since the Second World War. The Falklands was big in the early 1980s but this has been really extraordinary."
“It will be good to share my thoughts and hear views too. I might even have a Strictly moment,” said Jeremy, who appeared in the BBC ballroom series in 2015. “I still throw a shape or two in the kitchen but under strict conditions.
“I said to Karen Clifton the other day, I’m now ready with the cha-cha-cha and she was like ‘you are five years too late!!”
Coming back to the West Midlands will bring back fond memories for Jeremy, who started his career as a journalist in the central region.
“I was at the Coventry Evening Telegraph in the 1980s, doing classic, old school newspaper journalism, with manual typewriters, the printing press, the smell of ink, four editions a day, 85 journalists in one newsroom. It was an amazing place to be.
“I’d cycle in early, ring the fire brigade and police, write it all up and then it would come out of the press downstairs and would then be sold on a street corner by a man in a cloth cap, calling ‘late final’.
“It was insanely exciting for me as a 22-year-old. It’s an industry with so much change and that’s something I will talk about as well.
“A certain generation of people really yearn for paper and news print. My father-in-law will still travel 10 miles to grab a copy of the Times, he’s never going to read it on his iPad.”
“Fundamentally, when I showed up in the news industry, we have got mto hear from people who are important and know something.
“As time has gone on, the audience knows more than the broadcasters and news is about them telling us. that’s the biggest change and technology is a big part of that.”Jeremy also has a new series of Eggheads in the pipeline – on Channel 5 later this year.
“I have a book out as well about a painting I love called Christ of Saint John of the Cross by Salvador Dali.
“It’s very striking and I have written a love story based on the painting. To write fiction is so much fun.”
Jeremy Vine: What the hell is going on? is at Sutton Coldfield Town Hall on Friday, September 24, starting at 7pm.
For tickets and details go to suttoncoldfieldtownhall.com
