Staying alive on Channel 5

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

The Channel 5 programme Live with... Chris Moyles is produced and masterminded by Chris Evans. Aside from a few holiday pictures courtesy of Heat magazine, Evans has been keeping a low profile while easing himself into broadcasting again. But his quiet re-entry into television was disrupted last week when it was revealed that Chris Moyles is leaving the show – less than three months after it started – and his move has everything to do with the other Chris. Evans and Moyles are keeping quiet – Channel 5 said the move was by "mutual consent" – but according to the leak, Moyles was dropped; too many arguments to maintain an atmosphere of goodwill.

Live with... Chris Moyles came to television screens at the end of September, billed as an alternative for young men who weren't keen on watching soaps or property programmes. It was broadcast live from a pub in King's Cross, London every weekday night at 7pm. The first transmission on September 23 had 400,000 viewers: this figure rose to 700,000 and before the first series was even halfway through, Channel 5 had commissioned a second.

But by the end of the first series on 20 December the show was attracting only 200,000 viewers – one in every hundred. In spite of Moyles's swift exit, however, the show itself is not being axed; the programme was never dependent on its presenter. On 24 February, Live with... Chris Moyles will return as Live with... Christian O'Connell. Live with who, exactly?

I meet Christian O'Connell in the Hampshire Hotel on Leicester Square, a place where broadcasting people hang out. There isn't much of the media look about O'Connell just yet. With no Hoxton fin or twisted Levi's in evidence, he's finding the flurry of attention quite amusing.

It's the first interview he has given on this subject, but he's aware of the dangers of believing the hype. He is not embarrassed to recount the story of when Chris Evans invited him round to his London flat to offer him the television slot. "I did my best to seem blasé," O'Connell says. "I remember saying, yes, I agreed that my next natural step was five nights of live television when I'd never been on television before. And then I went into Chris Evans's bathroom and phoned my wife to gibber at her that Chris Evans had just made me a cup of tea and I was calling from his toilet." He laughs. "When I came out Chris asked me if I'd been on the phone. I said, no, no, of course not."

O'Connell is impressed that Channel 5 is interested in being innovative, and is prepared to make room for "an unknown like me". He is, it must be said, being more self-deprecating than necessary when he calls himself an unknown. Within London, the XFM breakfast show O'Connell hosts with the newsreader Chris Smith has generated something of a cult following: while the radio station entertains such celebrity presenters as Ricky Gervais and Zoë Ball, it has still managed to retain the credibility of its original underground status.

While there is not much that is underground about the television show he is about to present, the challenges mirror those he faced as a newcomer to XFM. O'Connell, at 29, has been in radio for only four years, and while he was working in local radio stations in Bournemouth and Liverpool, he says, he bombarded XFM with tapes. When he finally landed a job there two years ago, the breakfast show was London's 18th biggest – this year, it has risen to 12th. "I can only describe that rise as meteoric," O'Connell jokes, but it is hardly a coincidence that the ratings for the television show he is stepping into are at a low.

O'Connell isn't that keen on seeing himself as the saviour of the show, though. He points out that on a practical level, it must have been extremely difficult for his predecessor to do a live radio show on BBC Radio 1 that finished at 6pm and then go straight to a live television show that starts at 7pm. "It's probably more beneficial to Channel 5 that I do a breakfast show, so that there is a gap between the two," he says. "And," O'Connell continues diplomatically, "I think that Chris Moyles did a really good job. It's hard work."

There is one sense in which hard work looks inevitable. Whether the decision for Moyles to leave was or was not a mutual one, a spokesman for Channel 5 said last week that the show needed "more attention" from its presenter, who had been unable to give it because of "other commitments". O'Connell gets up every weekday at 4.30am, and he acknowledges that evening work on top of this will be fairly exhausting, but the eight-week run was an opportunity he did not want to turn down. "It's an incentive to work harder, do the show my way – and see if it's any good," he says.

Doing the show his way, it seems, means using the basic structure that is already in place, but with a very different style. If the radio show is any kind of indication, irony will play a major part in the proceedings, as well as a greater focus on interviews.

One change that may become evident is the target audience. Moyles's show was once deemed a success by his television company because he attracted "very advertiser-friendly young males". While O'Connell recognises this as something of a brief, he has learnt from radio that inclusiveness comes about more easily with a bit of humour and good conversation. "I'd like to broaden the remit," he says. "I like to think that what I do on XFM is going towards a more intelligent discerning listener. I'm hoping that feel will come through very quickly in the TV show as well." He has Evans's blessing to be innovative.

"I've been lucky enough to have a lot of offers," O'Connell says – he's being serious now – "but they've been rubbish. I'm not interested in just being a TV presenter; I'm only interested in things that I won't be ashamed of doing."