Radio X presenter Toby Tarrant is famously keen on the Daily Star – and the feeling is mutual. We sit down for a chat to mark the station’s 10th anniversary
It’s always great to meet a fan – but I did wonder what Toby Tarrant saw in us. He’s well-known for going through the Daily Star every day, picking out stories to share with the listeners on his Radio X lunchtime show.
And then I see him on Zoom and it all becomes clear. This man is one of us. He might have grown up showbiz royalty, the son of legendary broadcaster Chris Tarrant, but his heart is pure Daily Star journalist.
Which means he’s obviously given some intense thought to the issues facing modern society.
“I reckon about four o’clock in the afternoon on the first day of the apocalypse, I’d be looking at my wife, drooling and picturing her as a chicken drumstick,” he says. “I’d be useless. I would be eating my wife by midnight on the first day.”
But does Toby think his wife, respected Heart producer Pippa Taylor, would put up with that? He considers this. “Well, she did a lot of kickboxing when she was younger. She’d be eating me for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
“She’s a very attractive, lovely woman. I’m sure she could meet somebody else in the apocalypse.”
The pair have been together since 2017, when they both worked on Radio X’s Chris Moyles Show. Toby, 33, says they had to hide the romance at first, to avoid probing questions from their famously nosy ex-boss.
But it’s his famous dad who’s got him considering the end of the world. Given the state of international politics, with Donald Trump in the White House and wars in the Ukraine and Middle East, it does feel like a frightening time to be alive.
“I asked my dad just two weeks ago,” he says. “‘The world’s pretty scary at the moment. There’s lots of big egos and powerful men whose mums clearly didn’t hug them enough in charge. Was the Cold War ten times worse than this?’
“And dad said ‘oh no, this is way scarier than the Cold War ever was. The Cold War was this hypothetical threat that never really went anywhere. This stuff’s going places.’”
And at 78 years old, the former host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire has been around long enough to know what he’s talking about. Which brings us back to Toby’s love affair with the Daily Star.
When he first worked at Radio X in 2016, he started each day by going through a stack of papers, looking for “anything silly, anything weird, anything stupid to talk about” on his show.
“Over years I realised that the only one I needed was the Daily Star, because it amalgamated all the weird and silly stories into one convenient package,” he explains.
And in times like these, he believes that’s more important than ever. “I grew up in a household where the mentality was very much, when things are sad and heavy, make a joke out of it. Because it’s the only way to get through it.
“If you let it get you down, we’d all just be sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth, chuntering to ourselves and crying.
“I always remember that my grandpa’s funeral was the saddest day of my life. But whenever I look back – we laughed so much, because my family’s approach was to sit around and make jokes.”
It’s an attitude that’s served Toby well during his radio career, which has put him through some fairly gruelling trials. When he attempted Pete Doherty’s Mega Breakfast Challenge in 2023, he was visibly suffering.
Then there was the time last October he spent five straight days in the Thames on a unicorn pedalo. The stunt raised £300,000 for Radio X’s charity Make Some Noise, but it didn’t exactly look easy.
“It was one of the worst weeks of my life,” he admits. “When we got to the final day, the swell got a bit dicey and I thought ‘this is how I go. What an embarrassing, bleak way to die.’”
And there we have to disagree. We’ve all got to go somehow – and a unicorn pedalo incident sounds as good a way as any.
If you’re reading this Toby, you’re part of the Daily Star family now. We won’t necessarily be there to fish you out of a river. But we’re certainly happy to make jokes about it.
Listen to Radio X with Toby Tarrant weekdays from 10:00-13:00 across the UK and on Global Player.
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