The day Elaine Paige went quiet

She had you longing for the days when she would just pipe up, laughing dementedly, or refer to herself in the third person.

By Antonia Quirke

(Photo By Don't cry for me: Elaine Paige in full flow performing a song from Evita at the 2012 Olivier awards. Photo: Getty)

Elaine Page on Sunday
BBC Radio 2

Among the questions nagging the listener after the annual Radio Academy Awards a few weeks ago – in which a special prize was given to Nick Clegg’s jockstrappishly uncomfortable and now possibly redundant call-in show on LBC – is that of Radio 2’s inexorable rise. Taking home the UK Station of the Year award for the first time since 2005, it currently has more than 15 million listeners a week. Pick of the Pops, Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs, Sounds of the 60s – all of them are slam dunks. It’s inexplicable beyond, perhaps, a subtle upping of the ratio of music to chat during shows. I don’t think I’m imagining it. Sometimes the station has the air of Magic 105.4 FM: a glassy, do-not-disturbness to the playlists, a sense of the spoken word being ushered off.

Even Elaine Paige has picked up 19,000 more listeners for her 1pm Sunday show (ten years old this September) featuring hits from musicals. Although still conducting the occasional sympathetic interview, these days she seems to be doing less – creeping on to confirm that, yes, that was indeed Howard Keel singing “Bless Your Beautiful Hide”, then creeping off again, like an iguana. One wonders (and not for the first time) how Paige occupies herself between links. The other day she admitted to making her way through a plate of sandwiches, which sounded innocent enough and had you longing for the days when she would just pipe up, laughing dementedly, or refer to herself in the third person. I liked to picture her sitting with a large bag of Haribo, CCTV cameras mounted in her tiara. There was a crazed edge.

This episode, she roused herself momentarily to articulate a bat-squeak of desire for Hugh Jackman (“a busy boy and terribly talented”) – but otherwise all the life in the show was located in the messages left on its answerphone by amateur singers plugging local shows, relayed to listeners in a section called “Break a Leg”. “Hi Elaine! My name is Samuel and I’m playing Nanki-Poo, a wandering minstrel, at the Cotswold Savoyards’ 100th show . . . Bye, Elaine!”

“Byeee,” responded Elaine, with what sounded like increasingly heavy eyes. “Or rather goodbyeee. Whatever.” A drowsy bee seems to have found welcome in Paige’s bonnet. And still the ratings rise.