Clara Amfo has never sounded more at ease

Future Sounds is the ideal home for a presenter that sounded out of place on daytimes.

You might think of Clara Amfo’s move from the crucial morning slot, following up from the breakfast show, to an evening specialist slot as a demotion. In terms of audience size, however you look at it, it is a smaller audience, smaller potential audience, and traditionally lower profile slot for being on the radio. But in terms of Radio 1 profile and career, it was the opposite. If Greg James is the “fun” face of Radio 1, Clara Amfo is now the “credible” face of Radio 1, with clips from her shows and mentions of her show all over the station and consistently on the Radio 1 socials. She’s heading up the flagship specialist slot, at a time when that slot has been made higher profile than ever with its new role as a bridge between daytimes and the harder core specialist output of the station.

There were mixed reviews of Clara’s daytime show: I don’t have access to the RAJARs, but she was on from 2015–2021 so I imagine audience wise she was serving the purpose of the show, maintaining audiences from breakfast and appealing to all the right audience demographics Radio 1 would be wanting to hold and grow in that daypart; if that wasn’t the case, she wouldn’t have stayed on that slot for so long, and they’d have tried something else. But the fatal weakness of the show was always the lack of personality: that’s not the same as too much music, the current incumbents on the slot play as much or more, but a statement of the fact Clara did very few personality links, was almost always just talking about the music, and hardly ever did entertaining features.

So Clara actually put together a very good show, it was just a pretty straight offering and lacking in terms of typical daytime Radio 1ness, not taking away from the fact she is an immensely skilled radio presenter and knows exactly what she’s doing in terms of putting together and executing a music radio show, it’s just her particular strength was more talking about the music, talking to artists, etc. Enter Future Sounds: seven months in, she’s sounding better than she’s ever sounded on Radio 1 in my view. She sprinkles a bit of the cheery persona we know so well from her morning show, with much more space to talk about the music, and do those very intimate and engaging chats with artists she always did so well for Live Lounge, now every single night on evening Radio 1.

Clara moving to Future Sounds was always a bit of a curveball: I had been of the view that Jack Saunders was being groomed to eventually take over, but now the plan appears to be to let Jack develop for a few more years rather than throwing him in in the deep end in that way, which makes sense to me (plus, maybe he has his eye on daytimes). Clara was by far the safer bet, and she has a much higher profile on TV and elsewhere, helping boost Radio 1 and the Future Sounds slot yet further. I think she sounds much more at home at this time of day on the radio, and what better a way to use Future Sounds as a halfway house between daytime and specialist output than to have one of the long established daytime DJs do it. An equally good, very different approach would be to have put Grimmy on the slot, which I think was probably considered at one point. In hindsight, the point Clara clinched it was the month she spend covering for Annie during the pandemic.

Coming tomorrow: is Radio 1 going back out on the road for 2022?