JK and Go-el

About a year after landing at Virgin, JK and Joel are moving on:

The Virgin Radio chief operating officer, Clive Dickens, said the pair - real names Jason King and Joel Ross - were leaving "to do yet more TV".

Is it just me, or does that sound laced with sarcasm, given that their TV work to date hasn't exactly sent IMDB scrabbling about to increase server capacity - Hider In The House, kids TV vaguely unsettling 'can you hide an adult in your bedroom' gameshow; Sing It Back's ITV karaoke one-off; an episode of Loose Women and - for one of them - a spot of B-List sweating for The Games. Yet more TV, eh? You can see why they need the space for that.

Watching the tide of history rolling out

James P emails with news of Suzanne Shaw's engagement. And one keyt detail:

It's the headline that struck me - The 'boyfriend' in question is JK, from former Radio 1 duo JK and Joel, now a weekend presenter on Virgin. Up until a few weeks ago, he would've merited getting his name in the headline, rather than just 'Boyfriend'. It's like a demonstration of how quickly celebrity status can change in a few short months. In the world of celebrity couples, I don't think I've seen a shift in the role of 'The Famous One' like this since the days of Neil and Christine Hamilton...

It's also worth noting that JK is now so unfamous, they're also having to refer to him as Jason "JK" King - not, to be honest, that that's going to make people think 'that bloke who used to do the Top 40' rather than 'wasn't he a fictional character?'

Virgin signs more people

After all this time on the air, and Virgin Radio is still behaving like it isn't quite sure what it is. Having seemed to be rolling inexorably down the direction suggested by Tony Hadley presenting old songs, the station has now picked up JK and Joel - adding to the signing of Iain Lee last week.

Programme director David Lloyd tried to explain how they'll fit at the station:

"I have long been an admirer of these two guys - they are natural communicators and really radio people," said Lloyd.

"I think commercial radio can do a lot better at weekends. So much of the time it seems to be an area that we don't spend too much time worrying about, but we want to put the energy back in weekends in a number of ways.

"Iain Lee was the first salvo fired, and JK and Joel are the second. When you are up against Jonathan Ross you need to do something more, and we are putting significant investment into weekends."

Since JK and Joel managed the task of taking the chart show and making it into something unloved, and because this is reminiscent of the enthusiasm Radio One showed when they started there - indeed, they were the new Ant and Dec.

The pair themselves say the sorts of things that DJs say when they join new stations:

"No longer are we hauling our arses out of bed at 3am looking like crap, instead we are really looking forward to doing weekends.

"It'll be great to go up against our old mate Vernon at 10a. That's if he can be bothered to turn up - his random game show schedule is demanding don't you know!"

Which would be amusing, if it wasn't tinged with bitterness - the couple, of course, have flirted with the idea of being on the television themselves, only TV doesn't seem that interested.

One gets shaken

Radio One is about to embark on a fairly large schedule shake-up, most notable for granting Chris Moyles an extra two and a half hours a week - or, in other words, time enough for him to play two extra records. They're now starting the show at 6.30 in the morning, and while we'd have imagined three hours of Moyles a day was enough for any man, the audience seems to eat it up, so this is presumably a ratings-driven initiative.

The extra half-hour for Moyles is being shaved off the 'early breakfast' show - although now that programme finishes so far before a winter's dawn, it's presumably going to have to change its name. This reduced fiefdom has been granted to Greg James, who's been doing little bits and pieces around the station for a while now. He has, you'll note, perhaps the most local-radio-dj name to have graced Radio One since Mark Page.

That strange arrangement where Zane Lowe's show is opted out of on a Thursday evening in the other nations is ending - now, all of England will be shouted at between session tracks from Albert Hammond Junior four nights a week; the national regions opt-out fandango gets shunted to midnights on Wednesday from where, we imagine, it will quietly disappear sometime after Christmas.

The In New Music We Trust strand is still there, unfortunately. But not part of the brave new world is JK and Joel, whose unloved double-actery is banished not just from early breakfast, but also from the Chart Show.

Before you get too thrilled by the idea of the Top 40 returning to a safe pair of hands, though - or two safe pairs of hands - it's now going to be presented by Fearne and Reggie. We're not sure when Cotton and Yates actually became a double act, but it seems to be fixed now. We're at a lost to the logic of giving the Top 40 slot to a pair who were part of the destruction of Top Of The Pops, mind.

The gap in weekend breakfasts opened by this promotion (they're also going to do a 'requests' show on Saturday afternoons - charts and requests; it's like someone doesn't trust them to pick their own records, isn't it?) is filled by Nihal, which is probably the only good idea in the whole spreadsheet.

Also getting demoted is Vernon Kaye - or, perhaps, "having his Radio One workload reduced in order to free up more time to remake Bullseye". His Sunday morning slot is now going to be taken over by... well, it says Dick and Dom here, but surely that can't be right, can it? Maybe three years ago... but in 2007?

The most horrific detail, though, is left for Sunday nights. Sunday Surgery - the long-running 'don't get the clap, and don't pickle your kidneys' slot is now going to be presented by Kelly Osbourne.

How did that happen? Did Radio One see her pisspoor performance on Project Catwalk and think "we should see if she's as bad presenting live radio as she is at recorded television, where - presumably - they must have reshot some of the pieces, surely?" and then looked around for something she could do? Or did they have a shortlist of likely presenters for the programme, and - after they'd all said 'no' - were reduced to thumbing through the phone directory?

Kelly Osbourne.

[Thanks to James P for the tip]