Alex Lester

Alex Lester (born Walsall, West Midlands, 11th May 1956) is a British broadcaster who presents the weekday overnight/early-morning programme on BBC Radio 2.

Show Features & Campaigns

Running themes, innovations, campaigns and ideas which have become regular topics for discussion on the programme over the years include:

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• Standard Greetings & Standard Replies - a timesaver for people to greet each other without the requirement for unnecessary smalltalk about the weather or such like. Conversation begins with "standard greeting"; the respondee replies with "standard reply" and immediately they can get to the crux of the conversation...
• Penguins - years after someone first asked why penguins always appeared on Christmas cards, usually wearing a scarf, listeners still refer somehow to the wildfowl when answering Lester's daily trivia questions, known as Brain Bogglers...
• The Les Dawson Memorial Gag - also stemming from the Brain Bogglers, this allows Lester to make light of slightly 'prejudiced' answers from his large sector of male truck driver listeners whose answers are usually unkind towards mothers in law. Lester breaks into a half-accurate impersonation of Dawson, a respected comic who was prone to telling such jokes in comedy's less enlightened era...
• The Weather Chicken - any bad weather mentioned in the forecast by Lester's newsreader is often followed by Lester as the Weather Chicken - a staccato parody of female overstatement of poor weather conditions during banal, pointless discussions, with the resulting noise sounding uncannily like a chicken and resembling the screeches adopted by the Monty Python's Flying Circus team when they played domestic female characters...
• Freda, the Woollen Fridge of Doom - the show's official mascot; a woollen box which the listener knits from a pattern downloadable from the unofficial website (listed below). The idea came after Lester accidentally 'killed' his own fridge when he stuck a knife in it to see if it would help it work properly...
• Friendship Fries - also known as World Peace Through Chips, this idea claims to solve all global conflicts by adding French fries to every country's national dish, thereby giving them all something in common...
• Reverse Autographs - designed to puncture the egos of the famous, listeners are encouraged to offer their own autograph to celebrities if they meet one...
• Eating For Free - an experiment to see if people can live entirely on free samples of food products sent in the post or handed out in supermarkets...
• The Sock - from an otherwise inconclusive debate about clothing between Lester and his listeners, the sock was adopted as a superhero of the show, with nocturnal drivers accepting its status by hanging a single sock from the cabs of their trucks...
• The Sandy Status Symbol - an idea to persuade troublesome teenagers that carrying a heavy sack of sand around is fashionable. They keep their coolness factor but the weight of the status symbol means they're too tired to pursue any anti-social behaviour...
• The Christmas Cardboard Box - a gift which Lester promises will be 'all the rage' for Christmas 2005. Kids should be given a plain cardboard box for Christmas on the grounds that many toys get ignored by children who would rather play with the box in which the toy had been placed by the manufacturer...
• The Traveller's Arse - an idea that a huge prosthetic bottom could be manufactured and worn in which people could hide their money and valuables, with potential attackers and thieves not suspecting anything as they would just assume the large-bottomed folk were American...
• Tri-Team Football - initially stemming from a debate about how all sports have an aspect which make them look silly (such as the carpet on which bowls players rest their knees), this is an idea to make football more interesting by having three teams, three goals and a triangular pitch...