Chris Moyles spent New Year’s Eve telling me to ‘get laid’

This is a story about 41-year-old former Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles and how he ended up telling me to get laid. 

It begins last Thursday, on New Year’s Eve. I woke up, read, thought about buying a dog, looked out of the window, washed, thought about tweeting, tweeted, bought some cigarettes, met a friend, drank, met some more friends, drank on the train, went to a house party, drank champagne, was sprayed with champagne, smoked a cigar someone bought in Tel-Aviv, took some obnoxious snapchats, threw up over the side of a fence, walked to another friend’s house in Peckham, and fell asleep on their sofa.

It was the standard, ambiguous, disappointing in a way that’s hard to give words to New Year’s Eve. Aside from one important detail: 41-year-old former Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles tweeted me.

He sent me this message (which I have both retweeted and liked, because let’s be honest, this is as good as it’s going to get for me on Twitter):

The in-Twitter context of the tweet doesn’t really matter – if you want to see it, go on Twitter. The context you need to consider is the life and times of 41-year-old former Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles.

You also need to consider a period of time future historians will call “The Halcyon Days of Banter”. It runs roughly from 12th September 2001, when Russell Brand was sacked by MTV for turning up to work dressed as Osama Bin Laden to May 27th 2012, when Kasabian guitarist Sergio Pizzorno scored this stunning goal at Soccer Aid 2012, bringing the curtain down on more than a decade of chugging, pulling and inappropriate t-shirt removing.

This was an era when nobody had ever heard the word “intersectional”. Safe spaces were a twinkle in the eye of a future NUS delegate. Students worried people for drinking too many supermarket tinnies not their weird politics.

41-year-old former Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles was at the heart of it all, a Jeremy Clarkson of the airwaves, with millions of listeners tuning in every morning to hear him make jokes about Auschwitz or gay people. He was a lad, a bloke, a guy who had a mate called Comedy Dave. (And haven’t we all, in our darkest moments, secretly wished we had a mate called Comedy Dave?)

Back then Chris Moyles – who counts Vernon Kay among his best friends – was the perfect mould into which the inarticulate longings of a dumb nation could pour into.

We were younger and the stakes were lower. We didn’t demand much from culture and it didn’t give us back much in return. The world as we understood it was characterized by Heat Magazine and X-Factor, satirized by Charlie Brooker, soundtracked by the Arctic Monkeys and the Kanye who thought shutter glasses were a good idea. 

But eventually all things fall apart. Making jokes about Auschwitz and gay people wasn’t mainstream anymore, lad culture was forced into the gutter, where it congealed, producing Dapper Laughs and some of the worst Facebook pages in the entire world in the process.

Without a radio station to call home, 41-year-old former Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles had a mid-life crisis and started vlogging. Here’s one vid he made, selected at random, where he tweets all the members of One Direction, Ed Sheeran and Ellen DeGeneres for no real reason (none of them tweet him back):

Moyles is back on the radio now, on a station you and your mates don’t listen to. He’s also got the time to tweet completely random people to “get laid”.

I can’t tell if this is a knowing reference to the transatlantic furore my sex life caused last October or if this once and future king of the lads thinks telling people he’s never met to get laid is as witty as it gets.

Either way, it’s all very sad.