Jon Holmes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other persons named John Holmes, see John Holmes (disambiguation).

Jon Holmes (born 24 April 1973) is a double gold Sony Award-winning British comedy writer and broadcaster.

[edit] Career

After attending Canterbury Christ Church University, Holmes's first foray into radio comedy was for BBC Radio 4 with his debut comedy series "Grievous Bodily Radio" in 1997. The Power FM Jon & Andy show (with Andy Hurst), which Holmes presented from 1998-2000, won him a gold Sony Radio Academy Award for entertainment. He was subsequently co-presenter on the fifth series of the 11 O'Clock Show on Channel 4 television with Sarah Alexander.

Holmes has since written and performed for The Now Show. In 2001 he co-created Dead Ringers (for which he won—jointly—his second gold Sony). On The Now Show, Holmes is regularly mocked for his short stature by his co-presenters as a running joke (he is said to be unable to reach average door handles, though he claims to be 5ft 4in tall).

He was also involved in Gash, a nightly politics programme (broadcast to coincide with the 2003 local elections) presented by Armando Iannucci. Also alongside Iannucci he appeared on Radio 4's The 99p Challenge. He wrote on Iannucci's "Time Trumpet" on BBC2, and in 2006 he received his sixth Sony Award for his work on Radio 4's Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive.

The late-night Jon Holmes show on Virgin Radio ran from 2001 to 2002 but he was fired after Virgin were fined a record £75,000 for the item "Swearing Radio Hangman for the Under-12s," in which a young girl spelled out the phrase "soapy tit wank".^[1]

Holmes is currently writing and presenting for, among others, Radio 4's The Now Show and Radio 2's The Day the Music Died. He recently fronted his own Radio 1 show and is the voice of BBC Three's The Comic Side of 7 Days and Crash Test Danny for The Discovery Channel.

From early 2006 Holmes deputised for Iain Lee on London talk station LBC 97.3 when Lee was moving to a full time slot of his own later that year every Friday afternoon in place of Paul Ross's drivetime show. He left LBC at the beginning of January 2008. In September 2006, Holmes was recruited by BBC 6 Music to present a show on Saturday afternoons.^[2] His first book, Status Quo and the Kangaroo, was published in May 2007, with the paperback version coming out in America and the UK in 2008. He also hosts the spin-off radio series and official podcast of the American drama series 'Heroes'. In November 2007 he began his own Radio 4 series, Listen Against, which he co-presented with newsreader Alice Arnold. The show 'takes the programmes out of the radio, fiddles around with them and then puts them back together the wrong way round'.^[3] It has been well received: the Daily Telegraph called it "beautifully crafted and sharp" and the Guardian described it as "the mischievous offspring of [Radio 4's] Feedback and The Day Today".