Is this the end of the line for Mo Dutta?

A funny thing happened this morning... woke up too early on Saturday (as I often do), switched on the radio hoping to catch Mo Dutta's early morning Radio 2 show, and he wasn't there any more! Looks like he's been kicked off the schedule and replaced by Zoe Ball.

Now I've nothing against Zoe, but she lacks the sheer comedy factor of Mo Dutta... I posted about Mo a couple of years back, when I was altogether too negative in describing him as "the real Alan Partridge". Yep, some of Mo's links were just bizarre - as if he'd had a couple of plastic containers of farm cider before starting up at 4am - and he used to ramble on a bit - well quite a lot really, but it was strangely amusing, and, like David Bowie's initially laughable 1987 "Never Let Me Down" album, I found that the more you kept listening, the better it got. It was like the art of local radio presenting taken to a Pythonesque logical extreme - brilliant in its own twisted way.

Also, the show provided a useful half-hour of employment for the Independent's travel correspondent Simon Calder - Mo always used to talk to him at ridiculous length about whereever he'd been the previous week, which was usually somewhere completely mental.

I hope they won't be able to keep Mo down for long and he will resurface somewhere. Can't see him on the Radio 2 schedule but maybe he'll turn up on Asian Network or local radio. If anyone does spot a new show by him, do let me know in a comment to this post. In the meantime I shall keep up my one-man campaign of emails to the BBC to request that Mo be given the slot for either Terry Wogan or Sarah Kennedy when one (or both) of the old warhorses is pensioned off or shoots the tea-boy by mistake - which surely can't be very long now.

And Mo, if you're reading this: we miss you.