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In his first stint on talkSPORT he survived a few controversies, notably trying to rally his listeners to come to a massive anti-Israel protest. In the end he committed a political hara-kiri: quitting to stand for parliament again. But in its afterlife, the show has perhaps found even more fame, with people uploading the classics to YouTube and racking up a community of obsessives in the process. Some have even gone on to make playlists and compilations, such as "Galloway reads nutter texts compilation" and "Galloway getting tore into hun callers".I spoke to a few friends who have become similarly obsessed with the MOATS archive. One long-time listener, no-time caller described it to me as "one of the greatest unbroken runs in broadcasting history […] my favourite thing is how he sees it as some high brow show for intellectual debate, but all he gets is lunatics and knuckle draggers. By the same token he despises anyone parochial – Protestants, Tories, Zionists, little Englanders, Rangers fans. That collision is probably the funniest thing about the show: armchair Hitlers from Ascot and Barnet ringing him to say the police force doesn't need more black people."And it's Galloway's remarkable self-seriousness that maintains the gold the whole thing was built on. He will argue with anyone – anyone "who thinks they're hard enough", as he says repeatedly. But many of those who think they're hard enough are more mad or sad or bored than hard, so Galloway's "good fight" is reduced to him basically shouting at faceless people with generic aliases who either don't care or don't make sense. It's the "Don't Feed the Trolls" mentality realised in audio-only Technicolor, a man with an enormous sense of self-importance shouting into an anonymous void of cackling, disembodied ghouls.TRENDING ON NOISEY – From Broken Roofs to Broken Marriages: Meeting the UK's Most Obsessive Vinyl Hoarders
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My personal favourite moment in the show's history is the notorious "Jean in Twickenham", a quietly fuming and presumably quite pissed suburbanite who "doesn't want Scots, Irish or anyone here". She declares that she is 100 percent English and that "life was so nice" before they came. Galloway is, of course, not happy. "Have you heard of William the Conqueror, JEAN? Have you heard of the Picts, or the Celts, or The Anglo Saxons?" he bellows with his eloquent, educated, but totally incandescent rage, with not a second to stop and worry if this woman might not be sound of mind, or really that invested in her grim opinions. "Why don't you go and live in Gibraltar," mutters Galloway before cutting her off into the darkness.Another fan favourite is the cult-hero "Ken from the Highlands", a frequent caller who some Galloway heads have gone as far as to label a stalker. Ken – a born-again Christian who at one point started using cunning aliases like "Kenny from Blackpool" in order to get past the producers – and George had many a clash on the show, usually about issues of faith and war. Between them, there's a strange, possibly sectarian, definitely Highlands vs Central Belt feud going on; a very Scottish beef played out on nationwide radio. At one point Ken suggests that Galloway is anti-Christian because he declares himself a Catholic. It is not the kind of thing you'd hear on Question Time; it's both much more weird and much more real than that.
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