Joey Essex fails to sex up politics but he's an antidote to obnoxious Jon Gaunt

Pienaar's Politics: Election Special, Radio 5 Live; Stig Abell, LBC; Jon Gaunt, podcast iTunes

Joey Essex (left) with UKIP leader Nigel Farage (Getty Images)

If you're struggling to locate your botheredness in the face of politicians wanging on about polls and pledges while touring the business parks of Britain, then pity the poor radio people.

It's now three weeks until the election, though for the hapless sods trying to cut through the petty point-scoring and slogan-filled twaddle and make politically engaging programmes that won't send listeners into a coma, it'll seem closer to three years.

Right now much of the nation's news programming comes with the sub-heading Election Special. But how to make one's Election Special, well, special? If you are the presenter John Pienaar, then you bring in Joey Essex, star of Towie-turned-cross-party mascot.

Essex is making a new Educating Joey Essex show, about young people and politics, which is how he came to appear on Pienaar's Politics, wedged uncomfortably between the Conservative Treasury Minister Priti Patel, Labour's Gareth Thomas and the Liberal Democrat Justice Minister Simon Hughes.

Having established that Essex had finally learned that the Liberal Democrats are not in fact called Liberal Demo-cats, Pienaar went on to quiz him about his political convictions. This proved difficult as he showed no signs of having any.

He was clearer about individuals he liked, though, which was basically everyone. Ed Miliband was "genuine... quite nice" and Nigel Farage a "reem guy". Even David Cameron was deemed "really nice" despite the fact that, unlike the other party leaders, the Prime Minister had denied Essex an audience.

Pienaar was a gentle and generous host and Essex came over as a decent man with good intentions when it came to promoting democracy to the young and apathetic. But at times you had to wonder how he managed to find his way out of his house, let alone on to a campaign trail.

On LBC the presenter Stig Abell spiced up his show by informing listeners that 15 million people do not vote in this country – and he was one of them. Cue a predictably irate series of phone calls in which he was called, among other things, "irresponsible" and "stupid".

Even so, Abell put up a good defence and what could have been the radio equivalent of clickbait actually yielded an interesting and reasonably nuanced discussion on whether declining to vote can be a moral position, rather than merely a lazy and defeatist one.

If the ex-BBC and talkSPORT presenter and self-styled "shock jock" Jon Gaunt's aim was to rouse the election-weary out of their torpor, he probably succeeded, though only through the force of his obnoxiousness.

His news-based podcast, beamed from his spare room, has been going just over a fortnight and at the start of this week already had 50,000 downloads on iTunes. Monday's episode arrived shortly after the launch of the Labour Party manifesto, and saw him laying into Miliband's pledges at his familiar ear-shredding volume, all the while hooting at his own jokes.

Infinitely more objectionable than the politicians he likes to denigrate, Gaunt was like a barroom drunk shouting wildly at bewildered strangers. You just sat there hoping that sooner or later he'd pass out.

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