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Jon Holmes' Biography By Andrew Collins

Jon Holmes, who thinks it's really funny if you ask him if he's the porn actor John Holmes, wasn't so much born, as sacked from the womb. This proved to be the story of his life, much of which has taken place in Kent for some reason, although he gets up to London quite a lot and eats at Garfunkels if he's feeling really cosmopolitan.

Obviously, it's neither big nor clever to measure out your career in sackings, but then Jon is neither big. He has been unfairly dismissed from nearly every radio station in the land, usually for doing what they employed him to do, which was push the envelope. Stu Francis could crush a grape; Jon Holmes can push an envelope. His most famous unfair dismissal was from a well-known commercial radio station where he lured small impressionable children to listen to commercial radio when they should have been doing something more useful with their young lives. He also got them to swear on the air. Jon emerged from that one something of a radio hero, carried aloft through the streets of radio by DJs too timid and cowed to get sacked.

He filled the television shoes of Iain Lee, but this unfortunate incident didn't stop him being invited to present the 11 O' Clock Show, which went out at 11 O' Clock and failed to get sacked from it. The programme was sacked instead. Jon famously turned down the chance to appear on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, not because he isn't a celebrity, but because he feared he would be sacked from the jungle rather than voted out.

He's a cowboy; on a steel horse he rides.

Andrew Collins
Los Angeles , 2006

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