Hair combed and slicked, Mike Graham sits at his big shiny desk, waiting on his cue. When his guest goes rogue and starts swearing at a minion, it barely registers. He remains placid. Unruffled. It’s only his second week doing TV but Mike is in the zone. Three, two, one, zero. ‘Welcome to The Independent Republic of Mike Graham.’ He grins. ‘With you for the next three hours, of course!’

Of course. Independent Republic is a daily celebration of subversive tabloid television, beamed out on TalkTV to a dependable and swelling citizenry. Mike is the republic’s leader. During this three hours he skewers a museum for cancelling Santa, jokes about a ‘mystery eye-bleeding virus’ in France, and derides our brainless politicians.

‘Conspiracy theorists would ring in. Nutters, drug addicts, drunks. We had a whole cast of characters’

Mike has taken his brand from job to job for the last two decades, and now it’s moved to its greatest ever height: out of mid-morning and into a prime-time slot at 9 p.m. after Piers Morgan. A reward to the people. ‘It’s a pretty big honour,’ Mike says, reclining on a sofa in the green room. ‘The world is a very ridiculous place, and there are a lot of ridiculous people in it. I just like taking the mickey out of things.’

Mike started Independent Republic in 2006. He was editor of the Scottish Daily Mirror, and doing punditry for the BBC on the side. They’d bring him in ‘whenever they needed some horrible hack to wheel out and beat up, for having no ethics and all that’. Talk 107, a new radio station for Edinburgh, Fife and the Lothians, offered him a Sunday show, which became a daily when the Scottish Daily Mirror folded. The programme’s director claims to have thought of the Independent Republic name. ‘He occasionally rings me and says, “I came up with this”, and I tell him to eff off,’ says Mike. An ex-colleague says he did the news like an American provocateur-presenter. In an old advert for the station, Mike leans over a desk towards a microphone that has a cable made of barbed wire. A rebel leader. The strapline: ‘Enter at your own risk.’

The show made no money, Mike was fired and Independent Republic decamped to London. He was given the overnight slots on TalkSport on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. One o’clock in the morning till six. And it was mad. ‘Conspiracy theorists would ring in. Nutters, drug addicts, drunks, suicidal people,’ Mike says. ‘We had a whole cast of characters.’ Tony called to say that Nazis ran the government. Nigel rang and played songs on his little Hammond organ. Irish Jack accused Mike of being an extra-terrestrial: ‘Naw, listen Mike. We don’t know who we’re talking to. You could be, well… an alien.’ Mike once spent an entire five-hour show seeking advice on how to fix his son’s bike, which mainly consisted of ‘people just ringing in to tell me I was an idiot’. Another day, he asked his red-eyed listeners whether racism would end if people could change their skin colour like a chameleon.

He got his tabloid training in 1980s New York. He had done some shifts on Fleet Street and moved to America to get a proper job. ‘I literally just went because I was 23 and I didn’t have anything to lose.’ He got work at Star, a gossip magazine. ‘New York was amazing then. It was really dangerous. It was really rough and ready. Lots of violence.’ Mothers put their babies to sleep in bathtubs so they didn’t get hit by stray bullets, crack cocaine sold for $10 a vial and there was more rape, murder, burglary and assault than at any other point in New York history. ‘HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,’ read a New York Post headline when a man shot the owner of a strip bar in Queens and made a hostage decapitate the corpse.

After Star, Mike went it alone. ‘I’d do things like cover a court case in Houston for seven newspapers and charge them all $300. So I’d be making like $2,000 a day. And this is back in the late eighties. I was earning a fortune.’ A female colleague in the green room overhears and interrupts. ‘You haven’t taken me out for drinks yet, Mike.’ He turns sad. ‘I know. Well, I haven’t got any time.’ Back to the story. ‘It was just a wild time.’ Mike got a White House press pass, covered the Royals when they visited, and wrote about Joan Collins, Dallas and Dynasty. He made so much money that he bought an office on Fifth Avenue. It was the lower end but friends thought he was next to Tiffany’s.

In 1992 he came back to Britain to night-edit the Express, but after five years was fired in the middle of a shift. Management claimed he hadn’t hired enough women. ‘I said, “Do you want me to finish the edition?” They went, “No, not really.” I was like, “Fine, I’ll just go to the pub then.’’’ Piers Morgan made him editor of the Scottish Daily Mirror, and alongside this Mike started the radio punditry.

He trained by walking round his flat talking to himself. At first he managed less than a minute, but now he says he could go on for hours. Independent Republic has moved from Talk 107 to TalkSport to TalkRadio to TalkTV. The loopy characters stopped calling when the show went into the sobering light of TalkRadio’s lunchtime slot, and now Mike speaks to ministers and Extinction Rebellion protesters instead. It’s just another bunch of crazies. The audience, though bigger, is much the same too. ‘People come up to me in the street all the time,’ he says. ‘It’s not just a show to them. This is like life and death.’ Leading the republic is always a great and terrifying honour.