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No-one much seemed to take much notice of BBC 6 Music. Until they threatened to close it. It has never looked back. The Radio Academy AGM felt a little like that tonight. As Chairman, Ben Cooper (Controller BBC Radio1 and 1Xtra by day), mentioned in his own warm-up, usually one has to strong-arm a …

Tear down the walls!  Deconstruct the language!  Wash away the thinking!  Exams are killing the young, sucking out their souls and mangling their senses until they are completely absorbed with their ‘future’ and the present has been sacrificed at the altar of arbitrary qualifications and random gra…

The unmistakable sound of someone being sick in a toilet.  It’s not the most attractive sound, but one which sensible late night disc jockeys at Nottingham’s Radio Trent claimed to hear in the depths of night, when alone in the station’s 1794 building. That was just one of the odd things reported f…

News bulletins have adopted much the same production recipe since 1922.   Whether the 6.00 immaculately-presented nightly feast on BBC Radio 4 or the hourly juicy snack on much commercial radio, maybe smothered with a funky bed. Arthur Burrows, who delivered the first ever newscasts on a dark Nove…

I was 19, a spotty young presenter with straggly hair and a long duffle coat.  My then Head of Programmes peered over his large desk, before pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and concluding one of our rare coaching sessions with the remark: "You won't be any good as a presen…

I was delighted when RadioPlayer's talented Mike Hill stoodup at the Next Radio conference , armed with a yummy cake his wife had baked for him, to illustrate how complicated the current generation of radios are.  He said what I had thought for some time; but expressed it better. Radios are get…