About Me.
I’m a highly experienced, award-winning (and bearded) broadcaster. For 34 years I worked for the BBC, leaving in November 2023. I’ve combined my radio work with teaching and mentoring. I decided to take voluntary redundancy as part of a re-organisation of local radio and am now available for freelance work as an event host, presenter, scriptwriter, voice artist and trainer.
Most of my career has been spent as a presenter of live programmes, many of which I’ve also produced. I have a reputation for fairness, impartiality and for being able to react quickly, and with a quiet sense of humour, when things don’t quite go as planned, on air or at a live event.
For 15 years (1995 to 2010) I was the host or co-host of the BBC Radio Leeds breakfast show, broadcasting to West Yorkshire from 6am Monday to Friday. I’ve also presented a teatime news programme, a lunchtime phone-in, a “Desert Island Discs” style interview show and, from 2018 (continuing through the pandemic) Saturday and Sunday breakfast shows, including a very popular gardening hour. I’ve worked closely with a wide variety of faith communities.
For many years I taught radio journalism and production at university, spending seven years as a senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and Leeds Trinity University. I’m also a trained mentor, working particularly with young people and with students looking towards a career in the media and colleagues new to presenting.
Events & Charity.
I’ve hosted numerous events, mainly for charities and public sector organisations, ranging from multi-day conferences to carol concerts and public debates. I’ve been a regular ‘warm-up’ for BBC Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions’ programme when it visits Yorkshire. In the past I’ve done broadcast training with police and probation officers and emergency planners.
My Mum Carolyn died from dementia in 2022 and, for the last three and a half years of her life, I recorded ‘Mum and Me: The Dementia Diary’, a weekly audio diary broadcast on BBC Radio Leeds and on BBC Sounds. I was awarded a ‘Dementia Hero’ award by the Alzheimer’s Society in 2021: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p082m6h
As well as my involvement with dementia charities and close links with my old school, Hymers College in Hull, I’m the President of Leeds Hospitals Radio. I began broadcasting on hospital radio in my hometown, Hull, making my professional debut as a sports reporter on Viking Radio (despite not knowing a great deal about sport!). My career in journalism began at the Hull Daily Mail newspaper, before joining the BBC as a trainee in London in 1989. I moved to BBC Radio Leeds in 1993.
My Experience.
During my nearly three and a half decades with the BBC I’ve broadcast from Leeds’s twin city Durban in South Africa, New York (after running the marathon, raising money for Sue Ryder Wheatfields Hospice in Leeds) and Spain (when Leeds United were hoping to become European champions). I’ve co-hosted ‘Songs of Praise’ and broadcast on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2.
I’ve regularly hosted election programmes, broadcast through the night at times of flooding and reported from London after the deaths of the Queen Mother and Diana, Princess of Wales.
I’ve won a number of awards, including a Sony Award, a BT award and a silver trophy at the prestigious New York International Radio Awards for a documentary I made at the City Varieties in Leeds with the former Prime Minister, called ‘Major at the Music Hall’.
Home is Far Headingley in Leeds where I’ve lived since 1994 with my partner, BBC Look North reporter Cathy Killick – we met while training. We have a grown up daughter who lives and works in York.
I enjoy photography, reading and films – and have, since 2005, been a member of another BBC: the ‘Boys Book Club’. I’m also in a film club. I started taking photographs in 1980 and have never stopped. A few years ago I was chuffed to have a couple of shots long-listed in the Landscape Photographer of the Year awards.
