"Doorman please!"

A cracking club night on Christmas Eve, with punters of all ages turning up and not too many complaints about the music as I played a bit of everything from 60s Motown to modern RnB. You can't win though sometimes - stick on a Christmas song and someone moans I'm playing too many; stick on a dance anthem or some 80s pop and someone claims I have no festive spirit.

One of my regulars on a Saturday is a policewoman by day, but likes to revel like any member of the public who's had a hard time of it on shift during the week. Sadly, one of the punters recognised her - despite her snazzy dress and Santa hat - as the woman who'd banged him up a few weeks earlier and decided to have a pop. As an argument and threats brewed and her boyfriend tried to step in, I called for the doormen who promptly - and literally - threw the aggressor out of the building.

The song I was playing at the time? Happy Xmas (War Is Over).

"That was a transmission issue beyond our control..."

I've acquired a new Sunday morning show on Pure 107.8 FM in Stockport. It's a laid-back 10am-1pm slot and handy for me as I'm in the town doing the club gig the night before anyway, so a quick kip in the car is all I need prior to going on air.

I did the first one at the weekend and, of course, it was Remembrance Sunday. This is always observed impeccably by the radio industry, with the general way of going about the build-up to 11am being roughly the same from station to station - tone down any wacky content from 10.30am, play slightly more chilled music up to 11am, then observe the silence and play something suitably sombre and slow afterwards.

For our part, Pure did a grand job. Eva Cassidy's version of Fields Of Gold, then one of the station's volunteers read Flanders Fields in a wonderfully poignant manner. This took us to the silence at 11am, and then John Lennon's Love eased us back into regulation programming.

There is invariably one practical problem caused by the obligation to observe the silence - the prospect of the transmitter believing you have gone off air. If you ever happen to observe the silence with a radio station on in the background, you'll notice that the sound of birdsong, and maybe the odd passing aeroplane, is remarkably loud on your speakers amidst the hissing noise which radio equipment otherwise picks up as human respect for those who sacrificed their lives fills the airwaves.

The reason for rather loud birdsong is because the presenter has turned the levels on the satellite feed from the cenotaph up to maximum. This is so the transmitter recognises that there is output coming from your radio station, as anything beyond 30 seconds of silence prompts a back-up CD to kick in from the transmitter site.

These back-up CDs are a lifeline for when a building needs to be evacuated or when equipment goes wrong, especially at non-peak times when automated or pre-recorded or networked programmes are going out, meaning that the building is entirely empty. Unfortunately, they do have a habit of coming on when a station is observing the silence, as the birdsong levels are often not loud enough for the transmitter to register.

This has happened to me, a few years ago, when I was on a Sunday morning shift and was horrified to hear the back-up CD start fewer than 40 seconds into the silence. The only way to stop it is to restart something in the studio, as it then realises that output has returned and automatically resets itself, ready for the next time there's - literally - a breakdown in communications.

The other problem with back-up CDs is that often they are hopelessly out of date. The music on them may reflect what the station was playing at the time the CD was made but once it goes on air during a technical mishap, the station's music positioning seems to have made an almighty change for no apparent reason. Years ago, workmen sliced through underground cables in Manchester which rendered numerous radio stations off the air for a whole day. Our back-up CD at Imagine FM came on, playing some music we'd ceased to play ages before. Once the repairs had been done, I received calls on the breakfast show saying how refreshing we sounded (!) - but that it got a bit boring hour after hour.

That's another problem. An all-day cut in power or equipment can mean the same hour of music being played over and over again on the CD. I never wanted to hear When You're Gone by Bryan Adams and Melanie C ever again by the time the outage had finally come to an end, and I wasn't massively keen on the song beforehand. I'm still not.

And yet another problem is that the radio station needs to be identified during an outage, but an out-of-date back-up CD is likely to feature old jingles or sweepers, since when the positioning statement may have changed (ie, from "Today's Best Music" to "More Variety") and the package itself has been modernised or altered, often with a new v/o artist.

Radio stations should update their back-up CDs every six months or so, and immediately whenever they get a new jingle package, but only for the times it is necessary. For what it's worth, I'd always make sure the duty transmitter engineer switched off the array of radio station CD players before him just before 11am on one Sunday of each year.

It's just the same old show on my radio

I'm grateful to my old acquaintance Roy Lynch for sending me this photograph. He and I are on it, along with (almost) every other presenter hosting a breakfast show on commercial radio in the north west of England at the start of 2005.

All rivalries were put aside (not that jocks ever have them; only off-air staff are bothered with what the opposition is up to) so that we could assemble under the region's most prominent landmark, Blackpool Tower, to have our photograph taken.

The tsunami hit on Boxing Day 2004, and early in 2005 a couple of high-flying bods in commercial radio down south decided it would be a good, worthy and fantastically complicated idea to have a day when the commercial sector came together, broadcast a networked output and put a fundraising message across.

The programme directors of all the major corporate radio groups of the time agreed, but logistically it was going to take some doing. The set date was Monday January 17th and it would start at 6am with a day of networked shows but there would be three slots per hour where the local jock would opt in and do some stuff about events happening round their way. Like when Jonathan Ross gives way for Peter Levy or Gordon Burns on Comic Relief night.

All adverts were dropped and news bulletins came from IRN with a one minute local opt in for, again, each individual station to do a quick update from its patch. So most of the time I and my fellow local presenters spent our show time listening to the national output, which came from Capital Radio's premises.

It did throw up some incongruous combinations. I was working for Imagine FM, a female-friendly station which targeted listeners in their late 20s and early 30s. But at the same time those targeting much more youthful audiences, such as Kiss FM, were broadcasting the same stuff. So at one stage, Kiss FM listeners were tuning in to hear Simon Bates, Jade Goody and Tony Blackburn on their station.

Another feature was for one locality per hour to get some national airtime, introduced by the network jock. So the whole country would suddenly hear Ben Fry of Yorkshire Coast Radio in Scarborough talking about what his patch has been doing to raise funds and awareness, then a nervous jock at Red Dragon FM in Swansea would do likewise an hour later. In the very crowded Mancunian patch I worked in, I wasn't asked and neither were any of the post-breakfast jocks on Imagine FM. Mike Toolan of Key 103 in Manchester did a bit on the nationalised output though, and despite our obvious day-to-day rivalry with this station, we held our nerve and kept him faded up.

Such sportsmanship wasn't on show everywhere though. I can't remember the details, but the group I worked for (known as the Wireless Group, now UTV) had a Scottish station which was fortunate enough to get a national slot in one of those hours. Someone monitoring rival reaction then reported that a station up the road faded out their rival jock when he came on, and put a record on instead. Bad form.

It was all a bit frantic and hurried, but it worked. Chris Evans effortlessly presented his first radio programme for years on the network and all agreed afterwards that his absence had been such a shame. Simon Bates teaming up with Jade Goody was an addictive bit of car crash broadcasting, especially as Jade seemed to be a poor reader and yet was given the task of telling the audience of all the various events and fundraisers going on around the country.

TV cameras were there and a short fly-on-the-wall thing was broadcast on ITV later in the evening. As for the BBC, well as far as I know they chose not to mention it at all, certainly not on a national level. I suppose that's fair practice, given that the commercial sector largely avoids Children In Need and Comic Relief as they are BBC innovations and the local radio sector are as involved as BBC TV and national networks.

On the photo, you might not recognise too many people as they are, clearly, famous voices rather than faces, and even then only in their working localities. Tony Wrighton is on there though, who is now on the Sky Sports News anchoring roster. He was doing drivetime on Century FM at the time, the only radio station which covers the north west in its entirety and therefore the only station with a staff member genuinely posing alongside all of its rivals. I assume he was there as Darren Proctor, Century's breakfast show host of the time, was on holiday. Tony is #3. I don't know who most of them are, I must say, but there is Kev Seed (#27) of Radio City in Liverpool; Fairclough and Vix (#23 and #24) of Tower FM in Bolton; and Key 103's Rob Ellis (#1 - again sent as breakfast replacement by his station). My old mucker Ian Roberts, of Magic 1152 in Manchester, is at #20.

My pal Roy, who sent the pic to me, is #10 and was the local jock there - he was doing breakfast on Radio Wave in Blackpool - and I'm next to him at #4, and I remember feeling particularly bleary-eyed that day. Most of us did - we'd all hot-footed it from our studios to Blackpool for a lunchtime photo session and we were knackered, reacting to the winter sunshine and the parky temperatures. I had to drive back to Hull afterwards, too. That's quite a smart jacket I've got on - I haven't worn it for ages...

The photo appeared in (apparently) most of the local newspapers in the north west of England as part of the publicity for UK Radio Aid. The official website is still going - and here it is.

"Read ... read ... READ! I meant READ!!"

After people find out what I do for a living, the first question they are most likely to ask involves the worst mistake I've ever made on the radio.

I'm truly grateful to say that I've never done anything more serious than stuff that has been greeted with mirth from listeners/bosses and embarrassment from me. I've never cocked up severely, to my knowledge.

The incident that instantly leaps to mind took place on Viking FM's Late Night Love Affair back in the late 90s or early 2000s. I presented the Saturday night version of this programme, which was on seven nights a week, and it was as you no doubt assume it to be - three hours of uncontroversial ballads interspersed with listener dedications. Most commercial stations had a version of this - the Chill Out Zone and the Slow Jam being other common names for it.

Now the majority of calls we got (no texts back then, and emails were rare) came from women, specifically women whose husbands or boyfriends were "away". They'd never say where they were and I soon learned not to ask when the type of fishwife who did ring up would get ratty if I politely enquired where the man in her life was. I was very naive, initially. Messages like "goodnight darling" and "see you in 25 days" were a bit of a giveaway, and I'd feel a little self-conscious as I read them out, trying not to sound anything other than the local empathetic DJ who was on their side.

The letters which the programme got always had a postmark beginning with "H.M.P." which proved that the cons themselves were listening in their cells and writing messages of love (or codes for "be out the back at 0500 hours" for all I knew) for these women waiting loyally back home. I'd read these out as they were written, feeling sorry for the guys because the letters highlighted a very low standard of literacy. I don't sympathise with anyone caught committing a crime, but I do sympathise with guys for whom a bit of support and encouragement early enough in their lives might have prevented subsequent bad turns of events. Joel Ross, on the evening show at the time, was less understanding - he used to call the show Convict Corner ("where you can say hello to your favourite person in prison!").

What was the most disconcerting thing was that these letters, from hardened men trying so hard to show their devotion to their loved ones back home, had bene vetted. Prison staff had read and signed off the letters before allowing them into the external postbag. An invasion of privacy or a necessary act of security?

Anyway, one feature we introduced on a Saturday evening was the Open Letter. This was where we asked listeners to tell the whole story of their love life, or at least one major or significant aspect of it. It was akin to Our Tune but without the element of tragedy and, frankly, not as long.

We got a few letters but often I'd embellish them to make them a little longer. We had the music which Gary Davies used to use on his Sloppy Bit and it needed to be done justice. It was always done on the stroke of midnight and I'd get calls from women in tears afterwards, saying how moving the story was and how they hoped the lady (almost always a lady) in question would "get through it".

One week was slower than normal and so, in order to get an Open Letter on the air, I had to write one of my own. Quite a challenge. The names and situations were obviously fictional and I deliberately made the events within the letter semi-farcical or far-fetched to reduce as much as possible the chance of it reflecting real events somewhere. It turned into a bit of an essay and though now I can't remember what the story was, I know it was long enough to justify the backing music's duration and keep listeners hooked without boring them. The one thing I do remember was the record "requested" at the end - All Woman by Lisa Stansfield.

So, midnight comes and I back-announce the song playing, and let the theme music to the Open Letter come in. One thing Simon Bates always got right on Our Tune was starting the theme music and letting it play for a good while before talking over it. This is something I replicated, letting a good 30 seconds or so set the mood for the audience before beginning the letter.

"This is a letter from *insert made-up name here* from *some random part of the Viking coverage area - probably in north Lincolnshire, as we were targetting that patch heavily at the time* and I have to say, it's one of the most emotional things I've ever written."

Erk.

Written? Oh you utter tosser.

I meant read, clearly. But I said written on the air. I'll get slaughtered for that. I might be reprimanded. Put on weekend overnights. Sacked. Bollocks bollocks bollocks...

All of the above went through my mind in approximately five seconds after I'd committed the faux-pas. But I was on air. I needed to get out of it. Pretend it never happened? Or use my wits? It had to be the second option. Think man, think...

"... says the lady herself."

As soon as I said that, I felt the colour immediately return to my face. I'd made it sound like the "written" comment was a direct quote from the letter writer and not me. The fact that I was the letter writer was something the listeners didn't know and were not going to. Details, details...

I could have sworn the noise made by my blood rapidly vacating my face a few seconds earlier went out on air, but now I'd rescued the situation. I faded out the mic, cleared my throat, took a deep breath, reopened the mic and began reading the letter. No more cock-ups, all was smooth, I got the teary phone calls while Lisa played. Result.

I got away with it. No listener picked up on it, no member of staff mentioned anything when we all reconvened on the Monday. The remainder of the programme passed by without incident.

I dropped the Open Letter feature the following week.

I've done other stupid things, such as enthusiastically saying "Party Mix next!" at the end of a football show, only for the news bulletin to announce the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother five seconds later and go into full-scale obit mode. Given that I'd been made aware that we were going into obit mode and I just clean forgot, it was not the wisest moment of my career.

I also cracked a gag about dementia after watching a soap opera storyline about it, only to be carpeted by my boss for doing so after complaints came in (from two people - meaning that many thousand others didn't complain, but anyway...) - such complainants don't seem to know the difference between laughing at dementia and laughing at an actor playing the role, but nonetheless I wish I hadn't done it.

My favourite ever blooper involved a feature in which a radio station would give a dozen red roses to someone nominated by a listener because of their acts of love, kindness or loyalty. The DJ in question (no names or stations on this occasion, sorry) rang up a woman live on air and said her husband had written and nominated her for the roses.

The lady was pleased and grateful but didn't go crazy on air, as most did.

I'm paraphrasing from now on. The DJ then asked: "Is *husband's name* in, so we can talk to him about why he nominated you?"

Long pause.

"Sorry, no. Erm, I'm afraid he died yesterday morning."

Now at this point, the DJ should express sympathy and end the call right there. Put on a record or advert and move on. At this stage, it's unfortunate and tragic but none of it is the radio station or presenter's fault. But instead...

"Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. Erm, should we send you a wreath instead?"

The word is that the DJ, upon saying this, had to be carried out of the studio a gibbering wreck, on the verge of a breakdown.

And no, it wasn't me. Stop it.

In deep sh ...

I'm reading Giles Smith's book of collected columns from The Times at the moment. He's a marvellous football writer - irreverent, droll but always filling his paragraphs of biting satire with important truths. I wish I could write like him.

He makes reference in one of his pieces to a famous court case a few years ago when Sir Alex Ferguson was cleared of illegally using the hard shoulder of a motorway during a traffic jam on the grounds that he was desperate to use the lavatory; indeed, the Manchester United manager went into rather vivid detail of the state of his insides during his evidence.

It was too much information at the time, but it reminds me of the best story I ever picked up when I was hacking in the magistrates courts in my early career.

A spot of background; the agency I worked for had a contract with the local paper which meant we issued at least one journalist per day to the local magistrates court to pick up tales of affrays, assaults, the odd burglary and numerous drink-drivers.

Despite occasional pangs of conscience when people who weren't out-and-out villains were hit by the courts, I liked doing this, which probably explains why I was never cut out to be a proper journalist. I was into the routine stuff and found myself feeling distinctly safe and unambitious as a consequence. A morning in the press box at the court was an easy and yet productive one for me - I'd wander from court to court during recesses, scribble down cases and spend the rest of the time hobnobbing with the solicitors over coffee and fags, talking about football. After all this, I'd head back to the office and write up the three or four concluded cases for the paper, giving them their quota for the day.

There were seven courtrooms in the building. Courts 1 and 2 were general criminal courts; court 3 was usually set aside for a half-day or full-day trial, court 4 was likewise though sometimes had TV licensing sessions or parking fine sessions (stayed well away from those); court 5 was sometimes not in use but was always a coroner's court on a Wednesday; court 6 was a family court (not open to journalists) and court 7 a youth court.

Most of the time I'd be flitting between courts 1 and 2 because most of the stories came from there. You'd scan the wallbound court list looking for familiar names, or cases connected with high-profile incidents and choose your court accordingly. The best cases for reporting reasons had a 'G' next to the previous date of appearance, as that indicated a guilty plea had been entered and therefore the defendant was due to be sentenced today - allowing reporters to put all of the facts into the case for the first time.

Anyway, back to my favourite case. It was a speeding case (or 'exceeding the speed limit' to make it more accurate) which normally you'd ignore as there's next to no newsworthiness in somebody doing 45 miles an hour in a built-up area at 2am prior to being zapped by a thoroughly bored traffic cop. When this speeding case was called, I was about to stand up and make a hasty exit to the other court when I saw the defendant enter - and immediately I sat down again.

He was in a wheelchair. I immediately managed to make eye contact with his solicitor who, appreciating my raised brow, mouthed "this is a good one". So I got the notebook and pen out and began whirring the Teeline across the page.

He was charged with exceeding the speed limit on the local motorway by doing 129mph.

129mph!

He pleaded guilty. This meant he would be dealt with here and now. I couldn't wait for this.

The prosecutor, a willowy and auburn haired woman of serious lawyerly sexiness (I won't name her, though I'm dying to), outlined the case. Within the first ten seconds of her address, I knew this was one of those occasional stories we would not only file to the local rag as per the contract, but also to the regionals and the nationals, plus all the local radio and TV stations.

This chap, in his mid to late 20s, was a lifelong wheelchair user and had acquired himself a nippy Vauxhall Astra. Unable to move below his waist, the traditional apparatus for the clutch, brake and accelerator had been specially adapted into hand held controls on his steering wheel. He was spotted on the motorway by the police and cautioned for doing 129mph.

The prosecutor asked for costs and sat down.

So far so good.

Then his solicitor rose to offer mitigation. I was ready for a good yarn from him, and he didn't disappoint.

On the day in question, the defendant was driving home from a wheelchair basketball game when suddenly he felt this colossal, deep pain in his abdomen. Initially he tried to pass it off as indigestion or a spot of wind, but the pain got more and more intense. Looking down, he realised immediately with horror what had happened.

His colostomy bag, which he used as he had no muscular control of his abdominal area, had twisted and was therefore unable to be filled. This meant his own bodily waste was being forced back into his system. This, frankly, would soon poison him and his life was at risk.

Unable to stop as he couldn't get out of the driver's side of his car on a hard shoulder, he pressed his accelerator hard down on his steering wheel (I was obviously unable to use the expression "put his foot down" in the final copy), and began heading for a hospital further up the motorway, just off a forthcoming junction. He'd reached 129mph and was in acute pain when the police stopped him.

Because of the nature of his mitigation, the defendant himself was asked to confirm his solicitor's words on oath, which he did. The prosecutor, displaying characteristic lack of sympathy which the CPS always put into such extreme cases, asked a few questions before the magistrates retired to decide what to do.

On a motorway, 70mph is the limit, as you know. Generally the police will stop you if you're doing 80mph or more, but when you're clocked doing 100mph or more it's an automatic ban from the court, irrespective of your licence's previous cleanliness, unless the mitigation can indicate 'special reasons' why a disqualification should not be dished out. Indeed, 129mph would in almost all cases warrant a much more serious charge of dangerous driving, rather than merely exceeding the speed limit.

The magistrates had to decide whether this chap's predicament was serious enough to impose no disqualification - indeed, they could even go so far as to not endorse his licence at all. They also had to ponder how much, if any, financial penalty to hand out.

For me, the story was as much in the sentence handed out as it was in the awesome circumstances of the case. What I needed, ideally, was for him to wheel away convicted but without any sort of punishment at all or, conversely, wheel away with the book thrown at him in the way any able-bodied driver doing 129mph without the hindrance of a kinked colostomy bag would have had. Any sort of half-punishment in between would have been disappointing from a newsy viewpoint.

We got the former. This chap was not banned, not endorsed and instead of a fine, he got - wait for it - an absolute discharge. Sniggers all round, even though the magistrates didn't seem to notice the gag. He didn't even have to pay the £25 costs the willowy prosecutor had requested.

Result! For him, and for me. I chatted to him outside the court and got his post-case reaction. The next day, it appeared in every national newspaper, including numerous inside page leads plus the front page side column of the Daily Telegraph.

There was another day when a story of mine from the courtroom which didn't involve an actual case got on to Have I Got News For You, but I'll save that for another time.

"Today, live from the Paddock Boating Lake in Cleethorpes...!"

Mondo's mention of the Radio Rewind site on the thread below got me even more nostalgic. Go visit it - it's basically a potted history of Radio 1 - biographies, timelines, DJ details and some fabulous audio of jingle packages and show clips. I've been dipping in and out of it for years.

Although my working life has been in commercial radio, I barely heard any as a young listener because I was Radio 1 daft. Once I'd decided that my own ambitions were related to radio (something which made everybody laugh at school - students, teachers, even one of the dinner ladies) then I began to listen even more closely, as a connoisseur rather than just a consumer.

This, if you want to get on the radio yourself, is actually a mistake. Nobody wants a clone of someone who already exists, they want somebody new, different and true to themselves. There was no point in me going on Kingstown Radio and doing the gags that Gary King had done on the early show that very morning because the demo would be thrown straight in the bin by any professional station which heard it.

For all that, I did send a demo to Radio 1 as a naive 17 year old and got a nice reply from Jerry Foulkes, who was DLT's producer at the time. He was polite, without actually commenting on the tape's contents (thank God - can't remember what was on it and I'm glad I can't) and told me to keep gaining experience in hospital radio.

When I was 19, I left journalism college and got a week's trial at the Grimsby Evening Telegraph. They put me in a tiny but smart guest house close to the newspaper offices for the week and I enjoyed my time there - predominantly because my trial coincided with the Radio 1 Roadshow's annual visit to Cleethorpes.

I'd been the year before as a punter. Three of us went - my mate Chris and a French exchange student from Douai called Damian accompanied me. Phillip Schofield was the host and it was that rather famous occasion when he was Gotcha'd by Noel Edmonds. He took part in a warm-up "saw your head off" trick but the "magician" "lost" the keys to the guillotine and so Phil, ever the pro, had to do the whole roadshow on his knees with his head stuck in a hole. Noel pitched up shortly before the end of broadcast to huge cheers.

It was supremely entertaining from start to finish. Phil's swearing on the off-air mic was eye-opening too. The only thing that spoiled it was that everyone had seemingly brought their own Gordon the Gopher with them, thereby the whole experience was infested with grating squeaky noises all the way through.

So this time round I was anxious, despite being the placement student, to work at the roadshow. And the news editor, bless him, gave me one of the paper's press passes. He knew that I also had radio ambitions and was seemingly impressed that I had a part-time job at the time reading out non-league football results on BBC Radio Humberside, so I got in. Me and two reporters therefore spent the roadshow behind the scenes, chatting to the competition winners, staff and, most importantly of all, the stars.

Well, I say "stars". The two live acts onstage were the Smart E's and the Brand New Heavies. The former were clearly a novelty dance act with a name of minuscule-controversy; the latter were, erm, brand new jazz-funksters who'd later get much better and much more famous. When they were onstage, I remember watching the drummer being careful, as the performance was a mime, not to actually strike a single drum or cymbal with his sticks.

There was also Patrick Swayze there. Well, the crowd thought so, at least. He was introduced as such and got the most ludicrous scream, epic it was, from the female contingent gathered on the paddock. Leather jacket, shades and elaborate quiff all added to the act, but it was in fact a stunningly accurate lookalike and the truth was never revealed, on air at least. I'm not even sure his fakery was ever revealed to the crowd off air, come to think of it. If you were there and I've just ruined the moment you've clung on to for the last 16 years, sorry.

And who was hosting? Bruno Brookes. He wasn't my favourite at the time because he'd replaced Gary King, my idol, on the early show that year. But I interviewed him and then afterwards told him I was a fledgling jock who wanted to get where he was. He was extremely nice about it, really encouraging. Also there - here's a real blast from the early 90s - was Man Ezeke, who fitted the unfortunate "do we have to play this?" tokenism of 80s and early 90s Radio 1 and black music. Dixie Peach had previously done it, then the Ranking Miss P, prior to Ezeke's own one solitary hour per week on the air with his Sunshine Show. He was also encouraging, telling me - and I quote directly here - to "keep making those tapes, boy". What a nice chap.

And so I'd worked at a Radio 1 roadshow and I've still got my 1FM press pass in my box of keepsakes. Years later, doing roadshows for Viking FM and Imagine FM were enormous fun, and if you work for a local station that happens to be blessed with great heritage and a lack of competition, as Viking was, then you can attract huge crowds. My first ever roadshow as a full-time jock was at the Princes Quay Shopping Centre in Hull (opened by Gary Davies and a Radio 1 roadshow as part of Radio Goes To Town a few years earlier) in 1998, when all the presenters did a stint during an all-day event. It was Valentine's Day and Joel Ross, our resident heart-throb, was trying to break the record for partaking in the most kisses in a certain period of time. Joel, bless him, stood around all day while girls (and a good smattering of sporting lads with a degree of comfort about their heterosexuality) queued up to peck him on the cheek. He loved it, though needed regular applications of lip balm. When JK did his stint with the mic, his first act, under a little playful crowd duress, was to grab Joel and do tongues. For effect, obviously. It got a big laugh.

I did the last two hours and had great fun with it too, wandering around the balconies and concourses of this big shopping centre, persuading folk to join the queue and handing out random merchandise. It was an amazing buzz. And, as if to prove my theory that radio increases your sex appeal irrespective of what you're really like, I received a letter the following week from the student girl who'd been working that day for the event's sponsors, asking me out. Result!

Since going freelance in 2005, I've not done any type of roadshow. Before that, at Imagine FM we did a few, but it was harder to acquire them as the Manchester area has such an amazing array of radio stations, some regional, all powerful, whose clout financially was so much bigger. However, one thing we did get for three years in a row was the switching on of Stockport's Christmas lights and I was lucky enough to be the main presenter at each.

I committed some faux-pas during these events. I warmed the crowd up by running round the front of the cordons, asking random people what their names were and what they wanted for Christmas. One chap curtly told me "I don't celebrate Christmas, I'm a Muslim" - this is into a mic and out of large speakers, remember, so everyone hears it. I asked another lad his name and he excitedly said "Jay!" I then continued, in DJ mode, "so Jay, what do you want for Christmas?" but unfortunately this lad had an almighty stammer and was still telling me his name when I put the mic back in front of him, finally saying "Jay-Jay-Jay-Jay-Jay-Jason."

Duh.

One year we got the Cheeky Girls on. This was only a fortnight or so after they'd done their infamous audition in front of Pete Waterman and co on that reality show, the name of which escapes me as I didn't and don't watch any of them. I had no idea who the Cheeky Girls were but was reassured that it would be fun. Onstage they came, to enormous cheering, and myself and the three other jocks on duty had been told, in no uncertain terms, that we would be dancing with them. That record of theirs came on and there's me, a 30 year old 6ft 2 bloke, in a radio station puffa jacket doing sub-normal choreography that Black Lace would have deemed too embarrassing.

When the "touch my bum" line came up, one of my colleagues decided he would do as he was told, quite substantially too. He claimed later he didn't realise he had touch his own buttocks...

The same year Michael Le Vell was there. We always got a Coronation Street guest (Sally Lindsay had come along the year before, and was an utter delight and incredibly sexy) and so getting a chap who for 20 years had been on our premier soap, which I've loved all my life, was a great coup. He knocked about jauntily on the stage with us but then, as the cheers rang out, he started to ask us, on the mic, where the lights button was, assuming he was turning them on. He wasn't. That was the job of a competition winner from a promotion we'd done with the shopping centre. He looked a little taken aback that he was the big star of the event (and he was) but wouldn't be doing the big star's task.

And Toyah was there. I've adored Toyah all my life; she's one of those women who's got so much sexier as she's got older. She was in panto at the Plaza in Stockport and so turned up, with her Widow Twankee in tow, to do a chat with us onstage. She was fab, a great pro. I loved her even more. The only problem was that she and Twanks started to chuck sweets into the crowd, which should be fine, of course, but the jocks had been strictly warned beforehand not to do this because of, yes, Health and bleedin' Safety. Our roadshow co-ordinator gave me daggers from the side of the stage, and I gently stopped them chucking these toffees (they could have a child's eye out, y'know...) into the heaving throng of vulnerable, unprotected victims-in-waiting. Cuh.

Also because of Health and Safety, the actual switch-on was cocked up one year. We did the countdown from ten down to one, and the button was pressed and - hey presto! - the lights came on. Hurray! But the fireworks and crackers and general loud things were not set off simultaneously, as planned, because someone was standing too close to one of them (about five yards) and so they weren't ignited. Given that explosives 20 times the size of these things go off at stadia when a trophy is presented on a pitch and there are many human beings stood next to them, I thought this a little too cautious. It ruined the moment, really.

My favourite roadshow was in 2000, when Viking FM did its Party On The Pier at Cleethorpes (the seaside equivalent to anyone else's Party In The Park). Top of the bill were 5ive, and Billie Piper was our opening act. I did a segment on the air and stage and got the greatest crowd reaction I've ever had in my career when I said to them: "I reckon we could do this all night, what do you think?" (thieving from Brian May, that one) and the "yeeeeeeeeeeeeees!" in response from these thousands and thousands of people was just explosive. I had a lot of hair at the time, and it all stood up.

I peaked at that stage, as I then went on to introduce Scooch, and then afterwards Sid Owen and the Bomfunk MCs. Showbiz. The other highlights included the chorus of Angels which all the jocks together got everyone to sing before saying goodnight, and the member of Fierce (girlish trio who you won't remember) who responded to a request from below the pier by a group of Lincolnshire lads to, erm, reveal a dual part of her anatomy to them for their entertainment. And she did, just as I was walking past. I bet none of the Three Degrees ever did that.

So my favourite roadshow happened to be in the same town as the one which began my fascination for them, back in the days when I was a teenage wannabe, working as a hack and wearing terrible ties. They really are great fun.

And he's trying a segueway to heaven...

Reading the blurb about the Radio Luxembourg 75th birthday reunion at the weekend brought out the radio nostalgist in me. I didn't hear a great deal of Luxembourg as the medium wave reception round East Yorkshire was at the crappier end of crap, but it is a great radio story.

Working with Tony Blackburn and Paul Burnett lately (by 'working with', I suppose I really mean 'occasionally being in the same building as') has further rekindled my interest in the medium's past. I have friends who have reels and reels of old Revox tape full of interviews, jingle packages (including never-aired underscores and pre-mix sessions) and programmes in their attics. And in their spare rooms. And in their garages. I don't have quite this admirably nerdish approach to it all, but I do love reading about how it once was.

Here's the deal with the mechanics of radio now; a presenter on commercial radio walks into a studio (sometimes it's the only studio, so has to 'hot seat' with the preceding presenter during the news or the last song) and logs into a computer which displays all his songs, ads and required bits of production, in order. He then presses big buttons on a customised keyboard which play these things in turn. The only faders on a desk he need ever touch with regularity is the one which opens his microphone and the one which brings up the newsreader.

When I started as an amateur in the early part of 1990, a presenter walked into a studio and began a process of cueing up, checking for levels and spinning into its correct starting place a whole host of vinyl records. CD players were only really installed at the BBC by this time. Jingles were played off the iconic Sonifex cartridges which could contain any number of production snippets but you needed to be on your toes as to which one was where on the list. Other stuff would be on reel tapes, the cueing up of which was a laborious, finger-twisting process which could not be rushed even by those actually in a rush.

Inevitably you'd sometimes start a record at the wrong speed (Cuddly Toy by Roachford regularly got me, as it was a 7" single released at 33rpm) and reels were also capable of being unwittingly speeded up or slowed down by a nonchalant, accidental flick of a switch. It was all part of the learning process; it kept you on your toes, taught you the value of absolute preparation before a programme and complete concentration during it, and gave you immense satisfaction when a segueway which involved three different faders being opened at carefully rehearsed times was executed perfectly. Presenters are notoriously self-critical and think they hear errors or bits of clumsiness that in reality didn't happen, but back when the technical side was so much more complicated it was easier to feel pleased on those occasions when you felt you'd done a good job.

You could spend the duration of a three minute record rehearsing and double checking the process of segueing into the next one; a process which to the listener is an unremarkable few seconds - they're more interested in enjoying the next song - but to the presenter is a work of art, a sign of slickness and good production values. "Nobody remembers a good segueway", one of my ex-bosses used to insist. But the presenter doing the segueway does, and technical excellence back then would provide an adrenaline rush and galvanise the presenter into making the rest of the show just as good. Only once the segueway was absolutely memorised, ready for its on-air execution, did you consider doing stuff like answering the phone or preparing the next link or more humdrum necessities like visiting the lavatory. And sometimes you wouldn't have time. Afterwards, he'd listen to his own cassette recording of the show to see whether various segueways were as good as he thought they were.

The first time I was introduced to a playout computer was in 1996 at Hallam FM in Sheffield. I was transfixed by it; and also terrified of it. Even at this late stage, all I'd done was use CDs, vinyl and cartridges, and the only computer I'd ever needed was the one which had the record library catalogued thereon, telling you whereabouts on the shelves you could find the circle of vinyl or the CD. Now I was being asked to learn to use a system which was wired to the faders on the desk and contained all of the station's adverts and jingles. Later, these playout systems would be upgraded by their manufacturers so that the database was substantial enough to place all the music on as well. CDs on the radio, except in specialist shows, became pretty much obsolete from 2000 onwards. Some stations donated their CD and vinyl collections to local hospital radio stations, others kept theirs for the inevitable computer crash. You may have seen how the technology has now become part of club DJ-ing too, as more and more jocks deploy laptops with sophisticated segueway tools and mixing facilities to pump out the sounds. I don't do this, yet. It does mean that in theory, a jock can prepare his whole set at home, plug the laptop in and then spend the evening doing what his punters do but be paid for it. It's clever, but it's also impersonal, especially as it seems to rule out customer requests.

The radio playout systems also have substantial editing functions and remote facilities to play out audio which isn't even on the machine, but attributed elsewhere to the desk. Furthermore, they can keep a radio station on air without a single person being in the building for hours on end by doing its own timing, seguewaying and news introduction, providing its clock is set correctly. Numerous small stations within larger corporate groups in the UK now do this, for obvious but sad budgetary reasons.

And so we're now in that situation where we don't need to touch the faders which actually play out the stuff you hear on air. I grew up, professionally at least, with these systems but there are older presenters out there who seem to resent the technology a little as it takes away some of the 'performance' associated with live, pacey radio - performances such as those by the jocks fortunate enough to work for Radio Luxembourg during their careers.

"For Halifax and Calderdale - 106.2 Spark FM!"

Another photograph of me, in a bar, with some disc jockeys. These three lads, however, are also the closest friends I've ever had.

It was taken in Halifax, circa 2002. I'm second from the left. The four of us knew each other from the RSL project Spark FM, a mish-mash of a temporary station based at the Dean Clough complex in Halifax. It was a mish-mash because numerous mishaps befell it, but it survived its 28 day run because of a hard-working bunch of people.

I'll always be personally grateful to it, not just for introducing me to the chaps above, but also because the shows I did on it gave me the confidence to decide I could now really have a go at making a career from radio - and two months later, I was on Hallam FM in Sheffield and my life changed course.

I've done loads of RSLs over the years. They are Restricted Service Licences, handed out by the (former) Radio Authority (now Ofcom) either for community or fundraising reasons, or because they are considering advertising a licence for a full-time station in the area and want to gauge local reaction and the strength and keenness of potential bidders. The station I work for, KCFM, had an RSL in 2005 (which came from the KC Stadium), as did numerous other radio groups hoping to win the permanent licence.

Spark FM was a bit different. In the 1990s, RSLs were commonplace to emphasise that commercial radio could have a more localised and community feel to it. There are numerous community stations, which are run or regulated by councils and do not use RAJAR, around the country - examples being BCB in Bradford and Pure FM in Stockport. The Radio Authority decided, almost seemingly by random selection, that the town of Halifax could do with a temporary station and so Spark FM came along to have a go, as did others.

The chap on the right of the photo, Tim Morsley, was one of the directors of the Spark FM company, along with his then-girlfriend and a couple of other local radio devotees. I was living in Huddersfield at the time and had just done an RSL there (called Huddersfield FM, a station which then won a permanent licence for the town a few years later and is now corporately owned, broadcasting as Home FM) and had asked the man running this RSL if he knew of any others. He gave me Tim's number, and so began a friendship which continues to this day.

Tim is a music fanatic, and more specifically, a chart fanatic. He owns every single ever to reach the Top 40 (apart from Junior's Mama Used To Say which I managed to snap accidentally while taking it from its cover on Spark FM and never got round to replacing) and continues to update his collection depending on chart positions each week, as well as sending a weekly text message to loads of people in his phone with chart news, updates and predictions. He also knows the order in which every single chart-topper went to number one - so give him a date and he'll tell you who was there, when they initially got there and how long they stuck around.

He's also a talented radio DJ, having worked on Radio Calderdale (Halifax's hospital station) for numerous years, but for one reason or another, has never turned professional even though he has the skill to do so. He remains a decent, honest and unflappable bloke, now a proud father of two.

On the left is Matt Wilkins, the youngest of us - he was just 18 when Spark FM went on air but was irritatingly talented even then. Like me, he used his Spark experience to get on Hallam FM and we did the swing shifts between us for a while after. He went on to a very successful career in commercial radio - he did mid-mornings for Radio Aire, then joined BRMB to do evenings and earlies, before joining Galaxy in Leeds to host mid-mornings. He's now on the late show at Radio City in Liverpool, and he's still irritatingly good.

Next to Tim is Mike Earnshaw, of whom I have the best memories of Spark FM. Mike is a Lancashire lad, a Morrissey fanatic who aped his hero's hairstyle then (and still does) and presented radio programmes with exactly the sort of enthusiasm any heroic amateur presenter, as we all were, should. He did a couple of alternative shows a week, and would turn up at the studios, fag in mouth, with a huge pile of long players and 12" singles under his arm. He would then spread them out on the floor, occasionally stopping to pick one up and tell a story ("that's a test pressing of Spear of Destiny's Never Take Me Alive, isn't it great?") before going into the studio with just one of them. He'd then introduce himself and his first song ("Hi, I'm Mike Earnshaw and this is Killing Joke") before coming back into the office to stare at the impromptu carpet of vinyl, agonising over what to play next. A whole three hour show would be done like this.

Spark FM was a fantastic time. It was gloriously amateurish, and that's meant in a thoroughly nice way, as RSLs are meant to be like that. Even RSLs which have a long-term of goal of winning an Ofcom licence can have an amateur sound to them, due to the need to recruit volunteers and a lack of studio training time. This isn't true of all RSLs - most of the ones here in Hull all vying for the permanent prize were of a good quality - but back in the 90s when permanent licences were by no means a guarantee, they were there for the unambitious music lover or the young wannabe DJ to indulge in their passions and fantasies.

We had three rooms at the Dean Clough complex - one was a relatively big office, then there was storage at the back and slightly cramped but well-equipped studio. There was a minicab firm next door, who doubled up as our traffic and travel correspondents on the breakfast and drive shows.

There were some belting mishaps. The studio microphone was not wholly reliable at being switched off when the fader came down, leading to one indie presenter shouting "oh shit" after garbling his speech and fading out the mic, only for his expletive to go out on air. Another presenter was dismissed for playing a Public Enemy record with its expletives unbleeped at 7pm (and he was supposed to be doing a soul show); a third was tumbled for doing his show drunk and high; a fourth couldn't do his first couple of days on the afternoon show because he was on trial at Calderdale Magistrates Court.

Tim had used some of the budget to buy a cheap but reasonably produced package of jingles, one of which contained the name of every presenter recruited to do a programme, with the v/o just announcing the names in list form. This was made a little too far in advance to be accurate by the time the station launched, and after a fortnight you could play the jingle and after each name add a word or two of your own ("sacked"; "quit"; "never turned up"; "dead"; "who?"), while by the time the month was up, the jingle contained nobody on the weekday schedule except the breakfast show host, but people still played it - just so we could all fill the gaps.

Although I was only recruited a week or so before launch and was only given one show a week as a result (Saturday breakfast, which I enjoyed), I fortuitously ended up being the launch presenter at midnight. This was because only four of us were in the building at the time, and Tim's plans to be the first presenter himself were scuppered by an almighty row with his girlfriend on the telephone which ate into his preparation time. We launched a little earlier than planned due to technical mishaps elsewhere, and when Matt Wilkins was making his promotional trailer in the studio before launch, his request for "one of the shittier sounding" jingles to go on the end was, sadly, broadcast.

So, at midnight, a switch was flicked somewhere and I played a jingle. A thumbs-up from those standing next to a radio in the office confirmed we were on air. Then, as if to emphasise that cheese and predictability (of which I remain totally unashamed) were at the forefront of our minds, I began with The Final Countdown by Europe. We received our first telephone complaint during this record, and the caller wasn't complaining about the record, I should add. He was in Todmorden - a bit of Calderdale which is on the border with Lancashire - and was moaning that the reception didn't get to him very clearly.

My memories of that RSL are very fond. I was single at the time and was a little successful, though I say so myself, with one or two of the twentysomething ladies who did shows there - though when one of them punched me square in the face for no reason in front of Tim (and I mean it when I say no reason) I realised she was probably not ideal girlfriend material. We got some reasonable listener correspondence, with one bloke ringing every night without fail to ask for a dedication for the nurses and patients at Northowram Hospital. There was a jazz show one evening a week, hosted by two students who would bollock the listeners for not ringing up when they had a prize on offer. Two mad women called Audrey and Linda had a weekly programme which garnered the most callers for any one show when someone dared them to play Bang And Blame by REM for the whole of their two hours. And the community element was fulfilled - the station got newspaper publicity and good local guests, and tried at least to cover local news although I stopped them from reporting court cases when it was obvious there was no legal training among any of them...

Most of all, I have a lot to thank Spark FM for because it gave me three fantastic friends, whom I still see sporadically on nostalgic nights out in Halifax. They all attended my wedding - Tim gave the reading and Matt was one of the ushers. Mike didn't have a specific role on the day but was there nonetheless, and he did do his fine Jarvis Cocker impersonation in the evening.

Moreover, Spark FM gave me a career. I'd done better organised and less chaotic RSLs prior to that autumn of 1996 in Halifax, but only Spark made me realise that I could actually do this radio lark as a career. I've been thanking it ever since.

Halifax now has a community station entitled Phoenix FM which is run full-time thanks to European Grant funding.

"Yorkshire & Lincolnshire's Favourite DJs!"

We didn't have a jingle which said that, sadly. It'd have been great if we had.

The photograph is my favourite picture in my recent portfolio (ie, all the ones taken since acquiring a digital camera). It is of most of the presenters who worked for Viking FM in Hull, serving (East and bits of North and South) Yorkshire and (North and North East) Lincolnshire in a period covering, roughly, 1997 to 2001.

It was taken at the station's 20th birthday party in 2004, where we'd all decided to join the official bash a little later and go round a few haunts of Hull's old town which were frequently visited on station nights out in our days working on Commercial Road. I'm second on the right, with my shortest ever haircut, leaning on that white shirt sleeve.

Far more significant people than me on there include:

JK and Joel - JK is at the very front in the stripe-sleeved jacket; Joel to the left with wine glass and cigarette. For all the success they later had at Key 103, which got them their Radio 1 gig, it was at Viking where they say they had their biggest buzz. It is genuinely hard to put into words just how absolutely brilliant they were at Viking. They were treated by the listeners like pop stars - girls hanging round outside the studios, sold out club gigs and personal appearances, and shamelessly sexual graffiti famously daubed on the walls outside. I didn't see much of them at first as they were daytime jocks, long-established, and I was new and on the nightshift, but when they shifted to breakfast together (JK initially did it alone) I saw them every morning. JK was always quick to thank me when RAJAR posted a good 6am hour survey, which I was in turn very grateful for. When they left, a massive hole was made in Viking's building, even though their replacement...

Simon Hirst - ... was as dynamic a presenter as Viking could have got, but he would have been even more dynamite for Viking if he'd been with us when JK and Joel were still there. Hirsty, whose head is only on show between JK and Joel, is something of an icon in Yorkshire as a whole. He's been on Galaxy's breakfast show for some years now and is a champion anorak, networker and archivist within the industry. I first heard him on the Pulse in the mid-90s when I was a hack in Huddersfield, and first worked with him at Hallam FM in Sheffield in 1996. Supremely gifted and creative, and egoless in the extreme, he took over Viking breakfast from the lads for little more than a year before the dream Galaxy move came. You may recall him hosting hit40uk after Neil Fox quit. He remains a close pal, attended my wedding and we meet with mutual friends for a night out every other month.

Paul Carrington - an inspirational presenter of humour and humility, the Funster wasn't actually on Viking when we were (he was on the AM sister service Magic 1161) but was someone who everyone from JK and Joel downwards admired. He's standing on the far left, with the specs. Paul won Sony Awards in his time for his controversial and hilarious shows at Signal Cheshire (later Imagine FM, where I was doing breakfast at the time of this photo) in the 1990s and later became boss of Minster FM where he gave still-a-schoolboy Hirsty his first show. In recent times he was an AM stalwart, working for Great Yorkshire Gold and latterly Magic 828 in Leeds, before joining the BBC in Leeds last year.

Scott Makin - holding the bottled lager on the extreme right, Scott got into radio by accident as he trained as a secretary and was working for a station in his native north east when someone noticed his deep, gravelly voice and put him on air. He joined Viking to host the mid-morning programme and posted almighty figures for numerous years thanks to his laid-back approach and killer Top 10s at 10. He left to return to the north east and is currently the co-host of Century FM's breakfast show in Gateshead, serving the whole area, and still as unaffected by it all as ever. A smashing bloke.

And the others...

David Johnson, at the extreme front (it was he who set up the camera, see), a softly-spoken and charismatic Northern Irish presenter who came to Hull for university reasons and ended up on the late show and then drivetime. A nice, quietly ambitious fellow, he went on to present for Century FM and then Key 103 in Manchester, and also is in demand as a voiceover artist; Steve Jordan, pointing at the front and re-creating the traditional DJ shot of the 80s, is a highly successful breakfast show host who presented shows at Century FM (now Heart) in Nottingham and Leicester Sound before returning to Hull with Magic 1161 to take over from Paul Carrington. He is now my colleague again, on KCFM; Lee Thompson, bespectacled and holding Guinness in the centre, a Geordie music scheduler and occasional (and brilliant) presenter who left Viking to return to Newcastle and Metro Radio, later freelancing as a researcher and producer for music channels and documentaries; Phil Mackenzie, to Lee's right in the white shirt, probably the most versatile person I've ever worked with in that he was a presenter (did the overnights before me), the station sound producer (made the sweepers, jingles and promos), an engineer (unofficially, but he was there in emergencies) and producer (JK and Joel and the numerous club nights). Phil went into management after leaving Viking, then returned to presenting with Minster FM in York before taking on programme manager roles at Tower FM in Bolton and, lately, the Revolution in Oldham; Mark Somers, the current co-host of Viking breakfast who has been at the station for nearly a decade now, having started on weekends when he was still (in law, at least) a boy, albeit a boy with a man's talent and nerve; and Simon Scholes, at the very top of the pic, who was a technical operator and programming assistant at the station, and was also a talented decathlete until injury got him.

Mentions also for Simon Logan, a fantastic breakfast show host who is now completing a decade at Radio Aire in Leeds; Cameron, also at Radio Aire in presenting and production roles, and who at Viking hosted the most ludicrously brilliant, rule-bending evening show I've ever heard; Sam Heywood, who co-hosts breakfast now with Mark and has been in situ for ten years; Ben Weston, who has worked for a clutch of big stations since quitting the late show in 1997 to work in Dubai; Sara Fellows, a gorgeous girl who did the late show for a bit before going to other stations in Yorkshire; James Roberts, another late show host with big management ambitions, and now a decision-maker at Radio City in Liverpool; Ian Roberts, a mad Manc who did evenings under the name of Big E before returning to the north west; Paul Griffiths, one of the most natural presenters with the "patter" of the job, now on Radio Aire; and Jon Fox, who rose quickly from student part-timer to lates and then breakfast with his mate Tom Rhys, and now does breakfast at 210FM in Reading. They were all on the team during this period but for one reason or another, aren't on the photo. I hope I've not forgotten anyone...

It's one hell of a radio team which you are looking at. I feel privileged to have been a small part of it.

Come on down, Natalie

This is me with Natalie Pike, taken in the studios at Imagine FM in Stockport, where I hosted the breakfast show. It dates back to 2004.

Natalie was from Wythenshawe and was at university locally when I received a letter from her, asking for assistance in her quest to become FHM's High Street Honey, having been nominated by her boyfriend and made it through to the latter stages.

I hadn't read FHM for years; I was 31 by this time and had grown out of it. But I did know about the High Street Honey competition from my time with the radio wing of FHM's parent company, Emap. The radio stations were constantly encouraged to cross-promote through their DJs and so many a jock would start personality links with "just been reading in the new Q magazine..." and the like. Heat, an abomination of a publication, got a lot of this cross-promotion. They repaid the compliment by making an ad for broadcast on our stations which promoted an interview with Zoe Ball - at the time she was hosting Radio 1's breakfast show; the ads even referred to this. Programme Directors within Emap were hopping mad and the ad was pulled quickly.

Anyway, despite my lack of knowledge of FHM's current campaigns, I invited Natalie and her fella (I feel awful, but his name entirely escapes me; he looked like an unbearded Badly Drawn Boy and was a dead nice chap) on to the programme and began our own mini-campaign to get the listenership to vote online for her in the final. She impressed me a lot - not just physically, but she was engaging and droll and articulate and seemed to be having real fun in her campaign to win the contest.

During the weeks of voting that followed, she had acquired enough local kudos to secure an invitation to the Manchester City players' Christmas party. As she was a City season ticket holder (this is allowed when you live in Wythenshawe) she accepted the invitation. It was the occasion when Joey Barton had that mis-coordination involving a cigar, a team-mate's eye and a spot of red mist. Natalie duly came into Imagine the next morning to explain what she'd seen, giving us an exclusive for our news team which nobody else could get. She also told us she had been pursued by Shaun Wright Phillips all night - whom she politely told to go away. Good lass. All this was good radio for us, and good preparation for her as the final approached...

She won by a mile. An absolute mile. I can't say how effective our campaign was, but I'm damned sure it helped. And, reverting to red-blooded male type for a moment, I scanned the physical wares of the other candidates and saw nothing which should faze her.

I didn't live locally and occasionally stayed on a contra deal at a hotel up the road from the studios when a long day's work had made the trip back to Hull counter-productive. On the night of the final, I was dead to the world in my room when my text alert beeped and roused me. It was Natalie. All she said on her text was "I won! I won! I won! Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou!". As soon as the result was announced, a camera crew started following her for a week, and two days later it was in my studio, filming the two of us, plus proud boyfriend, as she kept a promise to give me the first full interview (after that of FHM themselves) if she proved victorious.

My abiding memory after that was our attempts to organise an FHM signing session at the local WH Smith store with Natalie, which she was up for, but the alpha female in our sales department who was incapable of liking anyone who challenged her self-appointed position as Most Beautiful Woman Alive was so snooty and horrid about the idea that Natalie decided to pull out altogether. She kept us informed of her activities for a while, and the product of the camera crew's efforts was shown on Bravo a few weeks later. The bloke who fired me from Emap - see one of the quotes on the left - emailed me after the programme was aired to say he'd seen it; it was the first time I'd had any communication with him since the day I'd left his employ four years earlier.

I left Imagine FM within another six months or so. The last time I saw Natalie, she was a hostess on the revived The Price Is Right. When I knew her, she was bright and resourceful, as well as easy on the eye, and I genuinely hope she's doing really well today. Her bloke was dead proud of her ("it's all his fault") and the thing that struck me most was how she was so disdainful of lazy hacks who assumed that now she had a soupcon of semi-fame, she would dump him and go for some tossy footballer or F-list pop pleb. I don't know what either of them are doing today, a little more than three years on, but I hope they're doing it together.