A love affair with radio and why it's over

I have no idea what was going through my mind, when at the age of 10 or 11 I started playing my mum and dad's vinyl records and talking to myself in-between songs. I obviously listened to the radio and heard lots of (white) male voices that I could try and copy, but all I knew was that I loved playing songs and 'linking' them. I liked making people laugh for sure and I loved music, so I guess it was an obvious next step. I just didn't have an audience!

I am the youngest of four children but there is a four-year gap between me and number 3, which meant family jokes about the 'mistake' and obviously later on the 'spoilt one'. Despite a busy house, I often had to (or chose to) entertain myself, disappearing into my own world. This was pre-computer, so having a vivid imagination was a gift (although sometimes a curse) and I would create Wembley in our back garden with a small ball and bollards my dad had picked up from the roadside. I would play the whole of Wimbledon against the back wall with a practice golf ball and a table-tennis bat. Our back room and dining table was transformed into The Crucible with pieces of wood for cushions, garden stakes as cues, marbles as balls and an upside-down Subbuteo pitch as the baize!

All those games would eventually run their course, as I progressed through my teens and grew out of them (mostly). But one thing remained. My love of radio. I would do a 'live show' in my bedroom, starting at 7pm and finishing exactly on time three hours later, with either a chart show or just a rambling music show. I even recorded shows for friends to listen to (they pretended they did) and collected their scores every week to create a chart of singles and albums. Looking back, I find it sad to think what those friends really thought of this weirdo. I craved some attention but was terribly insecure; doing 'radio' was a way to satisfy both. I could record a show in private and talk to myself without any fear of direct criticism. I don't recall ever asking my friends what they thought of the shows!

Several years later I started hospital radio at Wexham Park in Slough after a fairly brutal dumping (thanks Sarah). She told me the main reason I was being ditched was because I always reversed into car parking spaces. An extraordinary 'flaw' to pick up on and I argue to this day that reversing is completely logical! A colleague told me to get over this by joining hospital radio and the stars aligned in several ways for me to end up studying a media course and ending up doing 'proper' radio within 3 years on Star FM. Here I could use that car parking dumping anecdote for real and get listeners to phone in with similar stories. I was living the dream. Yes, it was a small station, but I loved every second of it.

I drifted from presenting into journalism and have spent the last 25 years mainly doing news or speech content, rather than presenting music shows. That has involved presenting election specials, covering some of the biggest stories and even making a radio documentary about my favourite band Del Amitri for Virgin Radio. I have been very lucky to do many things I dreamt of when I was that 11-year-old boy in his mum and dad's back room chatting to himself.

What is true about working in radio is that once you have been inisde the machine, you are no longer a 'normal' listener. The things you enjoy and the things that irritate you are slightly different, because you notice things others do not. That is one reason why my love of radio has almost entirely gone. I still think connecting with people through audio is magical. That one-on-one connection cannot be matched in my view. I work in podcasting and the drift towards visualisation challenges that one-on-one quality, but still most people would rather listen rather than watch radio or podcast content.

But there is more to my frustration than just working in radio and noticing things that 'normal' listeners might not. That's been true since I started in the 1990s. What has changed for me is that I do not think there is very much that is good on radio. I have heard so much bad content in recent years. Sometimes it is embarrassing. 87 percent of the UK adult population listens to the radio every week (according to Rajar), but I think they hear a lot of generic unimaginative and poor content. There are exceptions, but mostly the creative radio landscape feels barren.

Things like music beds that presenters talk over, riding the volumes as they move the faders up and down (called something quite awful in radioland) just annoy me now and I cannot listen to anyone doing it. There are talk shows where pompous presenters espouse their views and opinions with callers I never want to know or meet. There are sport phone-ins with inane waffle, presented by ex-players with the broadcasting skills of a hyena. I am afraid radios airwaves are full of terrible content. Sure, there are millions of terrible podcasts too, but the beauty with podcasts is that I can curate my listening. With radio I might have to listen to Robbie Savage and Chris Sutton, because there is no other viable choice. With podcasts, I can put on the things that I like, at the times I want to.

I owe a lot to radio. A wonderful career involving some amazing experiences and meeting talented and lovely people. It also gave me my confidence and allowed this very shy and anxious young man to grow into someone who can now stand in front of 100 people and talk about media and careers. But I have been scarred by the last people I worked with in radio and that leaves a bad taste. So while radio was my first love, it won't be my last. And that makes me quite sad.