From humble beginnings on Woodside Radio at Newham General Hospital, East London, I gained experience within a studio by presenting a 4 hour-long show on Sunday afternoons and applied for work experience at Virgin 105.8fm. After a stint helping out in the offices, I met a lovely man called Dave Wright who was a commercial producer there. He was nice enough to give me one-to-one tuition on production techniques and even gave me the opportunity to produce commercials for the station with him. Under his supervision my skills increased immensely.

Whilst helping him at the station I got talking to Presenter, Janie Lee Grace one evening who put me in touch with Syd Burke. Syd runs a Radio Journalism course with CSV London Media and has a long a varied past career in Radio Journalism within the BBC. Through vocational training on the course I learnt how to produce packages for radio and conduct live broadcasts. We were also given training in writing for newspapers and desktop publishing etc.

When I finished my Journalism course I began a work placement at Viva 963am - women's radio for London. Here I worked as a researcher on the breakfast show and, due to my contacts in stand-up comedy, I also helped organise a series of special guests and produced several comedy pilots. This included a show which was a parody of the Radio 4 discussion programme, 'Any Questions', where 4 comedians were brought into the studio & were given current news topics that were discussed. The whole show was improvised and the pilot turned out to be very successful.
I also introduced Ed Byrne and Ross Noble to the station. Both these commedians broadcast their own shows and the latter of the two has won Best Newcomer from the prestigious Perrier Awards at the Ediburgh Festival recently - one of the highest accolades in the profession.
Unfortunatly Viva 963am got into financial difficulties and was bought out shortly after by Mohammed Al Fayed's Liberty Corporation. It is now called Liberty 963am.

When Viva started on it's decline I applied and got a position working for Radio Broadcast Services who are based in a building just off Tottenham Court Road, London. Here I worked as a producer for several in-store radio stations such as Texas FM, BHS Radio and GFM. Yes, I know it doesn't sound that glamorous, but I gained an awful lot of experience during my time there. I produced voiceovers for Virgin Radio's Russ Williams, Xfm's Ian Camfield, actress Julie Peasgood and I worked with Adriano Russo on the Saturday morning live breakfast show on GFM. Adriano is now an excellent DJ on BBC Three Counties Radio.

My next port of call was with Metro Networks UK. I was taken on by Andrew Carter, Head of News (now at Isle of Wight Radio), to produce the news clips on their recently acquired Virgin Newsdesk. Metro started providing Virgin's news when Reuters Radio News was disolved. Shortly after the newsdesk was moved from Gray's Inn Road, where it had been based with Reuters, to Metro Networks' offices, on the 29th floor of the Centrepoint building, I moved over to travel news. This is where I worked on my broadcasting skills.

Next came AA Roadwatch. I sent a tape to the AA and started work there as a Travel Broadcaster. The main stations I worked on were BBC Northampton, BBC Cambridgeshire, BBC Norfolk, BBC Suffolk, BBC Kent & Oasis Fm. On Saturdays I was regularly on BBC Southern Counties and BBC Essex. I also provided additional bulletins to several other BBC and ILR Stations. Information on all this can be got through the Radio Authority.

If you would like more information on any of these stations, you can find full links to their sites on my links page.

During my time at AA I took a holiday to the island of Zakynthos with my close friend and ex-colleague Alex Ritson. I enjoyed it so much that when I returned to find out that Metro Networks had won the BBC contract, I served my notice and got the next flight out...the rest is history!