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I doubt those of us who grew up with the DJ quite realised at the time what a pioneer she was
January 12, 2024 5:44 pm(Updated 6:35 pm)
Back in the 70s Annie Nightingale – who has died at the age of 83 – had a request show on Sunday afternoons on Radio 1 that somehow acquired a very specific audience demographic. Almost every request she played seemed to come in from a student. I should know – I was one of them.
It’s hard to overstate just how lifeless the outside world was on a Sunday afternoon in those days, and as we mooched about in our digs or halls of residence, Annie’s show saved us from suffering death from boredom.
I can’t now remember what record she played for me and my mates. I like to think it was someone like Steely Dan – exactly the kind of sound Annie would have embraced, which you would rarely have heard on weekday Radio 1.
But with the trouble I’d have gone to – actually writing a postcard and sticking a stamp on it and finding a post box and sending it off to the BBC – the thrill of Annie reading out my name is never to be forgotten.
I don’t think it would have felt the same with any of the male DJs operating at that time. This was the height of the Smashie and Nicey era. Male presentation was just too smooth, too cheesy, too impersonal. Annie Nightingale was none of those things. She was warm, human, approachable, her heart so much in the right place.
I doubt those of us who grew up with her quite realised at the time what a pioneer she was – not just the first female DJ on Radio 1, but a DJ who played music from right across the spectrum.
We’re talking pre-the late-70s golden age of John Peel, and pre-punk. In the mid-70s it was quite hard to avoid the shlock and the middle-of-the-road, but Annie managed to, and we loved her for it.
Her voice became instantly recognisable. It had the confidence and the huskiness of a woman who you felt could hold her own, and in the sexist 70s, boy did she need to. She was everyone’s big sister. She got there before us but she didn’t leave us behind – maybe because she’d already led a helluva life of her own, eloping from home at the age of 19 with a married newspaper reporter.
Working on local newspapers is a kind of university of life, and in Brighton that’s what Annie graduated from. As the first female reporter on the Brighton Argus – she had a pop column called “Spin With Me” – she became battle-hardened for what lay ahead.
It’s staggering to think that from her Radio 1 debut in 1970 she remained the only female voice on the station for 12 years. What on earth was it thinking?
Finally, Janice Long was given a show in 1982 – another great female DJ, indebted to Annie Nightingale, but with an enormous amount of work to do herself in order to get on and, like Annie, overcome prejudice and stereotyping.
With the death of Long in 2021 and now the passing of Annie Nightingale, Radio 1 has lost the two most important female voices in its history.
The career of a DJ is subject to the whims of fashion like few other jobs. Nonetheless Nightingale succeeded in continuing on Radio 1 until the mid-90s, and after a period away was back in the 2010s presenting an early-hours show of grime and other 21st-century sounds, a measure of her willingness to move with the times.
One of her last big contributions to BBC radio came in early 2023 when she fronted an edition of Archive on 4 on Radio 4 titled Annie Nightingale’s Age of Irreverence. It found an unconsidered link between the pop of the 60s and the comedy of the time.
The programme conveyed the true joyous spirit of Annie Nightingale, a broadcaster who knew that sheer enjoyment was the name of the game – her own and her listeners’.
Thanks for reading out my request, Annie.
