The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1

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Faber & Faber, Limited, 1999 - 330 pages
In 1993, BBC Radio One gained a new controller. Matthew Bannister said he was going to reinvent the station, the most popular in Europe. But things didn't go exactly to plan. The station lost millions of listeners. Its most famous DJs left, and their replacements proved to be disasters. Radio One's commercial rivals regarded the internal turmoil with glee. For a while a saviour arrived, in the shape of Chris Evans. But his behaviour caused further upheavals, and his eventual departure provoked another mass desertion by listeners. What was to be done?In the middle of this crisis, Radio One bravely (or foolishly) allowed the writer Simon Garfield to observe its workings from the inside. For a year he was allowed unprecedented access to management meetings and to DJs in their studios, to research briefings and playlist conferences. Everyone interviewed spoke in passionate detail about their struggle to make their station credible and successful once more. The result is a touching, exciting and often hilarious portrait of a much loved national institution as it battles back from the brink of calamity.

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About the author (1999)

Simon Garfield was born in 1960. He is the author of Expensive Habits: The Dark Side of the Industry (1986), The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS (1994), which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, The Wrestling (1996), The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1(1998), the best-selling Mauve (2000), described by the Daily Telegraph as 'a remarkable book about science which also happens to be a miniature work of art', and the acclaimed The Last Journey of William Huskisson.

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