Colin Berry obituary

The Guardian

08-05-2025

Colin Berry, who has died aged 79 after suffering from dementia, was a disc jockey and newsreader whose calm, chatty style was heard on BBC Radio 2 for almost 40 years. He presented late-night and early-morning shows, and then filled the 2am to 5am gap between them as a regular host of You and the Night and the Music when the station started broadcasting 24 hours a day in 1979.
'It's certainly for insomniacs, but not only for them,' he said on Ray Moore's late show, moments before the inaugural edition went out, with Berry as its first presenter. 'There are drivers, there are people working through the night.'
He added that the format included short features such as a nationwide 'what's on' guide and a cookery slot for 'those of our listeners who get home late at night and feel like a snack'. Moore retorted: 'If you think I'm going to go home and start frying eggs at 4 o'clock in the morning, you've got another think coming.'
Through-the-night programming proved a success and, after the show's run ended five years later, several others replaced it.
You and the Night and the Music's launch made Radio 2 Britain's first round-the-clock national radio station. At the same time it became totally independent of Radio 1, finally ending a system where some programmes were shared.
From 1981, Berry also started regularly hosting his second stint on what the BBC termed the 'early show', which followed You and the Night and the Music and preceded Terry Wogan's breakfast programme.
His Radio 2 career was a merry-go-round of presenting during the 'graveyard' hours (Night Ride, 1973-75 and 1989-95, Music Through Midnight, 1975, and the early show, 1975-77 and 1981-88).
In an era when the station's output was dominated by easy-listening music, his soothing tones chimed with the style.
Berry was also a newsreader, and eventually the longest-serving one on the station (1973-2012). His was the first voice on Radio 2 to announce the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.
But his face was recognised – by television viewers in dozens of countries – only after he became the BBC's presenter reading out the British panel's votes in the Eurovision Song Contest, a job that lasted from 1977 to 2002. 'Television Centre, London, calling – here we have the results of the United Kingdom jury,' were his typical opening words. He missed just two years – with Moore taking over duties in 1980 and Ken Bruce in 1998.
His responsibility was actually greater than just revealing the choices of the jurors to up to 600 million viewers from the basement of the BBC. He was also on standby to take over from Wogan as the commentator in the event of technical problems, although he was never called on to step in.
Berry was born at Brocket Hall, a stately home near Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire – which the City of London hospital had been using as a maternity unit since the second world war – to Nellie (nee Young) and Cecil Berry, a director of Allied Suppliers, which bought goods for the Home and Colonial Stores grocer's chain.
His fascination for radio began as a child growing up in Kenton, Middlesex. Berry would tape records from BBC Light Programme shows and add his own links, with his parents listening on a speaker in another room.
On leaving Wembley grammar school, he landed a job in the London offices of the ITV company Granada Television as a studio technician responsible for slotting commercials into the breaks between programmes.
He moved on to selling advertising airtime at Westward Television, and then the pirate station Radio Caroline (1965-67), where he additionally organised records and tapes to be taken to its ship off the Essex coast. He had a stint as a newsreader there – under the name Robin Berry, because it already had a disc jockey called Colin Nicol – but gave it up after suffering from sea sickness.
A brief job followed selling advertising at Yorkshire Television's London office in 1968 and he was a DJ in London, Essex and Sussex clubs, as well as becoming a record plugger, a summer relief announcer for HTV in 1971 and presenter of his own Saturday afternoon show on BBC Radio Medway (1972-73).
In 1973, he joined Radios 1 and 2 to write and present programme trailers, and he soon became a Radio 2 announcer, newsreader and DJ.
Berry's other shows on the station included European Pop Jury (1978-83), with presenters introducing new songs from their own countries and a panel of young people from each nation voting for the best at the end, Eurovision Song Contest-style.
He later returned to BBC local radio with regular shows featuring a strong dose of nostalgia on Three Counties Radio, broadcasting to Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, from 2008 to 2019.
In 1981, Berry married Sandra Barker. She and their daughter, Marina, and son, Jonathan, survive him.
Colin Derrick Berry, broadcaster, born 29 January 1946; died 16 April 2025