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Beloved BBC radio star dies aged 75 after five decades on air as devastated colleagues pay tribute to ‘giant'
Beloved BBC radio star dies aged 75 after five decades on air as devastated colleagues pay tribute to ‘giant'

The Sun

time5 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • The Sun

Beloved BBC radio star dies aged 75 after five decades on air as devastated colleagues pay tribute to ‘giant'

TRIBUTES have been paid to beloved BBC radio star, John Peters, who has died aged 75 after five decades on air. The legendary broadcaster worked in commercial radio for 50 years and died this week following an illness. 1 Originally from Middlesex, the presenter first entered the world of radio in 1974 for United Biscuits factories. He was the first voice to be heard at Nottingham-based Radio Trent after the station was launched in 1975. Peters spent decades at the station hosting shows such as Trent Top 30. Over the years, he has broadcast on several other East Midlands commercial stations and spent time at the BBC. He hosted Boom Radio's weekly Vintage Charts show most recently, presenting three shows overall. A tribute from Boom Radio confirmed the news and said: "John was the king of chart shows, hosting our weekly Vintage Charts programme since Boom Radio launched - alongside 'John's Jukebox' and his Friday evening show. "Only at Boom have his rare gifts been heard across the UK – and he was enormously touched by the enthusiasm you showed for his programmes. "John was a radio man through and through, with an enviable command of the sound of the medium, weaving voice and music together into a rich audio tapestry. "With his somehow relaxed energy, few have the gift he had for making a chart show an unmissable drama." The station paid their condolences to Peter's wife Chrissie and his family and said they would pay their own tributes to 'celebrate his fine work' in the coming days.

Clemency Burton Hill: My love of Arsenal got me through a catastrophic brain injury
Clemency Burton Hill: My love of Arsenal got me through a catastrophic brain injury

Telegraph

time07-05-2025

  • Health
  • Telegraph

Clemency Burton Hill: My love of Arsenal got me through a catastrophic brain injury

I'm at the immigration desk at Heathrow and the officer is suspicious about my passport. And rightly so because the photograph on it predates a catastrophic brain injury that I had in 2020. Let me tell you: stroke face is real. Like many serious brain injury victims, I also suffer from acute aphasia and apraxia these days, which gives my speech – such as it is – a halted, clotted, strangled quality. In my former life, I had been an award-winning broadcaster for two decades, presenting an array of live TV and radio shows. I'm a born and bred Londoner and in 2020 moved to New York for work with my husband and two young sons. On Monday, January 20 2020, while in a meeting in New York, where I was working as a broadcaster in public radio, my brain – with no warning whatsoever – had essentially exploded after an 'AVM' (a generally-fatal tangle of cerebral veins and arteries) spontaneously ruptured. Before that, I was a very fulfilled working mum, with a husband and family I adored, a wide circle of friends, a career I loved, and, somewhat more privately, a lifelong passion for the world's greatest football team: Arsenal. And then, suddenly, all the floodlights, metaphorically speaking, had gone dark, ushering in a liminal life that seemed – seems – unnavigable. That unfathomable, existence-cleaving rupture left me in a coma. Then, I discovered I had lost half of my skull, and all my ability to form verbal language; I had sustained severe cognitive deficits and I was rendered severely disabled on the right side of my body. Against all possible odds, I survived – a bit of me, at least. And now, five and a half years later, I have come home to see my family. My football family, who have been in my life almost as long as my biological one. It's the semi-final stage of the 2025 Champions' League, you see; a position Arsenal Football Club have not reached in 16 agonisingly long years, and only once again before that. Arsenal were about to meet, in the first leg of the semi-final, a newly-remodelled Paris St Germain team, so I had booked my impulsive red-eye back to my home town. I simply had to be there, didn't I? Footballers and their fans are generally a superstitious bunch, so when only three minutes after kick-off we found ourselves a goal down, I started to feel sweat trickling down my back, palms sweating, heart racing a little ominously. Not because I didn't have faith in my team, but because I definitely didn't have faith in myself to not be a bad-luck omen. Had I somehow caused Arsenal to lose? As I doubted my decision, all the disapproving things my friends and family had said when I had sheepishly mentioned I was flying back for the Champions League semi-final came back to me. I started to hear again the shocked exclamations of those people (for whom all of this seemed incomprehensible, even irresponsible): 'You've only recently got the all-clear to from your neurosurgeon to be able to fly again, what are you thinking?' 'What does your mum think?' 'What do the boys think?' 'Shouldn't you be resting, not hopping back and forth across the Atlantic again?' And so on and so on. When that chilling PSG goal found the back of the net it did seem they had been right. And yet – and yet. What I really wanted to say to those well-meaning friends of mine was something along the lines of: I have lost so much of my former life; anything that meaningfully connects me to it is precious and needs to be held onto. My trip to see Arsenal is like someone else's stupid wellness retreat, boring solo mountain hike, wasteful fashion splurge or cheeky bender. This was a necessary thing. A pause. A gathering. A breath. Even if it simply does not make sense to anyone else. The first football match I remember watching was the 1986 FA Cup Final. Sandwiched between my older brothers on our battered brown sofa, I vividly recall the feeling as we witnessed the drama of the Merseyside derby on our tiny box TV. I was hooked by the rhythms, the music, the non-stop analysis coming from the commentary box, which meant almost nothing to me at the time, of course (I was five), but prompted my brother Elliot to announce to me, in a classic football pundit voice: 'It's Pools of Liver and Tons of Ever!' which had me laughing so much I thought I might die. I remember feeling totally content. I didn't want to be anywhere else, with anyone else, doing anything else but watching the footie. And I would go on to do that very same thing on countless Saturday afternoons. In time I came to recognise the accents of the cadre of football commentators – Des Lynam, John Motson, Bob Wilson, Martin Tyler, Andy Gray. I started obsessively collecting Panini stickers and picking out classic football songs on our out-of-tune piano. By the end of my first season, I had developed something of my own footie vocabulary; I even knew the offside rule. Plus I had also been fully initiated into a world of religious local fandom – we are Arsenal 'til we die – by dint of our mum having been born a stone's throw away from Highbury. And then: May 26, 1989. Anfield. We needed to win by 2-0 to win the FA First Division, and we were very, very close to not doing that, thereby giving it to our close rivals and current league leaders Liverpool on a plate. But then came Mickey Thomas, and one of the most famous moments in football history: 'Charging through the midfield now! THOMAS! It's up for grabs now…!' Over the next few years, I begged to go to the Arsenal as much as I could. I got my first season ticket to Highbury in 1994, queuing with my brothers on a hot August day, waiting patiently around the corner on Avenell Road, then passing my arduously-saved pocket money under the ticket window. In those days, an Arsenal season ticket was about the size of a chequebook covered in flexible red PVC, and we had to physically tear each numbered ticket at the turnstiles on game days. It cost me just over 100 quid, a small fortune of course, but absolutely worth it. My brothers were renewing their season tickets in the West Stand, Block Q, but as a proud new Junior Gunner, I was to be seated in the 'family enclosure' in the corner block of the East Stand Lower, which abutted the North Bank and was the corner that Gunnersaurus, our new team mascot, would appear from every game. It never crossed my mind to ask my brothers if they would consider relocating to the opposite side of the stadium to be nearer to me, their little sister, because by that stage, I was fully convinced that I was already 'home'. These perfect strangers in red and white (and sometimes yellow, if we were playing 'away') were my family too. I came round from my coma in 2020. For 17 days, my family and closest friends had been keeping vigil in shifts at my ICU bed as my unconscious self-sustained only by an array of blinking, beeping life-support machines, fought for my life. Apparently, it hadn't been easy to watch. My husband had been told by my neurosurgeon Dr Chris Kellner that he should prepare to face the fact that, if his wife survived, it would likely be a completely different wife who emerged. That he should try to imagine my life in two halves; a before and an after. Now, as football clichés go – and there are many – the one that goes 'It's a game of two halves!' is up there with the most annoying ones of them all. And yet, as anybody who has ever survived anything dramatic in their life knows: it's true. And even if life has gone swimmingly for somebody thus far: none of us know what is going to happen after half-time. It stands to reason, then, that it's worth fighting for the entirety of the second half. Just in case. In that dismal New York hospital bed, then in the grimmest early days of the pandemic, I would try to focus on the times I felt most myself. Newly mute, immobilised, wracked by intense pain and as lonely as I have ever been. But then momentarily, I would feel myself suddenly gladdened by some almost-forgotten memory cracking through the murky sediment of my broken brain. Meeting my brothers for a quick pint before home games. Memorable away fixtures, be they at White Hart Lane or Old Trafford, Anfield or Parken Stadium in Copenhagen. Or watching – literally smelling – Arsenal lift both trophies of the 1998 Double in Wenger's first full season. I could suddenly perceive my inert body on that wretched hospital gurney twitching with the recollection of all those songs sung with genuine emotional gusto, the sensory memory of embracing strangers, many hundreds of strangers, eyes shining, heart bursting, in all those crowded football stands which I could, even still, navigate with my eyes closed: as familiar as my childhood bedroom. All these seemingly irrelevant details were nothing, really. And yet I knew these were some of the building blocks that made me 'me'. In those desolate early months of 2020, I was incapable of forming the simple motor patterns to say my sons and husband: James, Tom, Joe's names. Yet, somehow, I could still croak the old Arsenal home chants and even make these unlikely words – 'who to, who to, who to be a Gooner?' – recognisable to (if not completely comprehended by) my bewildered American speech pathologist. And on I clung to life, even though medical probability had already deemed that it was almost time for the final whistle to be blown for me. But, no. Not yet. It's up for grabs now…! Finding my way back to myself through the wreckage; to what remains of my former agency, once glibly taken for granted, is a long haul, and not linear whatsoever. But the continued comforts and meaningful parallels I find in football; the hurdles and highs and troughs and non-linearity of that thing called 'progress', the seasonal nature of things, the ups and downs and shocks and unexpected reliefs – all this gives me great succour. I don't belong in my life any more. Yet I still belong in the Arsenal, as so many hundred of thousands of humans have done before me, and will after me. So once again I've defied the naysayers and flown from the US to Paris to watch Arsenal play the second leg of the Champions League. I'm bracing myself for a proper beating tonight. It will hurt, of course it will, yet how fortunate am I that I will be there, to witness it? A glimmering life-force, relit by the most unlikely of matches. (No pun intended!) But to see Mikel Arteta lift up the Champions League would make me properly elated: for him, for this team – and for myself. What motivation would that be! Beyond this season, beefing up our squad a bit, buying a real centre forward and more reliable left-winger would be joyful, and a relief, but – and maybe this point doesn't register with the American, Russian and Saudi billionaires who are snapping up football teams like so much popcorn and candy – winning trophies is not what football is about. I will defend that position until the day I die. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano memorably called it 'the art of the unforeseeable', football's 'stubborn capacity for surprise'.

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