Annie Nightingale

Anne Avril Nightingale CBE (1 April 1940 - 11 January 2024) was an English radio and television broadcaster. She was more commonly known by the more informal name of Annie. She was the first female presenter on BBC Radio One and was its longest-serving presenter, followed by John Peel who presented from the launch of the station in 1967 until his death in October 2004. After attending Lady Eleanor Holles School, Hampton, southwest London, and the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) School of Journalism, Nightingale began her career as a journalist in Brighton, East Sussex. In the 1960s she wrote columns for the Daily Express, the Daily Sketch and Cosmopolitan magazine. She started at BBC Radio One on 1 January 1970 with a Sunday evening show. (read more on wikipedia)
==Links To Peel==
thumb|right|300px|Annie Nightingale talks about John Peel after his deathPeel was good friends with Annie Nightingale at Radio One and he would often host Annie's Sunday evening request show, when she was away. She related that when she first interviewed him, he was wary of her, thinking she was just another trendy 1960s female journalist She had been appointed fashion editor of Disc & Music Echo in September 1966 and had owned a number of boutiques. An article in Disc announcing she was joining the paper had the headline "Bird's eye view of top gear", although she commented "I'm a communist as far as fashion is concerned". By early 1967 she was also the paper's agony aunt, responding to letters from unhappy teenage readers., but on joining Radio One she showed musical tastes which were closer to Peel and the other Sounds of the Seventies DJs than the chart material of the station's daytime shows. She was the only Sounds of the Seventies DJ, apart from Peel, to be kept on by the BBC after the series was axed in 1975, and also presented Radio One live concerts and the Old Grey Whistle Test. On 12 November 1979 he expresses his gratitude to her for getting him a ticket to see Brighton & Hove Albion vs Liverpool over the previous weekend. After Peel's death, she hosted a tribute show to the man on 29 October 2004 (Annie Nightingale), playing her favourite Peel tracks and inviting Dreadzone to do a mix. 
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2008 , she mentioned trying to fly the flag for Peel:
You can't fake it. John was the same. He would get passionate about something new and have to keep playing it. I miss him a lot because he was the only person here I could really relate to. I'm trying to fly the flag for him.
In an another interview this time with The Arts Desk in 2011 , she believed that without Peel, the BBC would not have recognised her contribution: 
People say to me, “Are you still listening to pop music?” which is so annoying. I had a real row with the guy on BBC Breakfast when I was on there a few months ago. He was going, “OK, you play all this weird stuff but I bet you go home and listen to Jimi Hendrix in the evening,” and I was… [exasperatedly searching for a word] I was actually quite annoyed. We had quite a row. How dare he! I’m totally committed to this, it takes over your life and you can’t pretend – what would be the point of that? It’s ridiculous. But it made me realise that I’m the one who’s out of synch with the world. I can’t explain it except that you know, John Peel was the only other person [who was like that] and I don’t think the BBC would really have accepted me if it hadn’t been for him, so he’s very important to me personally, as well as all the things he did for so much music. We played quite a lot of similar things but we had different agendas and some of the things I play he wouldn’t have touched.
On the 31 March 1980 show Peel looks briefly at whose birthday it would be the next day and mentions 'Anne Nightingale' although discreetly avoids mentioning that she was to turn 40.
In a 2020 BBC news on-line article, Nightingale stated, ""He (Peel) took so many chances and so many risks to bring people what they believed in. It's so important to keep that flag flying and keep that going." See 50 years of Annie Nightingale on Radio 1 (includes vintage photo of the two)
==Compilations==
Radio plays by Peel of various artist (v/a) compilations assembled by Annie Nightingale.
(LP - Annie On One) Heavenly
*01 March 1996: Age Of Love: 'The Age Of Love (Jam & Spoon Mix)
==External Links==
*Wikipedia
*BBC Radio One Profile
*Radio Rewind
*Facebook
*Twitter
*Mixcloud
== See Also ==
*Sounds
==References==
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Category:People
Category:Compilations