Stephen's wonderful world of radio

Radio presenter Stephen Bumfrey is celebrating 40 years on the air – from around the world to close to home, as David Clayton reports.

A good few years ago I was driving into Birmingham and there, on a flyover above the Aston Expressway, was a huge advertising hoarding with Stephen Bumfrey’s face smiling down. As a fellow Gorleston lad, like me he was a long way from his easty Norfolk home.

With co-presenter Hannah Cox, Stephen was half of the much-vaunted Heart Breakfast Show in the Midlands. Believe me, in radio terms, it’s quite a thing to hold down a highly popular radio show in such a major city, and Stephen was doing it.

Music, radio, and television fascinated the young Bumfrey and he wanted to be a radio presenter but, when he got to the age of properly deciding what to do, he was told not waste his time on such fancy ideas. “The careers master talked me out of it,” Stephen tells me. I sense that even now he’s still a bit miffed that he wasn’t taken seriously. He started training to be a paramedic, but it wasn’t what he really wanted to do. Jobs as a bingo caller, shifts at Birds Eye in Great Yarmouth and as a trainee manager at Pontins all filled his time, but he was drawn back to radio. As a huge fan of the offshore Radio Mi Amigo, Stephen rang a number he had for the fan club and found himself speaking to a Dutch DJ called Ferry Eden. It was a chance call that changed everything. Ferry was launching a radio station in the Ventimiglia tourist area of Italy. Stephen was invited to go and help run it. He was just 19.