ANNIE NIGHTINGALE
Pioneering DJ and broadcaster
(1940–2024)
ALREADY a respected print journalist and presenter on local TV in southern England, Annie Nightingale’s first BBC appearance was on Juke Box Jury in 1963, but she was made to fight before becoming Radio 1’s first female presenter. Nightingale applied for a job on the station’s launch in September 1967, only to receive an appallingly sexist rebuttal. “They came out with this wonderful line: ‘Our disc jockeys are husband substitutes,’” she recalled on Desert Island Discs in 2020. “That set up an awful lot of assumptions that all the women pop fans were housewives… They would say to me: ‘Why would a woman want to be a DJ?’”
Nightingale refused to give up. She was finally offered a trial run of Sunday shows in February 1970, quickly graduating to weekday afternoons, before finding her true home on the late-night Sounds Of The 70s. There, Nightingale was able to explore her passion for underground and experimental music. “I’ve always been quite a progressive person,” she told the Sunday Post. “For me, the attraction of radio isn’t just about playing nice music – it’s about finding the new.”
By 1978, she became the first female host of, steering its transition from blues-rock and prog towards post-punk and new wave, showcasing the likes of Patti Smith, PiL, X-Ray Spex and The Specials. Nightingale balanced TV and radio throughout the ’80s, be it leftfield evening shows, current affairs programmes, or events like , where she was the BBC’s sole presenter in the US.
