Colin Berry was ten or eleven when he presented his first radio show. Admittedly, the only audience was his parents, listening on a speaker he had rigged up in the kitchen while from another room he played them records taped from the BBC’s Light Programme and which he interspersed with his own links and segues. Yet it was the start of a passion that never left him and led to a career in which he was believed to be British radio’s longest-serving newsreader, clocking up almost 40 years on BBC Radio 2.
After reading his first news bulletin on the station in 1973, he read his last at 3am on September 8, 2012. When he announced at the end of the bulletin that it was his last, the presenter who took over from him quipped, “Colin, you were obviously charging far too much.” He appreciated the joke but it wasn’t entirely fair. Having formally retired from the BBC in 2006, he continued reading the news for another six years on a very modest freelance fee, simply because sitting in front of a microphone had been his life and was all he had ever wanted to do.
The momentous events he announced included floods, famines, pestilence and wars but the news story that affected him the most was when he informed Radio 2 listeners of the death of Princess Diana on a Sunday morning news bulletin on August 31, 1997. “People were waking up and I was the first voice telling them. That was a hard one. I went home absolutely shattered,” he recalled.
A decade earlier on the morning of October 16, 1987, he had been the voice informing Radio 2 listeners of the overnight devastation caused by the great storm that had torn through southern Britain and brought down power lines and thousands of trees. What he didn’t tell listeners was that one of the falling trees had nearly finished him. “I was doing the breakfast show and when a BBC car picked me up from my home in Hertfordshire at 3.15am the driver said, ‘Don’t worry we’ll get you there one way or another’,” he remembered.
After a hair-raising journey involving various detours to avoid blocked roads as the 100mph winds howled around them, they were almost at Broadcasting House and were skirting around Regent’s Park when a huge oak tree crashed down across the road behind them, missing the car by a split second.
In his long tenure at the BBC, Berry did much more than read the news. Recognised as the safest pair of hands with a voice that was authoritative yet comforting, he presented numerous shows on Radio 2, many of them nocturnal, including Night Ride, The Late Show and Music Through Midnight. When Radio 2 became a 24-hour station in 1979, he was the first voice listeners heard in the wee small hours presenting You and the Night and The Music between 2am and 6am.
In more sociable hours he also deputised for the station’s main daytime presenters, including Terry Wogan, Jimmy Young and David Hamilton, and he held another long-running record as Wogan’s UK-based sidekick during the annual Eurovision Song Contest broadcast. His role was to read out the points awarded by Britain to the other contestants. The words “Good evening London and hello Colin Berry” were first heard in 1977 when France won the contest with L’Ouiseau et l’Enfant by Marie Myriam. His tenure took in two British winners in Bucks Fizz and Katrina and the Waves and ended in 2002 when the contest was won by Latvia’s Marie N with I Wanna. “I thought I’d do it for two or three years but I ended up doing it for a quarter of a century,” Berry said.
Throughout his time reading the points awarded he was also on standby to take over as lead presenter should the line be lost to Wogan in whatever European city was hosting the contest, although his services were never required. He is survived by Sandra, his wife of 43 years, daughter Marina, a singer and presenter, and son Jonathan, who works in advertising.
Colin Derrick Berry was born in 1946, one of more than 8,000 “Brocket babies” who arrived in the world at Brocket Hall, a stately home in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, that was used as a maternity hospital by the City of London during and after the wartime bombing of the capital. His father was Cecil Berry, a director of a company that owned various shops and stores, and his mother was Nelly.
Educated at Wembley Grammar, on leaving school he was reluctantly about to start work in one of his father’s stores when a neighbour asked if he was still interested in pursuing his childhood ambition of working in radio and television and offered to put in a word with a contact at Grenada TV. That led to a job as a studio technician, slotting the commercials into the programme breaks.
From there he moved to Westward TV selling ads, which he hated, and then on to Radio Caroline as “assistant traffic manager”, which meant sitting in the station’s London office rather than on the pirate ship and organising the tapes and records to be sent out by tender to the vessel in the North Sea.
He was first heard on air on Caroline in 1965 as a stand-in when one of the regular broadcasters fell ill. Broadcasting as Robin Berry because there was another Colin on the roster of Caroline DJs, he was deputed not only to read the news bulletins but to compile them. He did so by copying items from the BBC Light Programme’s news bulletins “and changing the odd word so we didn’t get found out”.
However, he was not cut out for pirate radio, suffering from chronic sea sickness. When he was offered a high-profile DJ-ing role in 1967 after the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act had made the pirates illegal, he turned the promotion down. Instead, he compered the on-land “disc nights” that Caroline ran in clubs around Britain.
He also worked briefly for the nascent Yorkshire TV, although he was unceremoniously sacked before the station went live in 1968, and had a spell as a record plugger before landing his first BBC job presenting a Saturday afternoon music and sports show on Radio Medway.
In many ways he was ideally suited for Radio 2, at least as it was originally constituted, for he loved its diet of light and decidedly unhip middle-of-the-road music. In later years, as the station updated, he regretted that its playlists no longer centred around such staples as Matt Monro and Jack Jones and the orchestras of Henry Mancini and Percy Faith. Radio 2, he complained, had become “Radio One and a Half”.
He continued to broadcast on BBC Three Counties Radio until 2019 with a series called A Little Light Music, his voice until the end as soothing as the records he played.
Colin Berry, radio broadcaster, was born on January 29, 1946. He died of Lewy body dementia on April 16, 2025, aged 79
