Radio and tv legend Tom Edwards – whose voice resonated across the airwaves of Peterborough and Cambridgeshire during the late 60s – has sadly died at the age of 80.
I met Tom 50 years ago when I worked for Needle Press Agency in Peterborough. We chatted daily collating news stories for the BBC. He would ring the agency to invite us to pitch ideas for the regional radio news bulletins he hosted and on a good day might agree five items from Peterborough deserved a radio audience.
It was hearing that distinct voice boom out in a Norwich pub one weekend (I had been on a home visit to my parents in Swaffham) that we actually met for the first time.
The pub was crowded but I recognized his voice and went over to introduce myself. I later followed his dizzying rise to radio fame – and watched it fall apart so spectacularly.
By an extraordinary coincidence, a former Wisbech county councillor has been his closest friends for 20 or more years. He helped us re-connect and four years ago I spent a glorious day with him chatting and filling in the years.
By then he had been 31 years sober and it was a delight to treat him to lunch at a farmhouse restaurant near his home in Heckington Lincs.
If Tom had any bitterness about how alcohol had wreaked havoc with his life and career he never showed it. Instead in Heckington I found a man attuned to modern life and media, chain smoking his way through his latter years and fully aware of the mortality of life.
He died, peacefully, in a Lincoln hospice on October 25.
Early days in Norfolk
Tom grew up in Norwich and made his first forays into broadcasting when, at nineteen, he responded to a tape-audition and was accepted by the pirate world of offshore stations.
Pirate radio: adventure and risk
His most vivid memories were of two legendary stations. First was Radio City, based off the Kent coast. Tom joined in 1965 and became a senior DJ there. His recollections are dramatic: living on towers built during the Second World War, crossing rope-bridges, surviving storms, playing the pop records that the BBC would not, and broadcasting outside the legal reach of the time.
Then he moved on to Radio Caroline South, boarding the ship Mi Amigo early in 1967 until the government passed the Marine Offences Act that outlawed such stations in August.
BBC and regional radio
With the outlaw stations closed or transformed, Tom’s career took a turn for legitimacy. In late 1967 he joined BBC, working on the regional TV news programme Look East from Norwich, and shortly after that he moved into radio presenting.
Later he could be heard BBC Radio 1 (initially replacing Simon Dee on the Midday Spin) and then as announcer and newsreader on both Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 in the 1970s.
Freelancing in the 1980s, Edwards became Thames Television’s in-vision announcer (most of the decade), plus ATV and HTV West
The private struggle: alcoholism and recovery
Behind the microphone, however, Tom faced a much harder personal battle. His memoir, Is Anybody There?, published in 2018, lays bare his descent into alcoholism and the professional and personal consequences that followed.
During his freelance television years in the 1980s, often working seven days a week, the pressure and the pace took their toll. He acknowledged that his drinking shifted from social to dependency. He spent three long years in a rehabilitation clinic.
Yet perhaps the most powerful part of Tom’s story is his recovery. In his own words he wrote of feeling like “an idiot” for allowing drink to jeopardise his career. But he also pointed to the kindness of friends—such as comedian and presenter Bob Monkhouse—who helped him back when he needed it most.
By the time he published his memoir he had been sober for many years and had found, a measure of peace.
And his signature sign-on? Knocking the mic three times: “Is anybody there?”—later the title of his autobiography of course.
