Last Train to Hilversum by Charlie Connelly

Author:Charlie Connelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

15

‘Make it a Conversation’: Spending the Night with Dotun Adebayo

‘If you make through to half-two I’ll be impressed.’

I was standing at a drinks station in New Broadcasting House with Dotun Adebayo. It was midnight, Sunday night turning into Monday morning, and he was doubting my ability to make it through the night without nodding off. Outside in the darkness central London was about as quiet as it would ever be, and so was the building in which we were both opening cupboards in search of teaspoons. The place was absolutely deserted. With the darkness outside it felt a little like we were a skeleton crew on the bridge of a huge spaceship transporting cryogenically-sleeping colonists through the furthest spiral arm of the galaxy. And someone had left the teaspoons back on Earth.

We met a few weeks after Dotun Adebayo had been acclaimed as Best Speech Presenter at the Audio Production Awards. He was genuinely surprised and authentically dumbstruck when he reached the stage, improvising an emotional speech during which he broke down in tears. If ever an entire room full of people metaphorically reached out and gave someone a hug, it was at that moment. ‘It’s funny,’ he said, reversing backside first out of the cupboard where he’d been foraging for spoons, ‘it’s only a short time since that award but already I can tell that it’s made me much more confident in myself as a broadcaster. I’d never won anything like that before.’

Dotun is the busiest man in radio, working seven nights a week, every week, presenting the overnight show on BBC Radio London from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. on four nights, then Up All Night on 5 Live between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. on the other three. For the national show he spends two nights broadcasting from Media City in Salford, renting a tiny, cheap flat in a rough part of Manchester, where he grabs a few hours’ sleep during the day, and Sunday nights in London because on Sunday evenings he also presents a two-hour magazine show aimed at the capital’s black community. That’s 26 hours of live radio every week, on top of being a newspaper columnist and running his own successful publishing company X Press (the imprint’s first book, 1992’s Yardie by Victor Headley, is being turned into a film starring Idris Elba, he tells me). Oh, and he’s a husband and father too, with one daughter already away at university and the other about to start.

He’s been presenting Up All Night since the early part of the millennium, taking the weekend slot while the show’s founding presenter Rhod Sharp looks after the weekdays. He took over the Radio London show, and began working seven nights a week, in August 2017.

‘A colleague of mine at Radio London was away for a while and they asked me to sit in for a month or so,’ he told me, turning on a tap and rinsing a spoon he’d found, stirring our cups of tea before setting off towards the 5 Live studio.

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