Presenting an overnight radio programme has been called ‘doing the graveyard shift’ for some very good reasons. With most sensible folk asleep in their beds, you’re often left with an assortment of oddballs, insomniacs and shift workers – and not very many of them. Tuning your set in at random at 2 am, you’re likely to hear the presenter having a desperately over-long conversation about bus tickets with Mad Arnold, who’s old enough to remember the first bus. The three of you may well be the only ones involved.
Up All Night is not for Mad Arnolds; it attracts over half a million really quite sane people every week, who tune in to hear the programme circle the globe, bringing foreign news and sport stories to a UK audience. Regular features in the show’s 28 hours a week include science, world football, film, book and mental health phone-ins, world music, Bollywood, US sport and TV, weather and archaeology news.
It’s the brainchild of softly-spoken Scot Rhod Sharp, who proposed the format to 5 Live before the BBC network’s launch in 1994; he still presents the show from Tuesday to Thursday (if you’re staying up late to listen, think Monday night to Wednesday night). Both Rhod and the Friday to Monday host, Dotun Adebayo, make sure the tone of the show stays friendly and accessible. Rhod is an old newsroom hand and foreign correspondent; his low-key interview style and his deep knowledge of US issues are among the programme’s major attractions. He has unobtrusively presented the show from the small, coastal town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, since 2004.
Dotun is a Nigerian-born, North London neo-geezer who’s as arty as he’s blokey and does an occasional relationship advice phone-in item with his wife – unmissable! When she gets really fed up with him, ‘the missus’ – singer Carroll Thompson – brings a few musical mates in, and sweetly sings Dotun off his chair. He once got his own back by staging an OB at their house.
Rhod doing one of his classic intros:
Dotun on the World Football phone-in
Onmyradio 