John Peel Near Miss Flashback

This isn’t a good photograph by any criteria other than nostalgia, I’ll admit that.

I came to London tonight ready for an early start on my new contract tomorrow. I booked a hotel off Great Portland Street and was pleasantly surprised when I realised that it was a place I’d stayed in many years ago, and just around the corner from the site of a magical memory…

11 or 12 years ago I was staying here with my colleagues and good friends Karen and Simon. On our walk out to dinner we passed this very unassuming building, which at the time was a BBC building – Radio 1 used to broadcast from here until a couple of years ago.

Anyway, that night we happened to spot John Peel unloading boxes of records from his car boot, but we were all far too shy to approach him. Over dinner we regretted this and wished we’d stopped for a chat. So we emailed him while he was on air. Then he read out the email! John Peel spoke to us over the airwaves! He joked about seeing us and thinking we were going to mug him, then gently berated us for not speaking to him, saying he wished that more people that met him on the street stopped for a chat instead of being starstruck like we were.

And of course we never got a chance to rectify it as he sadly died suddenly a year or so later.

And that’s my John Peel story.