When Annie Nightingale, who has died aged 83, first approached the BBC in the hope of getting on the radio, she was instantly rebuffed. Her qualifications were inarguable: as a young journalist working in local news in the early 1960s, she had interviewed the Beatles, and had gone on to host the pop culture show That’s for Me, where she booked then little-known bands such as the Yardbirds, and had appeared on the Friday night rock and pop series Ready Steady Go! But when she met BBC bosses about hosting her own radio show, she was told her voice was too high and wouldn’t carry, that she didn’t have sufficient authority, and – preposterously – that disc jockeys were “husband substitutes” for listening housewives and that a female voice would kill the fantasy.
It wasn’t the first time Nightingale had been turned away on the basis of not being a man. Prior to banging on the doors of the BBC, she had tried get a spot on Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station which launched the careers of Tony Blackburn, Johnnie Walker and Dave Lee Travis, and was housed on a boat that she could see bobbing about in the sea from her second-floor flat in Brighton. She was perfect fit for the station: a music nerd with bottomless knowledge, enthusiasm and contacts. But, as she later told an interviewer, “I discovered the doors were very firmly bolted and locked and barred. There were to be no women.”
