By the time that he came to front his own radio show in the late 1970s, Jeremy Beadle's career had already been one of startling diversity and achievement. Purely as a result of his enthusiasm rather than any cynical desire to make huge piles of money, he had started out as a successful organiser of rock festivals, during which time he personally booked acts like Chuck Berry, The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart to play in Britain, and even managed to win over local residents whenever any started to voice severe misgivings about the possible effects of tens of thousands of music fans swarming around their respectable neighbourhood. As the sound of people shouting "Wally! Wally!" at Rod Stewart and The Who started to fade and the end of the 'golden age' of the rock festival drew to its inevitable conclusion in the mid-1970s, his other major enthusiastic interest - namely that of collecting obscure and unlikely facts - began to take precedence over his interest in music, and eventually allowed him to gradually carve a unique new career for himself as a "curator of oddities". Grouping his findings together under specific subject headings and dates, he initiated a scheme whereby he supplied local radio stations with unusual lists and interesting pieces of information for their presenters to use on air, and both his reputation as a writer and the demand for his services - in a number of fields across the media - rapidly escalated. Within a few years of starting out on this venture he was writing a hugely popular column in the Daily Express (which was personally commissioned by the paper's editor Derek Jameson), masterminding a popular series of books detailing unusual facts that happened 'on this day in history' (and additionally writing a superb children's book, "Rodney Rootle's Grown-Up Grappler And Other Treasures From The Museum Of Outlawed Inventions", which described all manner of mythical devices for making children's lives easier that had supposedly been banned by boring old grown-ups), editing the short-lived original North-West edition of the listings magazine "Time Out", and working as the main scriptwriter for presenter Bob Monkhouse on the top-rated ITV game show "Celebrity Squares".

Increasingly, having made his name as a dependable source of offbeat and interesting topics of conversation, Jeremy Beadle found himself in demand as a guest contributor to other people's radio shows, and one on which he ended up making regular appearances was Michael Aspel's show on Capital Radio in London. 'Beadle's Bookshelf', as his section was called, found him reviewing unusual books of the sort that were usually ignored by the mainstream press, dealing with all manner of outlandish and unusual concepts. The success of 'Beadle's Bookshelf' alerted him to the possibilities that radio might offer for the presentation of his fascinating interests and obsessions, and while writing late one night with the radio on in the background, he found himself coming up with an idea for a show, which he immediately pitched to the London-based talk radio station LBC. Although LBC was well established as a news and current affairs-based station, and was considered to be the best local station in this capacity, Beadle felt that there was room within their output for - and indeed a huge untapped audience for - a lighter entertainment-based programme. To this end, he had devised the format for a programme that combined quizzes and puzzles, humour, interesting facts and friendly chats with listeners on whatever subjects took their fancy, and suggested that as the above were all keen interests of his, that as well as devising and producing the show he would also make the most suitable presenter. He wrote to LBC with his programme proposal, and following a meeting with the station's Programme Editors and some slight prevarication on their part, he was eventually given a three-hour slot on Sunday nights to try out his programme ideas. As it turned out, this unusual timeslot was in fact the perfect timeslot for a show of this nature - as Beadle himself has remarked, Sunday nights are notorious for offering very little in the way of entertaining television, and so a radio programme that offered listeners the chance for some real interaction was always going to be a popular alternative choice. Given that little has changed with regard to the paucity of entertaining television on Sunday nights in the intervening years, it's perhaps surprising that few other broadcasters seem to have followed this highly successful template.

Within a very short space of time, Beadle's enthusiasm and LBC's cautious faith in his ability to deliver what the target audience wanted had paid off brilliantly. As a presenter, he was ideally suited to the demands of creative, intelligent and entertaining speech-based radio, and the judiciously chosen timeslot proved to be perfect for such a distinctive and innovative show. Opening each edition with his characteristically larger-than-life greeting "hello sensation seekers!", Beadle proved to be totally irrepressible and unstoppable when behind the microphone, and his shows are regarded as having been among the most densely packed and overflowing with ideas ever heard on British radio. The challenging and sometimes fiendishly difficult phone-in quizzes proved to be extremely popular with the audience, who often jammed the switchboard with calls in the usually vain hope of getting the answer right and winning a prize, and the puzzles that he put to them ranged from cryptic questions about unusual historical facts, to a genuine challenge to present Beadle with a question that he couldn't find out the answer to. With his vast knowledge of many subjects and equally vast library of reference books this was no mean feat, and the reward for successfully stumping him was a highly coveted "I Beat Beadle" badge (highly coveted because, by all accounts, very few of them ever actually ended up being given out). Complex mathematical puzzles using pocket calculators, which were then the absolute height of technological sophistication, also drew huge audience responses, and clearly demonstrated that this was operating on a higher plane than the usual straightforward 'phone in and win a prize' show. Here the audience were being treated with and indeed credited with a significant amount of intelligence, and they showed their appreciation of this fact with massive and overwhelmingly enthusiastic responses. Quick-thinking, talkative and with an extremely noticeable anti-establishment streak, Beadle rapidly endeared himself to his target audience, and even when no quizzes were taking place he was always more than happy to engage callers in conversations that weren't necessarily connected to what they had actually phoned in response to, and was also rather fond of making them do or say bizarre things live on air.

Beadle's off-the-wall approach to the concept of audience interaction was without question one of the most exciting and popular aspects of his shows, and impressively it didn't just start and end with the broadcasts. In fact, he was so keen to build up a clear atmosphere and concept around his shows that he encouraged it to extend to the considerable volume of mail that he would receive from listeners during the week. For example, from the outset he made it very clear that he wasn't interested in receiving ordinary straightforward letters written on plain paper and posted in plain envelopes, which he considered to be unimaginative and boring. Instead, he encouraged the audience to be creative when they wrote to him, and to use the most bizarre substitutes for paper and envelopes that they could feasibly get their hands on and post. The audience took this as a clear challenge to try and surprise him with their ingenuity, and among the more unusual items of stationary that Beadle received in response to this plea were an addressed odd sock with a stamp affixed to it, an old fur coat with the letter written on the lining, entire rolls of tissue paper which had been written on and then carefully rewound, and the inside of a tin can. Equally unhinged were the frequent postal competitions he staged, which capitalised on the audience's willingness to send him bizarre items by encouraging them to send even more bizarre items in the hope of outdoing each other and winning the contest. Most notable among these was a competition that, to the dismay of LBC's postal department who had to check all the entries, offered a prize for the person who could fit the most objects inside a single matchbox. The eventual winner had somehow managed to cram over two hundred items into one, complete with a detailed and annotated list of what the objects in question were. Astutely, such incentives for listeners to write in allowed Beadle to keep the concept of the show going even when he wasn't actually on air, and allowed the listeners to form an even greater attachment to him than they would any ordinary presenter.

Unsurprisingly, almost overnight Jeremy Beadle's show became essential listening for anyone who preferred original and innovative radio to the usual bland and unimaginative fare. Reviews in the press were almost uniformly positive and enthusiastic (Beadle has described this as the only occasion when Fleet Street have actually been nice about him), and the loyal audience that his broadcasts attracted went far beyond the original envisaged target audience. The show became extremely popular with schoolchildren, who identified with his anti-establishment streak and also liked to phone up and ask him for help with their homework (which he was only too happy to give), and was also apparently a huge favourite of inmates in the various prisons in the London area, many of whom sent Beadle enthusiastic fan letters that he recalls with fondness to this day. In fact, the show became so popular that LBC soon saw fit to offer Beadle slots on Friday and Saturday nights as well. However, he turned this suggestion down, arguing that it was easier to maintain the energy and high standard of planning and presentation that he had set with a single show.

Jeremy Beadle is of course best known these days for the 'hidden camera' stunts and practical jokes that he masterminded and presented on television shows like "Beadle's About" and "Game For A Laugh", and it should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with his work to learn that hoaxes and pranks were an essential part of his LBC shows too. However, the ones that he perpetrated in his radio days had little in common with those for which he is more notorious, and were genuinely of a far more cerebral and ambitious nature that would cause some degree of surprise to anyone who is only familiar with his television work. Meticulous planning and a great deal of quick thinking went in to the execution of the most legendary radio stunts, and some of them seem so genuinely breathtaking in their ingenuity even on paper that they must have been absolutely exhilarating to hear unfolding on a live broadcast. On one occasion, he began to talk quite knowledgeably and in great detail about a report he had recently read about scientific research into the theory that, in keeping with the notion of being left or right handed, humans also used one ear more prominently than the other. After discussing the evidence presented in the article at great length and expressing a strong personal interest in the subject, he invited listeners to call in with their thoughts and observations and to discuss their own experiences. Quite a number had appeared live on air talking about how they too had noticed that they seemed to use one ear more than the other and how this corresponded to or contrasted with their hands, before Beadle admitted that he had in fact made all of this 'research' up. Another time, he pretended to a caller that he was in fact the station's switchboard operator, telling her to be ready to go live on air after the next record. However, this exchange was actually broadcast live on air. When it became obvious to Beadle that she had not actually heard this and was not near to a radio, he decided to spin the pretence out as far as he could, eventually managing to spend the entire three hours of his show referring back to her and telling her to be ready to be live on air 'next'. Other listeners were of course aware of what was going on and many rang to tell Beadle that they were helpless with laughter, including one the woman's sons, who was listening on his own radio and called from a telephone box outside the house to say how hilarious he was finding it (and was also put on air!), but the poor woman herself was still none the wiser. At the end, Beadle revealed what had been going on, and invited her to call back the following week when he promised that he would put her on air. Inevitably he didn't, and, amazingly, he managed to pull off the exact same trick for a further half hour until his uncontainable laughter gave the game away. Another time, a competition called 'Make Stuart Laugh' challenged listeners to try and make a notoriously straight-faced mystery guest in the studio burst into laughter by telling him their best joke. The entire show went by without a single listener succeeding in their aims, which is hardly surprising when you consider that Stuart was actually Beadle's dog, and he had in fact been giving out coded hints about this throughout the competition ("he's barking mad…") that no-one had picked up on. However, Beadle's most ambitious stunt during his time at LBC managed to dominate an entire programme, and has rightly since become one of the most celebrated moments in the history of British radio.

At the start of that night's show, Beadle announced that he would be making outside broadcasts from different locations throughout the night as he travelled around London, giving cryptic clues to his location as he went, and offering a prize of a tracksuit to the first listener to find him. At first he was moving around by car, but then announced that the car had broken down and that he was proceeding on foot, making the race to find him first even more exciting for the listeners. At the first available opportunity, having run along several long streets, he made his way onto the Underground and continued to give out clues, as LBC were inundated with calls from listeners claiming that they'd just missed him at each station he passed through. Eventually the clues led to Hyde Park, by which time over two hundred people had joined in the search, some even racing around on bicycles and skateboards in an effort to get to him first. Yet no matter how hard they tried, none of the people in Hyde Park would actually have found him there. Beadle had in fact been in the LBC studios all night, and had successfully created the illusion that he was travelling around London by talking over pre-recorded sound effects of cars, trains and passers-by, even to the extent of running around the studio until he was out of breath to add extra authenticity to the links where he was supposedly moving around on foot. The final clue led the ever-increasing search party to LBC's headquarters in Gough Square, but even as hundreds of unaware listeners made their way there en masse, Beadle's cover was in danger of being blown. A stern-faced traffic policeman turned up at the studios, insisting that the competition should be called off at once as it was causing serious traffic disruption in the West End. After trying unsuccessfully to talk him round, Beadle decided to come clean to his listeners in order to avert any possible prosecution. He also tried to get the traffic policeman to appear on air to make the announcement with him, but that suggestion apparently didn't go down very well at all. Having previously planned to make the announcement from outside the studios after the conclusion of the show, Beadle made his way out into Gough Square and was greeted by a huge cheering crowd, many of whom remarked that it was the most fun they had ever had on a Sunday. Promotional copies of books and records that had been sent to the station were handed out as prizes to everyone present, and Beadle recalls that the only person who didn't look happy was the still miserable traffic policeman.

As it turned out, the higher authorities at LBC weren't particularly happy either, especially once they found out that the police had become involved. Many of them simply didn't understand Beadle's style or the appeal of his show and had been uncomfortable about it for some time, and after a number of previous ignored warnings and failed attempts to 'tone down' his approach, this was viewed as the final straw. Although he was unquestionably giving the audience what they wanted, Beadle's vision of entertaining and challenging radio didn't fit in with the identity and image that the less imaginative people in positions of power wanted the station to be seen to have, and he was quietly shown the door. As he left, though, Beadle insisted that the popularity of the show and the loyalty of the audience should not be simply thrown away, and suggested that the up-and-coming television presenter Tommy Boyd should take over as presenter. Thankfully, someone with a hint of imagination managed to prevail in this instance, and Boyd did indeed take over the show to great success. Jeremy Beadle, meanwhile, went straight into devising and producing "The Deceivers", a quirky history-based show, for BBC2. When the original choice of presenter proved to be unavailable at the last minute Beadle stepped in to replace him, little realising that yet another unexpected new career path was opening up before him.

Eventually, as anyone who has watched Saturday evening television since the early 1980s will know, Jeremy Beadle went on to become a huge success as a host of mainstream programmes, scoring huge successes with shows like "You've Been Framed!" and "Beadle's About". Aside from brief but glorious attachments to Radio 2 and Talk Radio UK, during which the old LBC-era brilliance was clearly in evidence, he has concentrated on television work ever since. Although his shows are often entertaining and imaginative, and certainly far above the usual level of dull and undemanding mainstream peak-time viewing fare, such shows are often derided by critics and media commentators as representing a general sense of 'dumbing down' in television standards. As well as being an untrue and poorly aimed statement (there are a great many more programmes that are more deserving of such criticism, and it would be far better to attack them before turning your attention to shows that at least have some degree of individuality), it's also a deeply ironic one, given that Jeremy Beadle once did so much to raise the standards of entertainment in radio. Perhaps if more people were prepared to be as adventurous and creative with airtime as he was on LBC, then there might not be any need for talk about 'dumbing down' at all.