celebrates 50 years of pop picking this week; she turned me onto The Mighty Sparrow and Obeah Wedding years ago. A great lady.

She's been on radio 1 since 1970 and is still on it today, all be it in the middle of the night on weekdays when no one is listening.
I used to love listening to her show as a teenager in the 80s after the chart show (the most listened to radio show in Europe) at 7pm on sundays. She played bands like the Cure and Japan, that were rarely played elsewhere. She is still into all the latest trends at 75 years old like dubstep ( or claims to be in order to keep her job). I love her and think that she should be held in the same esteem as John Peel. BBC 4 did a night dedicated to her a year or so ago, showing the documentary "Police in the East" about the Police's tour of Japan in 1980. Long may she continue.

My one reservation about her and Peel was their refusal to use the benefit of their unrivaled perspective to engage with the present. The greatest broadcasters use their experience, whereas those two seemed almost to dismiss it in favour of living in the perpetual present. Take Peel, for example, revering The Fall so much - I just couldn't ever work out how someone who'd heard so much great music from so many different eras and styles could then overrate them so much. I know there's a benefit that comes from an older person keeping fresh and up to date, but it's not a handicap to have heard so much with one pair of ears. You can be more insightful than someone who's too young to know of anything else. The ideal would be to have a young and enthusiastic broadcaster playing whatever he or she can find and likes, while in a complementary show someone like Nightingale sorts the wheat from the chaff. When I hear her these days I can't help thinking she plays too much stuff she can't possibly think is much good.

Yes as far as both Peelie and Annie on radio, I used to listen because they tended to play stuff nobody else (rightly) would touch with a barge pole but once in a thousand times there was an absolute gem (like Obeah Wedding, above).