Nick Bailey

Nick started his career at the age of 19 as a newsreader on Radio Caroline, but when the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act was passed in 1967 he found himself out of a job. Australia was his next stop, arriving in Sydney in 1968 as a £10 migrant.

Within months he was broadcasting from the wheat and wool centre of New South Wales. After presenting several radio programmes throughout Australia, Nick set off back to Britain with a stop-over in Hong Kong where he presented a classical music programme not dissimilar to the programme he's currently doing on Classic FM.

Once home, Nick joined the British Forces Broadcasting Service where he stayed for several years working in Gibraltar, Cologne, Berlin and Hong Kong.

In 1985 he decided to join Radio Television Hong Kong (the station he'd worked for 10 years earlier) and for over five years presented the flagship morning current affairs programme. When BBC Radio 5 launched in August 1990 Nick became their Hong Kong correspondent, providing weekly reports of what was happening in the colony. Nick was planning to move back to the UK when the offer was made to join Classic FM.

In 1994, Nick took the Breakfast Show to Calais prior to walking through the Channel Tunnel for charity, a distance of 31 miles, and his name is now on a plaque at the Folkstone terminal along with 100 others who were the first and last people to walk through the tunnel.

Nick has won several broadcasting awards including the prestigious Sony award in 1993 for the best Breakfast Show. He also won a Sony silver in 1995 for Classic Romance, which since its first broadcast has been Classic FM's most popular weekend programme with nearly one million listeners every week. In 1996 Classic Romance won the Radio Programme of the Year award from the Television and Radio Industries Club, and in the same year Nick hosted a Classic Romance musical cruise to New York on board the QE2.