Simon Lederman

Simon Lederman

Simon Lederman at BBC London 94.9
Show Simon Lederman radio show
Station(s) BBC Radio
BBC London 94.9
BBC WM
BBC Three Counties Radio
Network BBC
Time slot Late Night 10pm-2am Monday to Thursday
Breakfast 5-10am Saturday
Style Talk show
News Talk
Music show
Phone-in
Country UK
Website BBC Profile on Simon Lederman

Simon Lederman is a radio presenter in the UK. He presents a Saturday morning breakfast show with JoAnne Good and the Simon Lederman Show on BBC London 94.9 Monday to Thursday 10pm-2am. He is also a regular presenter of the weekday breakfast show behind Paul Ross, weekday Drivetime behind Eddie Nestor, and the weekday Vanessa Feltz phone-in on the same station.
He stands in for Robert as presenter of the Robert Elms programme and for many years he was also a regular contributor to the show, each week taking listeners on an audio bus tour of London, with Lederman describing the areas of London which specific London bus routes travelled through. For this reason he gained two titles: The Bus Biographer and The Route Master.

Biography

During the 1990s Lederman presented the nine station BBC Midlands Radio late night network across the East and West Midlands, broadcast from Pebble Mill in Birmingham. Simon was also back on BBC WM over the 2012 Christmas and New Year period, and in March and May 2013.

Lederman presented a solo show on BBC London 94.9 on weekdays from 10pm-2am until April 2006, a slot subsequently presented by Jumoke Fashola, Big George and JoAnne Good. From 2012 Lederman was back in this slot from 10pm-1am. From October 2014 he presented until 2am.[1] The programme is mainly a phone-in, but also features celebrity guests and newspaper reviewers. The most interactive part of the programme is the Bank Of Lights. This is an apparently real bank of lights where every listener has a bulb dedicated to them. Each time they switch on the radio, their light would light and then they get a mention. On some weeks Simon offers listeners the chance to change the colour of their light bulb on their part of the bank - so often you here a listener asking: "Can I have a blue bulb on the bank of lights?" for example.

2012 Olympics Logo

In June 2007 Simon Lederman was interviewed and credited on the Jeremy Vine programme on BBC Radio 2 and also in the BBC's internal staff magazine Ariel for breaking the story that the London 2012 animated Olympics logo caused Epileptic attacks in some individuals.

Lederman told Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2:

"I met a man called Christopher Filmer one morning in Sutton whilst working on another BBC project. Chris told me his girlfriend was in a nearby hospital after watching the news the previous evening. It was the previous evening that the animated Olympics logo had been unveiled. I checked out the possibility of a connection between the two events with the hospital and with Epilepsy Action and had Mayor Of London Ken Livingstone live in the studio on my Drivetime programme on BBC London 94.9 later that afternoon.

"I called Christopher that night and thanked him for being so open and I said his story would be on the front page of every newspaper the following day."

Ken Livingstone said: "The 2012 video is a catastrophic mistake, the firm which made the film should not be paid a penny. Who would go to a firm like that again to ask them to do that work?"

The story was featured prominently on most national front pages the following day:

BBC News The Guardian
Daily Mail Reuters
The Independent
Daily Mirror
The Sun
The Daily Telegraph

Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street

Scottish singer songwriter
Gerry Rafferty

In January 2011, Lederman broke the news that the famous saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty's hit song Baker Street, played by Raphael Ravenscroft, was out of tune - according to Ravenscroft himself.

When asked during a live radio interview on BBC London 94.9 by Lederman: "What do you think when you hear [the sax solo] now?", Ravenscroft replied: "I'm irritated because it's out of tune; yeah it's flat; by enough of a degree that it irritates me at best" and admitted he was "gutted" when he heard it back. He added he was not able to re-record the take as he was not involved when the song was mixed in London.

Shropshire Star
Yahoo News
Belfast Telegraph
Italian Press

Television

Lederman has hosted worldwide TV coverage of the London New Year's Day Parade, broadcast in the UK and via satellite to TV stations across the Americas and beyond, and also online. He has also appeared during the 1990s in Central TV's 3 part drama The Guilty starring Michael Kitchen and in the 1992 BBC drama Dead Romantic made at BBC Pebble Mill. He also made an appearance in an advertisement for Mitchells and Butlers pubs in the Midlands and in 1996 for an advertisement for BBC Radio 5 Live alongside David Mellor.

Lederman (top right) from The Mighty Boosh 2 DVD

The Mighty Boosh
Lederman also appears in the official The Mighty Boosh BBC DVD interviewing Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding. The video was shot on location at the BBC studios as part of a series of videos for The Mighty Boosh promotional tour. It only appears in black and white. At the end of the interview Noel Fielding regrets having done an impersonation of Worzel Gummidge.

Other engagements

Lederman was Managing Editor of BBC Radio WM at Pebble Mill and has broadcast on the following UK radio stations:

National
Local/Regional - BBC Radio
Local/Regional - UK Commercial Radio

See also

External Links/Sources

  1. Simon Lederman's Facebook page
  2. Profile on Simon Lederman
  3. Andrew Gilligan's article in London Evening Standard
  4. Michael Jackson was born with it - Simon Lederman interviews Tito Jackson
  5. Simon Lederman and Lowri Turner present breakfast show whilst Lowri breast feeds 2 days old baby
  6. Interview with Russell Grant
  7. Miranda Sawyer's 'Upbeat Ranter' Article in Observer newspaper 13 January 2013

References

  1. ↑ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001v6bk