Radio 1 picks up five Sony awards

By Caitlin Pike

Radio 1 had reason to celebrate at the Sony Radio Awards on Monday
night, winning five gold awards, including News Programme of the Year
and the Feature Award.

Vote Friction, an investigation into the BNP, was chosen by the
judges over BBC Radio 4’s File on Four and Five Live’s The Worricker
Programme as the best news programme of the year. Radio 1 DJ, Bobby
Friction, who won a Sony award in 2003, presented the programme which
was produced for Radio 1 by Unique. Friction followed the BNP as they
campaigned for more seats in Burnley’s local elections. Unique also
produced Missing the Message, Radio 1’s documentary about Aids and
young people, which won the feature award.

BBC Radio 4’s Eddie
Mair was named News Journalist of the Year, with last year’s winner,
Hugh Sykes, getting the silver award. As Mair accepted his award he
bucked the trend of giving a long speech and just said “thank you”.

The
BBC dominated the news categories with its World Service news and
current affairs programme winning the News Output Award for coverage of
the Beslan seige. BBC Five Live won the News Story Award for the
tsunami coverage, presented by Christian Fraser and Ross Hawkins as
well as Shelagh Fogarty and Lesley Ashmall. The award was collected by
Fraser, who said: “This award is a tribute to the way Five Live does
news as well as sport and is down to the foresight of editor Howard
Benson and the hard work of the team who made sure that we were one
step ahead of the rest.”

Local radio was also successful at the
awards. Station of the year (under 300,000 listeners) went to Radio
Foyle for the fifth time. BBC Three Counties Radio won both the station
of the year (300,000-1million listeners) and the Interactive Radio
Award.

Overall Station of the Year went to BBC Radio 2, which
last week came out on top of the Rajar figures with a record share of
16.5 per cent and 13.3 million listeners.