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| FEATURES | BY JANE WRIGHT |
 Mark Goodier |
he tells Jane Wright DO disk jockeys get too old for the job? Emphatically not says radio star and Hampstead resident Mark Goodier. After 15 years with Radio One, where he carved out a niche presenting the Sunday chart rundown, Mark left last year at the age of 41. He admits: “If I hadn’t taken that step, I risked being pushed.” But he denies absolutely he was axed. Or that he’s at all bitter, though the parting came at the end of a “horrible” year in which the main arm of his Wise Buddha production company, which made programmes for Radio One, also went bust, forcing him to sack 30 people. But you can’t keep a good DJ down, it seems. And Mark is quite clear that he would rather be good than famous. First, “out of the blue” he says, came an offer from Classic FM to pump more energy into the station’s classical chart rundown on Saturday morning. Mark admits: “I didn’t say yes straight away. I knew more about classical music when I was ten and played the cello, piano and double bass. But the station is an amazing success story, though when I started in January, I was nervous as hell.” Then he climbed back into the bosom of Aunty Beeb, turning up regularly to hold the fort for absent colleagues on Radio Two, this week on Ken Bruce’s morning show. It may afford Mark some satisfaction that as Radio Two’s 13 million audience coasts through the summer, Radio One’s has dipped under ten for the first time in a long while. He reflects: “Radio One welcomes the 15-24 year old music fan. But if you don’t play Atomic Kitten, the kids will just find it somewhere else.” Sweetest of all, perhaps, Mark now presents the new Smash Hits interactive chart show, where listeners’ votes count as well as record sales, and which airs on Sunday afternoon in direct competition with the Radio One rundown. It is proving such a success on commercial stations such as Kiss 100 that it immediately ousted the rival Pepsi chart, which his Radio One rundown was previously losing ground to. Even Wise Buddha, whose songwriters penned number ones Kiss Kiss for Holly Valance and Whole Again for Atomic Kitten, has bounced back, recording music for radio and TV commercials. He explains: “Wise Buddha is Budweiser backwards.” Mark was born in Rhodesia, southern Africa, where his father was researching the disease-carrying tsetse fly. The family returned to Britain three months later because Goodier senior didn’t want his children to grow up thinking the way black people were treated there was normal. Then Mark says he was “captured” by radio aged 11. “My school friends were talking in the playground about Top of the Pops. But I didn’t know anything about it, because we didn’t have a telly. So I turned on the radio instead. After that, I only ever wanted to be a DJ. I was absolutely obsessive. If I’d failed, I wouldn’t have had anything to fall back on.” He finally made it onto the airwaves at 18, broadcasting for eight years on commercial stations, before his debut on Radio One on Boxing Day 1987. He recalls: “It was scary as hell. Since school I’d told all my friends I was going to be on Radio One. I couldn’t eat any Christmas lunch, it was so important.” He describes the radio presenters he most admires – Jonathan Ross, John Peel, Terry Wogan – as “great brains”, and adds: “I wish I’d gone to university and was better read.” Mark continues: “Jonathan Ross could get away with having a hangover on air. But I never set out to be a personality broadcaster. I’m a music fan and come at everything through the music.” This diffidence makes him a reluctant celebrity. “I want to be good, but I’m quite uncomfortable with using my music to be famous,” he says. In London Mark has always lived in Hampstead, progressing from a flat in Fleet Road, via Carlingford Road, to his current family home, complete with wife and three kids, in Well Road elegance. But he says: “I resent the image that Hampstead is for toffs when it’s such a mixed area. I live between two blocks of council flats.” And he’s equally unhappy about Camden Council’s indifference to his ecologically friendly electric car, a two-seater Ford which he charges up overnight and can then run for 50 miles. Mark says: “I don’t have to pay the congestion charge and can park for free in Westminster, but I have to pay in Camden, which ought to be more encouraging.” Our conversation in a Hampstead café comes to an abrupt halt when the self-conscious DJ fears he’s “getting some funny looks” and strides away. Outside, he regains his composure. “There’s no upper age limit in this game,” he tells me. “I’m delighted with where I am, but in no way satisfied. I’d like to do more Radio Two-style broadcasting, but I ended up doing the charts, and that never did Alan Freeman any harm.” |
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