BBC disc jockey dies

THE FORMER Radio 2 disc jockey Adrian Love has died, aged 54. He died at Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells after a lung collapse, having never fully recovered from a car accident in 1997.

He presented Love In The Afternoon on Radio 2 for three years and also worked for Capital, Radio 1 and Radio 4. Most recently, he was Saturday morning presenter at BBC Southern Counties Radio.

Mike Hapgood, managing editor of Southern Counties, said Love was "a great broadcaster who will be sorely missed ... Adrian was an ordinary man who had the skill to be an ordinary person on the radio, and this was a touch of genius". The agony aunt Anna Raeburn, who worked with Love at Capital, described him as "a terrific, warm and friendly man".

Love, son of the bandleader Geoff Love, started his career in the Sixties on the pirate station Radio City before joining the BBC Light Programme, the World Service and then the London station Capital where he ran the evening phone-in.

Love, who suffered from asthma all his life, was hospitalised by a car accident in December 1997, and subsequent infections brought about the collapse of one lung, then the other. He leaves a wife and three daughters.