Matthew Bannister: Why I'm back at the Beeb

In 1993, Matthew Bannister became notorious for a culling of Radio 1's Smashy and Nicey brigade. Sixteen months ago, he resigned from an executive post at the BBC. He tells Louise Jury why he has returned

In a classic case of the boss returning to the shop floor, Matthew Bannister is back at the BBC. Sixteen months after he quit, the one-time executive most famous for sacking the old Radio 1 DJs, has just taken on his own weekend news show on Radio 5 Live. He says people are being remarkably welcoming and that it is great fun being back on air, a throwback to the early days of his career in local radio and at Capital in London. But he is very clear about one thing: he has no intention of running anything at the Beeb ever again.

He has done many of the senior jobs, from controller of Radio 1 through director of radio to director of marketing and communications. He was a contender for director general last time round, which he says is one of the "three great jobs" at the BBC, alongside running a channel and editing your own programme.

He is now more than happy for Jenny Abramsky, head of radio, and Bob Shennan, his controller at Radio 5 Live, to be making the decisions. "I have no sense of unfulfilled ambitions there," he says, with the broadest of grins. Besides, 45-year-old Bannister quit the BBC to get away from all that. "I wanted a more flexible life," he says. "I just wanted to enjoy myself more."

He has two children, a 17-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son, and he was never seeing them. In his executive roles, he was always on call. In the end, the BBC made the error of appointing him its representative at a Business in the Community forum, dedicated to persuading employers that a happy workforce was one with a good balance of work and life.

"I read the literature, I went to the think-tanks, and it all seemed so deeply sensible to me, I thought that I would take a leaf out of their book. I would stop being on duty seven days a week, and I would start having holidays and enjoying my children," he says.

As soon as he left, he was approached to run a business called Trust the DJ, a management and record label for DJs. He did that for four days a week, and will now continue as chairman on one day a week. He is a board member of the Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex. But he has always intended to return to broadcasting – and, even as he was leaving, he had raised the possibility with Bob Shennan.

Bannister had started his career as a reporter and presenter at Radio Nottingham, working his way on-air through Capital Radio, Radio 1's Newsbeat and back to Capital, where he developed and launched shows including Chris Tarrant's breakfast programme. During his time on air, he went to the Falklands in the wake of the conflict and covered the Broadwater Farm riots.

But being of the disposition that constantly believes things could be done better, he ended up in management. "I used to belly-ache about the way things were run and in each case somebody said, 'If you're so fed up with things, why don't you change them?'," he says.

"I ended up with promotions not from wanting to move up the ladder, but from being dissatisfied and feeling that I could make a difference. I don't regret that, but it's rather nice to get out of it."

After standing in on Radio 5 Live a couple of times last year, the opportunity to have his own show came about when Bob Shennan was pondering the implications of breaking news in the wake of the events of 11 September. Shennan decided that the station's old formula of pre-recorded programmes to follow Saturday sport was not enough. As a consequence, Bannister has ended up with his own live Saturday and Sunday evening programme, The Weekend News, co-hosted by Caroline Feraday.

In deference to the weekend, a liberal dose of entertainment gets thrown in. Since the show started the week after Easter, guests have included the actors Jeff Bridges and Billy Bob Thornton. But there is also serious foreign affairs and domestic news coverage.

Bannister says he is not nervous about being back at the BBC, but he is nervous about broadcasting again."It's really like riding a bike. If you leave it for a long time, you're a bit wobbly. But it does feel like coming home."

Besides, he clearly believes the decisions that may have made him enemies at the BBC proved to be the right ones. "BBC radio is looking good, isn't it?" he says. "There's a sense of confidence and it's still the only place where real creative programmes get made."

Yet when he presided over the cull of Radio 1's long-running DJs, including Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis and Gary Davies, in 1993, he points out that the health of the station was very much in question. Privatisation was on the Government agenda. The dance music explosion had been well under way for some time, yet scarcely figured on the station. "Radio 1 was still arguing about how many ELO tracks to put on the play list," he recalls. "It was clear from the research that kids thought Radio 1 was irrelevant."

With hindsight, he does not think they could have done anything else to re-shape the station. The biggest mistake, though, was not having anywhere for those older DJs and their listeners to go. Although he went to see Frances Line, then controller of Radio 2, to discuss this at the time, Bannister says she was not interested.

"Radio 1 cast off a generation of listeners who should have gone to Radio 2 then. We would have avoided a lot of angst if we had achieved that," he says. As it was, he claims it was only when he became director of all the BBC's radio that he was able to put in place a strategy that ensured the stations worked "like a flotilla", rather than like isolated ships. Then, he says, Radio 2 embraced the older, ex-Radio 1 audience and went on to become a storming success.

Even if you accept Bannister's version of events – and one suspects it was not quite this simple – there must have been raised eyebrows at his return, not least because he has expressed serious reservations about digital radio in recent months, having once been in the vanguard of promoting the new technology.

Such antipathy is not likely to have amused Jenny Abramsky, who has taken over as digital radio's passionate advocate. Bannister endeavours to explain his doubts with a tad more diplomacy today. "I really hope that digital radio takes off, because it's so much better than analogue, tuning in is so easy and the quality is fantastic," he says. "But there has been promise after promise of affordable sets coming, and none of it has come to fruition."

Talking to Bannister, it is almost as if he never left the BBC. He sounds like an official spokesman in his defence of its talented and committed staff, their dedication and creativity. He says leaving gives you perspective, but he still sounds like the man on the inside.

Ask what the future holds and he stresses that he has broadcasting skills to re-learn and others to develop. "I'm not going in in a foolish and arrogant way," he says. Succeeding John Humphrys on Today, for instance, is not on the cards.

"I'm signed up to do this for a year and I want to get it right," Bannister says. "But if other opportunities came along..."