Simon Mayo: Leaving BBC Radio 1 was 'harmonious' but 'pretty traumatic'

Broadcast legend Simon Mayo says leaving BBC Radio 1 was 'traumatic' for him because working at the station was everything he thought he wanted to be.

The presenter — who first joined Radio 1 in 1986 before taking over the breakfast show in 1988 — left the BBC's flagship pop station in 2001 to join Radio 5 Live.

He told Kate Thornton on White Wine Question Time: "Leaving Radio 1 and going to 5 Live that was the was the most disruptive, and the most challenging, and then ultimately, the most rewarding [new start].

"Being at Radio 1 was everything I'd wanted to be. I just wanted to be a Radio 1 presenter, and then when I was one, I wanted to be the breakfast show presenter, and then I was the breakfast show presenter.

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"But everything has its course, everything has its lifespan."

He said at Radio 1, which is aimed at a younger audience than the BBC's other main stations, 'you feel the advancing years there sooner than you do anywhere else'.

"Unless you're a John Peel or an Annie Nightingale or someone like that," he said, "In which case, yeah, you can last forever."

Mayo spent five years presenting Breakfast on Radio 1 until 1993, moving to mid-mornings. He briefly stepped in to cover Breakfast after Chris Evans was fired in 1997, but ruled out a full return.

His time at Radio 1 officially came to an end in 2001.

"I didn't dispute that it was time to be thinking about something else," Mayo told Thornton. "I found the end of Radio 1 to be pretty traumatic.

"Just because I was leaving Radio 1. Everything was harmonious, and everything was by agreement."

Listen to the full episode to hear Simon talk about why he started writing novels, what it was like to broadcast on the day of 9/11 and the song he wrote during lockdown

But he said his home life was 'quite stressful', with his father having died earlier in 2001 and his wife having a hip replacement, so he said he'd taken a couple of months off to prepare for the jump from music radio to talk radio.

He told Thornton: "I was learning a whole new way of broadcasting, learning a new discipline."

While he had agreed to go to 5 Live and said he found it 'exciting', Mayo did admit to being 'gobsmacked' when he was offered the role by the station's then controller Bob Shennon.

The presenter, who now has a drive time show on Greatest Hits Radio, said he met Shennon for lunch and thought he was there to pitch an idea to him, which he did.

Mayo said: "He was sort of only half interested in that and more interested in saying: 'Would you like to do the afternoon show? And I was completely gobsmacked by that.

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"The idea of doing a speech show, a talk show had not occurred to me at all. I didn't know what I thought about it."

He said the idea had come 'completely from the side'. April will mark the end of his film show with Mark Kermode, which has been running on the station for 21 years.

WATCH: Simon Mayo on being live on air during the 9/11 attacks