Liz Kershaw - Recent Career

Recent Career

In 2002, she was one of the original presenters on the newly launched, digital station BBC Radio 6 Music where she presented the weekday afternoon show from 1-4pm, before moving to the weekend mid-morning slots in April 2004, from 10am-1pm.

In September 2005 Kershaw also became a weekday presenter on the BBC's BBC Coventry & Warwickshire radio station, where she took over the Drivetime show. She later presented the weekday Breakfast Show for the station and continued to present a show on BBC Radio 6 Music, but on Saturdays only. Kershaw and Bruno Brookes re-united for a one-off special on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire on Christmas Morning in 2006.

In July 2007, following a complaint from Buckingham Palace about the mis-representation of the Queen in a BBC documentary, Mark Thompson, the BBC Director General, in a public purging exercise, singled out Kershaw’s show in what became an infamous BBC scandal, announcing that some of the DJ’s shows that were aired as live were in fact pre-recorded and that members of the production team had passed themselves off as listeners texting and emailing in to competitions.

It was subsequently revealed by journalists and listeners that other shows, not flagged up by Thompson, presented by the likes of Russell Brand, Jo Whiley, Tony Blackburn and Dermot O'Leary, were also involved in the same endemic production practices.

On 30 July 2008, the BBC was accused by media watchdog Ofcom of 'misleading its audiences' by 'faking' audience interaction. Ofcom stated that the BBC 'deceived its audience by faking winners of competitions and deliberately conducting competitions unfairly and fined the corporation a record £400,000 of which Kershaw's BBC Radio 6 Music show was fined £115,000 for seventeen shows in 2005 and 2006. Kershaw was forbidden from commenting on this by a clause in her contract which prevented her from speaking publicly about the BBC and its affairs.

She can currently be heard on BBC Radio 6 Music Saturday lunchtimes 1-3pm. She left the breakfast show at BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on Friday 17 July 2009 when the management decided to change the hosts, moving to a Sunday programme which she presented until April 2011.

On 2 October 2010, she reprised her performance of The Undertones Teenage Kicks at the celebration of the reprieve of BBC Radio 6 Music, 6 Fest with Damian O'Neill of The Undertones, and Doyle & The Fourfathers, a charity gig in aid of Nordoff-Robbins and the Chilean Miners in the 2010 Copiapó mining accident.

In October 2012, Kershaw told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that she had been routinely groped while working as Radio1 DJ in the 1980's. She said the station had a culture that was very intimidating for a young woman.