In 2002 there was a flurry of news items about Wes Butters, the 23 year old ‘unknown’ who had been taken on to present the Official Chart Show on Radio 1.

Some of the papers used the phrase “plucked from relative obscurity”, which, given that he already had a successful career in commercial local radio, seemed to mean only that he’d never previously presented an Official Chart Show on a national, publicly-funded broadcaster with the number one in its title.

It was with surprise that I realised it was the same Wes Butters who co-produced this week’s Twice Ken is Plenty: The Lost Script of Kenneth Williams on Radio 4. He admits in the Radio 4 Blog that, “While other teenagers in the nineties were mad for Oasis, I lay in my bedroom listening to cassette tapes of The Goons and Hancock’s Half Hour loaned from Manchester’s Central Library.”

I’d never had Wes Butters down as a radio comedy fan. I was more into Radio Active than The Goons, but it’s still exciting to discover someone else of my age who listened to speech radio as a teenager, and to see the career path that has led them down.