Radio One loses 'foundation stone'.

Out of the near two dozen mostly suited presenters famously photographed on the steps of Broadcasting House for Radio One's launch, it would have been hard to have imagined back in 1967 that John Peel would be the one there three decades later.

At its birth Peel could only muster a co-presenting slot every other week on its magazine programme Top Gear. A quarter of a century later, his influence within the station had grown to such an extent that Peel became a central part of its new destiny.

As seemingly permanent Radio One fixtures such as Simon Bates and DLT disappeared in the early Nineties under Matthew Bannister's revolution, Peel's importance seemed to become greater than ever. "When I took over at Radio One in 1993 I wanted to bring the station nearer to John Peel," says Bannister. "I felt there was such a huge gulf between what he did at night and the rest of the output and I saw him as a beacon. He said to me, 'Every time I play a new style of music you create a new show'."

Peel had by no means been Radio One's only specialist presenter during its early years, but current station controller Andy Parfitt acknowledges he was "the foundation stone" of what today is a network heavily defined by its specialist output from the likes of Zane Lowe, Mary Ann Hobbs and Pete Tong.

Trevor Dann, Bannister's lieutenant at the station during those turbulent Nineties years, questions how different Radio One would be today without Peel. "He created an environment at Radio One where breaking new acts was a cool thing to do," he says.

But it was a different story in the Seventies and early Eighties, when Peel would often find himself a lone voice among a Radio One line-up whose most high-profile names were entertainers first and foremost.

David Jensen, who in the early Eighties preceded Peel in his 10pm to midnight slot, said his former colleague was uniquely himself. "He was dry, sardonic, ...