I'm a writer, broadcaster and Emeritus Professor of Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex, England.

I studied history at St Andrews and Oxford before joining the BBC in 1987 as a trainee reporter, later working as a producer on The World Tonight and Analysis. After leaving the BBC in 1993 I taught at the University of Westminster and the University of Sussex, and held visiting fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and Indiana-Bloomington.

'The BBC: A Century on Air' (published in the UK as 'The BBC: A People's History) is my latest book. My four previous publications include 'Life on Air: a History of Radio Four' (2007), which won the Longmans-History Today Book of the Year Award and was nominated for the Orwell Prize.

In 2010, I co-wrote with Adrian Bean 'Between Two Worlds', a Drama on 3 for the BBC based on the life of the Victorian scientist and spiritualist Oliver Lodge. Since then, I've appeared regularly on BBC Radio. For Radio 3 I wrote and presented the five-part series of essays, 'Rewiring the Mind', as well as 'The Power of Three', which featured seventy highlights from the Third Programme’s archives. And in 2013 I wrote and presented the thirty-part series 'Noise: A Human History' for Radio 4.