Chris Lloyd talks to Mike Parr of BBC Tees who is celebrating his 35th anniversary of being on air

BEING told you have a face for radio is an insult, but Mike Parr certainly has a voice for the airwaves: it’s large and fully-formed, flowing fluently up to peaks before dropping right down as it asks a question or throws out a thought.

And then it pauses. It stops, leaving a space, begging for interaction as it invites the listener to become involved before it takes wings once more.

“The trick is to be as natural as possible but there is inevitably a slight exaggeration,” he says, his voice rolling as if he were on the radio. “I need to perform a little bit when I’m on air – each show is a public performance – so I suspect my radio voice has developed over the last 35 years.”

Mike started on the air in the autumn of 1982 and has since presented more than 8,000 shows on BBC local radio in the north, most recently as the mid-morning voice of BBC Tees.

But his interest, his passion, was kindled long before those professional beginnings.

“I set up my own mini radio station in my bedroom when I was a child,” he says. “My microphone would pick up music from the record player with me making the announcements over the top, and it was rigged up in a Heath Robinson way to a speaker downstairs for my parents to listen to.

“They had to put up with a lot, to be fair, because there were always cables trailing up and down the stairs.”

He got his first radio when he was ten, and he remembers turning the dial on it in those analogue days when tuning was a manual activity, scratchily searching through the bands of hiss and interference for a station in focus in English.

“I heard all the national stations but then I heard someone talking about Whitehaven, in Cumbria, and places where I lived – it was local people talking about local things, and I was fascinated,” he says. “I went into the studio and fell in love with it.”

Armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, he was making interview clips for Radio Cumbria before he was even in sixth form, and it was on the west side of the Pennines that he got his first full-time radio job 35 years ago. Since then, he’s filled the timeslots from earliest morning breakfast shows to the most intimate late night talk-ins across BBCs Cumbria, Newcastle and Tees.

“No, it’s not because I like the sound of my own voice – it’s a communication thing,” he says. “Radio is a great way of connecting with people.

“I am really interested in other people, and my job is more about listening than talking. Some interviewers have a list of questions that they wade through, but interviews to me are conversations, and listening to people’s responses can take the interview in a completely different direction.”

He likes to make waves on the airwaves. “Music radio is background listening whereas talk radio is foreground listening,” he says. “I’m always imagining that someone is about to switch off and do something else so I’m always thinking what can I say next to make sure they don’t – and that’s the key to compelling talk radio. You have to make it relevant and reliable and challenging and funny.

“I wanted to make talk radio as popular as music radio, and if you get the formula right you can achieve it, and I have.”

As he approached his 35th anniversary, he disappeared down under, to Australia and China, on a six month sabbatical.

He confesses: “I am 55 and I decided to do things like travel and spend more time with the people close to me, and to stand back a bit. I have returned with a different view of things. I still have a great interest in news and current affairs, but it is important to switch off and relax. ”

In fact, the confessional parts of Mike’s mid-morning show on BBC Tees, which has a weekly audience of 133,000 listeners, are among the most popular. The way broadcasters interact with their audience has changed enormously from the days of delay when listeners’ letters crawled through the post to the studio. Now it is instantaneous, as emails, texts and social media posts, offering opinions and advice, pop up on a screen before the man at the mic has even finished his sentence.

“If you are prepared to open up, more will come back, and it creates a real bond,” says Mike, who lives in Darlington. “I have been told my cholesterol is borderline and I have been offered statins. I shared this with my listeners and it was they who helped me decide that I’m not going to take the statins but I am going to fight it with lifestyle changes – so I’m starting cycling and I’m eating less of my bread.”

Food is one of Mike’s favourite topics about which he is not short of opinions or comments. “I’m passionate about good fish and chips,” he says, revealing that a couple of years ago he nearly bought his own chippie. “The secret is filtrating your oil, using Marris Piper potatoes and frozen-at-sea fish – there’s nothing fresher than a frozen-at-sea fillet of fish. When you get tasteless fish that’s dry and not succulent, it is because it was left out too long before it was frozen.”

But bread-making is his big hobby. “It’s all about kneading – don’t scrimp on that,” he says. “You’ve really got to pommel the dough.” His animated voice pummels into the two syllables of “pommel” so that, although he is sitting quite passively with a cup of tea, there’s violence in his kneading.

And then he takes off on a bake-off journey, his voice falling and rising along with his baking loaf as he says: “Bread is very satisfying, watching it rise and prove, and the smell: it’s the chemistry of seeing this food grow in front of your eyes.” By the time he reaches the end of the sentence, the aroma of baking bread fills the air and you can almost taste the knob of butter on top. It is a picture in words; he has a voice for radio.