Richard Bacon is back in Nottingham tonight to host a 40th anniversary concert for BBC Radio Nottingham – the station where it all started for him. Jennifer Scott speaks to him about his subsequent eventful career

RICHARD Bacon has e-mailed over his mobile number for me to call.

Unfortunately it's not his current one.

"This is my old phone number", he says in the message. "I keep meaning to write to Vodaphone but that's very boring so let's not go into that."

He then gives his new number before advising: "I don't really pick up messages from this phone. So it's useless."

I'm already reeling from this running commentary on the life and times of Richard's telephones – and I haven't even spoken to him yet.

But then, this doesn't seem untypical of Richard. The Mansfield motormouth's ability to wax lyrical on any subject has helped keep his media career buoyant when all around him seemed certain it would sink.

By rights, his should be a name that ranks alongside other 1990s novelties such as Lord Brockett or Brian Dowling – people whose names ring a bell for no reason you can remember.

Instead, Richard, 32, couldn't be a more up-to-the-minute media operator.

He's about to start a new four-day-a-week topical news and chat show at 10pm on Five Live and will be going out to the US to cover the Obama camp's reaction to the election result.

"I will be in the same room as Obama when he does his acceptance speech, if he wins," he says, sounding genuinely excited.

But then, that's Richard all over.

In an era when many TV presenters are all about the improbably orange skin tones and lacquered locks, Richard manages to endear himself to broadcast bigwigs by sounding genuine.

"I maintain this insane level of enthusiasm," he proclaims, and he's not wrong.

Richard's enthusiasm has propelled every area of his life.

As a child, he would watch his father, the prominent Mansfield solicitor Paul, being interviewed by local news crews in the front living room.

Richard was frequently bored as a child – but TV was something that held his interest.

"I'd see the camera crews coming around and I used to find it all tremendously exciting," he says.

After finishing Worksop College, a leading private school, he went for a day's work experience at BBC Radio Nottingham. Whatever he did was enough to persuade them to give him a longer run on music show The Beat. Eventually the gig allowed him to quit his uninspiring course at Notts Trent.

Nor was his just a flash-in-the-pan enthusiasm, put on solely with the aim of forwarding his career.

He still regards The Beat as a fine show ("They had Nirvana in session – the only radio station in Britain ever to do that," he tells me).

And he's back in Nottingham this weekend to celebrate the joint 40th birthdays of BBC Radio Nottingham and another Mansfield success story Cantamus.

The occasion will be marked by a celebration at the Royal Concert Hall tonight at 7.30pm which Richard will host.

Perhaps Richard's prevailing enthusiasm is related to the fact the career he loves was so nearly taken away from him.

His notorious brush with the press in 1998 certainly left him slightly more cynical and slightly more determined.

While he's very open about his misdemeanours, he's understandably weary of being continuously questioned about them.

He was working for cable TV when he was picked by producers to be the 24th Blue Peter presenter, following a successful audition with a python.

He lasted just 20 months before his name was splashed across the tabloids in a blaze of cocaine-snorting scandal and he was sacked.

A so-called "mate" had sold the story.

"It's not something I did regularly but nor was it the first time," he says. He can't really explain how the drugs experiments came about.

They'd started while he was a bored teenager in Mansfield and culminated in what the tabloids called a "12-hour binge".

He was never, he says, pressured into getting involved in the scene. "It was something a lot of people were doing but I've noticed that's changed a lot recently," he observes. "Whether that's because people are more discreet, I don't know."

Whatever. It was stupid. He regretted it. He moved on.

And he's lucky he was able to.

At first, his new-found notoriety brought him plenty of job offers, none of them seemingly serious.

He admits that when he was asked by the Big Breakfast to stand in as a presenter, they viewed him as a novelty hiring who'd last two weeks at the most.

"It's a bit like asking James Hewitt to present a gameshow," he says.

In the end, though, his talent told. He was there for three years – the longest he's ever stayed in one job.

Then, the BBC began to feel they were missing out and welcomed him back – not to Blue Peter but to more mainstream slots like Top of the Pops.

Inadvertently, he'd made the leap from kiddy TV to the grown-up stuff, which is where he's stayed. He was guest presenting on Channel Five's The Wright Stuff earlier this year, where he impressed.

He says he had the most fun on The Big Breakfast, where they indulged what he calls "his childish side".

But he feels ready for the pacy, journalistic cut-and-thrust of Five Live.

In the meantime, he's got a bit more settled. He married former marketing executive Rebecca in January.

Being married is, he says, "like going out but with more jewellery".

They've just finished converting an Edwardian artist's studio near Hampstead and Primrose Hill.

It all sounds positively respectable.

So, has he been on any more wild nights out recently?

"Not of that nature," is how he phrases it.

His parents would be proud.

Catch Cantamus tonight at the Royal Concert Hall. For tickets call 0115 9895555. Read our review in Monday's paper, or online at www.nottinghameveningpost.co.uk

jennifer.scott@nottinghameveningpost.co.uk