They began their radio lives on opposite sides of the fence – but within a week of becoming rivals they were instant best friends.
A young, brash Aussie called Ed Doolan was one of the new voices of BRMB when the city’s first commercial radio station launched on February 19, 1974.
And, over at the then-BBC Birmingham, was city-born breakfast jock Les Ross , a former pupil at Handsworth’s King Edward’s Grammar School who’d found previously found more joy working at Witton Cemetery than he’d had during a year working at IBM.
Canny Ed invited Les to make a guest appearance on his show and, to Les’s amazement, his bosses at the Beeb agreed.
“He just phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to go over to see him,” says Les, who, nine years earlier, had beaten future Radio 2 star Johnnie Walker into second place when he won a 1965 Birmingham Evening Mail DJ competition en route to joining BBC Birmingham.
The only son of a pre-War mixed-marriage (father Ted was Catholic, mum Edna was a Jew), Ed had begun his career as a teacher before trying his luck as a broadcaster on Germany radio for the country’s own ‘Voice of Germany’ world service station, Deutsche Welle.
He joined the station on August 1, 1970, less than two weeks after Ted had died on Ed’s 29th birthday.
Once he’d moved to Birmingham, Ed and Les hit it off immediately and soon became great friends, even sharing the same agent, Paul Vaughan, who also looked after Chris Tarrant .
Les joined BRMB himself on March 29, 1976 and for six years Ed, Les and maverick sports presenter Tony Butler were among the pioneering stars who turned a blank sheet of paper into a gold standard for local radio.
Ed later joined the then Radio WM (ex BBC Birmingham) on September 20, 1982 and for several years Ed and Les were breakfast rivals on the reverse sides of their original fence.
Even more years hence, they would both be awarded MBEs for services to radio, be Sony Gold Award winners and be among the first 40 names to be inducted in the Radio Academy’s original Hall of Fame alongside legends like Tony Hancock, Richard Dimbleby, John Peel and Alistair Cooke.
“Only someone like Ed could come all the way from Sydney, Australia, and end up as one of the 100 Famous Brummies created to mark the city’s centenary,” says the now Warwick-based Les who spent a quarter of a century spinning discs for BRMB on Aston Road North.
But even he, though, couldn’t keep up with the astonishing determination of Ed Doolan.
“Despite all of his many health problems, you just thought he was indestructible,” says Les, who’ll be 69 himself in February.
“Ed had completed almost 44 years non-stop on air in the Midlands.
“And he just kept going into the Mailbox every Wednesday to pre-record the links to the Sunday show repeats of his archive interviews even after he’d been diagnosed with dementia.”
In recent years, Les had been a weekly visitor to Ed’s Selly Park home in a bid to keep his spirits up and sister Barbara Doolan would fly over whenever she could - including a lavish 70th birthday party Ed threw at the Botanical Gardens for everyone close to him.
“Ed had been on great form on Boxing Day,” says Les.
“But the last time I saw him was on Friday last week (January 12, 2018) and that was the first time he didn’t really recognise me and he was still in bed at 11.30am.
“Along with his carers, we tried to prop him up with five or six pillows.
“You kind of knew (the end) was coming sooner rather than later, but it’s still a shock when it happens.
“His wife, Christine, is in bits.
“It’s just so cruel, because by the end the dementia meant he wasn’t the Ed that I knew.
“I’d stopped thinking about Ed the broadcaster, because he was just Ed my mate.
“Sometimes when he was talking to me, he would ‘lose it’ and have to wait to remember what he wanted to say.
“He’d say: ‘Mate, this is so hard’ and there would be a look etched on his face like a migraine.
“But we had a format and I would start him off (on another topic of conversation).
“Sometimes, I had to remember not to wear him out.
“Sometimes, we would just sit and gaze.
“Because of the heart disease in his family and the early death of his father, Ted, Ed never expected to live as long as he did.
“But he must have had a hell of a constitution and it’s a tribute to BBC WM that they kept him on air with dementia.
“What I admired about him the most, and one of his biggest broadcasting achievements, was the way he shared his dementia experience with the listeners because so many families go through it and you can feel very alone.
“I am glad he was there when his Inside Out programme won an award at the Royal Television Society last autumn because his listeners, even if they had never met Ed, felt like they knew him.
“He was definitely a one-off in terms of his radio career and typical of him that he should have been ranked as one of the 100 Famous Brummies when the city was celebrating its centenary.
“Even though Ed was Australian, he was as Brummie a broadcaster as any Brummie broadcaster you can think of, someone who had come from halfway round the world and landed on a new-fangled commercial radio station that was one of the first in the country.
“And what bets would you put on someone surviving in that field for 44 years?
“It’s quite an achievement but Ed was seriously, seriously professional and someone who couldn’t do an average show.
“Two of my favourite interviews that he did were with Malcolm Boyden – that was so funny – and also Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on Star Trek.
“Leonard couldn’t believe how much Ed knew about the show, of which he was a fan, but also the way he included the listeners in the conversation was marvellous.
“Ed could also be quite technical – even 30 years ago he began to use an electronic diary and would look up the numbers of contacts in it live on air when I would be, and still am, using an old fashioned book with names written down.
“Ed wasn’t old fashioned in that way.”
As much as Les will miss Ed as a friend, he comforts himself with the knowledge that his great pal went out on his own terms.
Well, almost...
“If there’s thing you knew about Ed it was that he would keep on broadcasting right until the end,” says Les.
“He wanted to die in the studio.
“Ed will be annoyed that he didn’t manage to do that, going down with the ship so to speak.
“But he certainly made a really good stab at it.”
Ed Doolan's first producer
In April 1978, Mike Owen was brought over from BBC Radio Nottingham to become Ed's first producer at BRMB.
The station's then programme controller, the late John Russell, felt that Ed could really go places and told Mike: "We've got this difficult Australian bloke, but we could do to push the boat out with him a bit."
Ed had already been on air at BRMB since February 19, 1974 and wasn't happy with need for such an appointment.
Mike says: "I ended up having a big stand-up row with Ed in the first week because he just didn't want a producer.
"He'd say: 'What have they given me... a Welsh midget!'.
"Ed was doing a Monday to Thursday lunchtime show from 12.30pm til 2pm and then an evening show from 6pm til 7pm and trying to establish who he was.
"It was consumer things on Monday, legal on Tuesday, medical on Wednesday, but there was a sense to try to set the lunchtime agenda for what was happening in Birmingham.
"We started to get anybody and everybody on the show including party and council leaders.
"We once got Conservative council leader Neville Bosworth in with Labour leader Dick Knowles and by the end of the conversation they agreed they didn't have a disagreement (about an important city issue).
"Another day we got (Ed's fellow Ausssie) Barry Humphries in and he talked as Dame Edna (without being made up) to listeners who were calling in.
"It didn't matter who we got on if we could get people talking and it came to the point that we could get people on air because of that reputation.
"Working on radio with Ed was great fun and exciting and he was a real pioneer."
Tom Ross was a sports reporter at BRMB when Ed was in his pomp at the station and later became its head of sport.
"Ed has forgotten more than most modern-day presenters know about radio," says Tom.
"He was a master at engaging and interaction, hence his longevity in the business.
"Ed was the Godfather of Midlands' radio broadcasting."
