Last updated: August 2026
James Stannage died on 30 March 2026, after a year-long illness. His son Darren confirmed the news. For thirty years he was the voice Manchester argued with after midnight — first on Piccadilly Radio, later on Key 103 — and there has not been anything quite like him on British radio before or since.
The man who kept Manchester awake
Stannage joined Piccadilly Radio in the mid-1970s, not long after the station launched, presenting his own late-night phone-in. This was not the gentle, sympathetic late-night radio of the period. He argued with callers. He cut them off. He was rude to people who rang up specifically to be shouted at, which turned out to be a great many people.
It caused a genuine stir. The Bishop of Salford publicly condemned him as a bad influence — the kind of criticism that, then as now, does a broadcaster's audience figures no harm whatsoever.
What made it work was that it was not an act built on nothing. He was quick, he was well read, and he could hold an argument. Listeners who found him unbearable still listened. That is a rarer skill than it sounds.
Away, and back again
He left Piccadilly and spent part of the 1980s at TFM Radio on Teesside, before returning to Manchester and to Piccadilly 1152 in 1989.
The second stint began more gently than the first. Regular listeners noticed the edge coming back over time, and the confrontations with callers became as much a part of the show as they had ever been.
The Late Night James Stannage Talk Show
The show most people remember is the one he presented on Key 103, which ran for years and became a Manchester fixture. If you were a teenager in the North West with a radio under the pillow, you almost certainly heard it, whether or not your parents knew.
It ended in June 2005, when the station dismissed him following a series of warnings and a history of run-ins with the broadcasting regulator. That was, by any measure, an unusually long run for a presenter working that close to the line.
Why he mattered
It is easy to reduce Stannage to the arguments, and plenty of the coverage does. But the reason his name still comes up decades later is not that he was rude on the radio. Anybody can be rude on the radio.
It is that late-night local radio used to be a place where a city talked to itself — unscripted, unpredictable, occasionally ill-advised — and he was the best-known practitioner of it that Manchester had. That kind of programming has very largely disappeared from British radio. He outlasted it by some margin.
Tell us what you remember
We are a heritage project, not a newsroom, and we would rather this page ended up as something more than a summary of publicly available facts.
If you rang the show — or worked alongside him, or simply listened — send us your memory and we will add it here with your name, or without it if you would prefer. The people who listened know more about what those nights were like than any archive does.
You can also read what happened to Piccadilly Radio, what Key 103 is called now, or what happened to Umberto, another Piccadilly voice Manchester has not forgotten. Or simply listen to our live channels.
Sources
This page draws on publicly reported accounts of James Stannage's career and death, including RadioToday and Prolific North, together with documented radio history. We have no connection to his family or estate. If anything here is wrong, or if you knew him and would like something added or removed, please contact us and we will act on it.