The radio boss who just would not listen

THEY told him there was no market for a commercial radio station playing nothing but classical music. They laughed at his pleas for financial backing. But 80 City institutions were wrong and Ralph Bernard was right.

Within four years, his idea had been turned into a £100 million company. Thanks to stars such as Pavarotti and a Top 40 approach, Classic FM has become almost a national institution. And GWR, the holding company chaired by Bernard, now owns 32 local stations and is woth £290 million.

GWR (in which DMGT, publisher of The Mail on Sunday and This Is Money, has a 29% stake) posted pre-tax profits, before exceptionals, of £8.6 million for the year to March - up £900,000.

The 50-year-old former local newspaper reporter has become one of the most powerful voices in commercial radio. He is also the industry's leading campaigner of the digital revolution.

'I've never met anyone who has heard digital radio who hasn't been bowled over by the difference in sound quality compared with analogue,' says Bernard.

'It offers so much more. Some digital radios now have a pause button, so if the phone rings halfway through The Archers you can listen to everything you've missed when you've finished talking.'

The potential is huge - 90 million radios will have to be replaced when the analogue signal is switched off by 2010, while 12 million new sets are bought every year, including car radios.

His love of radio goes back to the days when he did a paper round and listened to pirate stations on his transistor.

'At heart, I'm an anorak,' he says. He started out on local newspapers in east London, including the Barking Independent and the Stratford Express. While he was at Stratford, he took a call from the local hospital, Whipps Cross, which asked if the newspaper could help out producing a news bulletin. Bernard grasped the opportunity.

'Hospital radio is proper radio,' he says. Talking to patients who were often very ill but who wanted to talk about their lives and their families left a deep impression on him about the value of broadcasting.

Bernard's first job in a commercial radio station, after being turned down by BBC Radio Carlisle, was at Sheffield's Radio Hallam where he was a documentary producer.

He made programmes on miners' leader Arthur Scargill as well as the documentary Dying For A Drink about alcoholism, though this came about almost by chance. He had gone to pick up his wife, Lisa, from an Alcoholics' Anonymous meeting that she was covering as women's editor of Yorkshire's Barnsley Chronicle.

Asked what he was doing there, Bernard, suspecting he might be mistaken for an alcoholic, blurted out that he was making a documentary - then he went ahead with one.

The programme won a national award, which helped him get his next post as head of news at Hereward Radio in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

Bernard finally achieved one of his greatest ambitions - to become a programme controller - at Wiltshire-Radio. Soon after, he met Marmaduke Hussey, later to become chairman of the BBC.

At the time, Hussey was chairman of Radio West in Bristol. It was a station in trouble and the two of them hatched the virtually unheard of notion of merging the stations, creating GWR.

'We were very innovative,' Bernard says. 'We ran a classical music programme in the early days which was prompted by Michael Bukht - better known as television's Crafty Cook, Michael Barry - who was also working at the station. We ran it between 4pm and 7pm and it worked.'

Bernard went on to become managing director at Wiltshire Radio, then launched Classic FM, proving all his critics wrong. Will it be the same story with digital radio?

'Commercial radio already has 6.5% of the total advertising market with less than half the radio audience,' he says. 'When digital is up and running and the gloves are off with the BBC, we will have three-quarters of the audience.'

There is just one embarrassing detail to sort out first. 'I live in a reception blackspot in Wiltshire,' he says. 'I'm digital radio's biggest fan, but I can't pick it up at home.'