Mary Anne Hobbs: Radio 1 firebrand at the helm of the pioneering electronic show the The Breezeblock (Mondays, 1.00-3.00am). She left school at the tender age of 16 and went to work in an egg packing factory for the princely sum of £39 per week. She quickly ran away to London with a rock band called Heretic and lived on a bus with them in a car park in Hayes, Middlesex for 12 months, working as their lighting engineer, record sleeve artist, wardrobe designer and mechanic. Her great ambition was to become a music journalist. She figured the next logical step would be to produce her own fanzine - Krush. She sent a couple of issues along with a demented CV detailing her adventures on the bus with Heretic to the Editor of Sounds music paper and landed a job with them at the age of 19.

At 21, having been profoundly influenced by a snapshot of Motley Crue, Mary Anne sold all her worldly goods and bought a one-way ticket to Hollywood, where she lived in a garden shed. She spent a year as Sounds US correspondent in the dark underbelly of LA writing about the fledgling Guns N' Roses, Jane's Addiction et al. At Sounds Mary Anne met fellow teenager James Brown (legendary writer and publisher, not the Godfather of soul) who became a lifelong friend. James moved to NME as Features Editor and when Mary Anne returned to London, promptly poached her to work with him at NME, where everybody was afraid to rock. Mary Anne spent three years on the newsdesk and also worked as a major feature writer there, authoring their first ever Nirvana cover.

She went on with James Brown to form part of the original team he put together to launch Loaded magazine. She worked there as Music Editor, and writing major undercover stories with private detectives, cocaine dealers to the stars and most notoriously in a Soho sex club.

Mary Anne got her break in radio at BBC GLR on Sunday mornings alongside Mark Lamarr. She presented groundbreaking shows on XFM for five years during trail broadcasts which helped to win their licence. She was poached by Radio 1 in 1997 after a particularly confrontational interview with Radio 1's then Head Of Production (Trevor Dann) was bootlegged around the BBC and found the desk of the Controller of the day, Matthew Bannister.

Mary Anne's eight years at Radio 1 have been very happy, she has: hosted shows from all the major award ceremonies: Q, NME, Brits, Kerrang, Mercury Music Prize; made documentaries about David Bowie, The Sex Pistols and The Stone Roses; championed comedy god Ricky Jervais in his pre-Office days; hosted a movie review show with Mark Kermode called Cling Film; and founded and fronted the award-winning Radio 1 Rock Show for five years.

TV... well there's quite a bit - her series about global biker culture for BBC Choice - Mary Anne's Bikes; 27 hours of live coverage at Glastonbury Festival for BBC Choice; and a myriad of guest appearances on everything from Never Mind The Buzzcocks for BBC TWO to The X Rated Videos They Tried To Ban on Channel 4, Perfectly Frank (a programme about Sinatra) on BBC TWO to James Brown's Flipside on Nation217.

Mary Anne can ride any motorcycle you care to park in front of her too...