Rick Edwards: 'I assumed I'd embrace being famous. I quickly realised that wasn't the case'

Rick Edwards was born in Enfield, North London, in May 1979. He studied maths at Pembroke College, Cambridge, before switching to natural science. During his time at university, he developed as a stand-up and went on to perform on the circuit, often as a double act with Joe Wilkinson.

His television breakthrough came in 2005 as a presenter on E4 Music, after which he graduated to Channel 4’s Sunday morning magazine show T4. That led to stints presenting Freshly Squeezed, Tool Academy and Impossible, among many more. In 2012, he presented Channel 4’s coverage of the London Paralympics.

A growing interest in youth engagement in politics led to Rick Edwards delivering a TEDx Houses of Parliament talk in 2014, presenting BBC3’s debate programme Free Speech and the publication of his book, None Of The Above, during the 2015 general election campaign. He returned to his love of science with the hit podcast Science(ish) with Dr Michael Brooks which investigates the science behind popular culture and led to a spin-off book in 2017.

Since November 2021, Edwards has hosted BBC Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast show each weekday morning, usually alongside Rachel Burden, and began presenting the station’s hit sports-based panel show Fighting Talk in September 2023.

Speaking to The Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Rick Edwards looked back at his disruptive younger days, his reaction to fame and the challenges of live radio.

I wasn’t very well behaved at school and got in trouble, mainly for backchat and being disruptive in class. So just before my GCSEs, my school wanted to kick me out. My dad said, “Well, can he at least do his exams?” So the agreement was I could do them, but I wouldn’t be there for my A levels. I think it was testament to the fact that I’d spent five years annoying most of the teachers and they were sick of the sight of me. Looking back, that’s probably with good reason. 

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At 16, I tried to be funny over almost everything else. I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life. I liked certain bits of school, mainly the social aspects. And I enjoyed exams, which I accept is completely bizarre, but I’m very competitive. From the outside it might’ve looked like I was quite driven, but I just liked the idea of beating other people, which isn’t the same thing! 

I was an only child and completely spoiled for attention. That’s probably what got me into trouble at school and what led me to the ultimate career for an attention seeker. Oddly, since I started being on telly, that need has evaporated; it’s like I’ve satiated it. Now it’s not something that particularly motivates me. 

Even now, if I need advice, I will often turn to my dad. He ran a garage selling tyres, doing MOTs. So even though what I do is a million miles from his work, there’s something about that feeling of reassurance from a sensible, clever man. And he was always really supportive of me. I can’t remember if him pushing back against the school for me meant a lot at the time, but it means a lot looking back. 

My family would watch the telly together. We’d have our trays and we’d sit, have dinner on our laps and watch TV. I always really loved that. But until I went to university I just had no inkling that a career in television, or being a comedian or anything like that was a possibility. I didn’t know anyone who worked in the media. I didn’t know anyone who’d ever met anyone who worked in the media. So if you told me I’d end up being on TV and radio, I would have been baffled. 

I was always confident, but I don’t know if I necessarily knew what to do with it. Your sphere of opportunity expands massively when you go to a university like the one that I did [Pembroke College, Cambridge], where there’s a lot of well-connected people who feel like they can do whatever. And that does rub off on you. There was a TV station, student radio and a comedy club, which was the big thing for me. Me and my dad bonded over TV comedy like Harry Enfield and Blackadder and sometimes we’d go and see live stand-up – people like Harry Hill, Frank Skinner. To go somewhere where I could stand up on a stage and a) try and make people laugh and b) not get in trouble for it – that was revelatory.  

I was very lazy at 16. As a kid I didn’t want to put work into anything. I wish I’d done more comedy when I was at university, but I did enough to give myself the idea that maybe I could pursue something performance-based. When I was 20, I auditioned for T4 when Dermot O’Leary was leaving. I got down to the last two; it was me and Colin Murray, though I didn’t meet him at the time. In the end they gave it to Vernon Kaye. But to get through this protracted audition contest to the last two made me think, ‘OK, so this is not an unrealistic ambition then.’ And a few years later, I got the job on E4 Music that led to T4. 

My younger self would assume that I’d embrace being famous, even at that very, very, very low level. And I quickly realised that wasn’t the case. I didn’t like being recognised, didn’t like people thinking that they sort of knew me. It seems selfish, but when I was out with my friends and people started coming over to talk to me, it felt like, ‘this is an intrusion’, even though people were being perfectly nice. I think it’s difficult to predict how you would react to it. I’d feel very self-conscious in public, like people were looking at me, even if they weren’t. I’m much more relaxed about it now. 

• Colin Murray: ‘I never, ever wanted to be on the radio’
• Edith Bowman: ‘It would be unbelievable to the teenage me that I ended up being on the telly’

Success would have meant having my own snooker table, a dedicated table for Subbuteo, or a room full of Scalextric. I would never have imagined that I could be in a position where that would be possible. I would have been mainly motivated by money because I have this narrative in my head that I grew up not well off. Thinking about it recently though, I don’t think that’s quite right. I went to a fee-paying grammar school on a scholarship, so basically everyone’s parents were better off than mine. If I had gone to a regular state school, I wouldn’t have felt like that at all. It really informed how I felt growing up. Objectively I was wrong – we were lower middle-class and doing fine. 

If you said to the 16-year-old me that I’d write a book about politics [None of the Above, 2015] it would sound impossible. It just wasn’t on my radar. I can remember feeling excluded, not deliberately, from chats about politics at university and later. I’d just zone out. It was a lot later in life when I started to think, it’s a shame that my experience is so commonplace, that there are so many young people disenfranchised by politics. In some sense though, the pinnacle would be working for the BBC, because when I was growing up the BBC was the big one, it was grown-up and serious. And so going in to work every day, with my BBC pass – I would’ve thought that was pretty cool. 

We’ve had two wars break out in the two-and-a-bit years I’ve been doing the [BBC Radio 5 Live] breakfast show. I can vividly remember the day that Russia invaded. I felt completely out of my depth. When you’re talking to people whose loved ones are dying or their home has been destroyed, it was unspeakably awful. I don’t have any journalistic training – generally speaking, I don’t feel like I’m lacking, we’ve got a great team and it’s all fine. But when you have that grounding, you’re better at maintaining a distance and more able to compartmentalise. There were a few times when I couldn’t hold it together and cried on air. I don’t beat myself up about it because we’re not the Today programme, the whole show is really talking to people about their experiences. Everyone at 5 Live was very supportive but I don’t think it was perfect broadcasting from me if I’m brutally frank.

If I could, I’d relive two moments. The first would be the first time me and Emer [Kenny, his wife] kissed. We were on the bus and it was coming up to my stop, so I said, “Look, you’ve got two options here. You get off the bus and we kiss, or you stay on the bus and we don’t.” And so, she got off the bus. We got engaged at that bus stop six weeks later, which is clearly sort of insane, but I think we’ve been vindicated.

The other one would be when I was about 32 and me and my best friend camped on the Great Wall of China. I’m still not entirely sure you’re allowed to do it, but we went with a guide. We had to clamber over a barrier and he kept saying, “This is completely fine”, and we were like “OK!” We woke up to watch the sun rise and it was just a real moment. I still can conjure up the exact feelings. We played backgammon up there, had some coffee. It was absolutely ideal. We’re still talking about it.

If I could have one final conversation with anyone it’d be my nana. We were really close. She died when I was quite young. There’s nothing specific that I’d want to tell her, but I’d just like to show her my life and introduce her to my son. I think she’d be really proud of me basically. 

Rick Edwards presents BBC’s 5 Live Breakfast every weekday 6-9am and Fighting Talk on Saturdays 11am.  

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