Eleanor Oldroyd Broadcaster

Having joined the BBC in 1986, Eleanor Oldroyd has become well known as the presenter of radio programmes including Radio 1's Newsbeat and 5 Live Sport, and is perhaps most familiar to many as the voice of 5 Live's cricket coverage. She commentated for BBC Radio on the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh and the Coronation of Charles III and Camilla, and has also presented programmes on choral music for Radio 3. Her book Composers of Barnes: The Flow of Inspiration was published in 2016.

- Jeremy Pound

Music was always on at home. Both my parents sang - my mum was an alto and my dad was a tenor - and my dad was a vicar at the parish church in Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire where, along with my two brothers, I sang in the choir from the age of eight or nine. I also learnt the piano to a level where I could pick up a book of pieces and enjoy playing them to myself and briefly took up the flute too, but it was the choral singing that really stayed with me.

When I went for my interview at Girton College, Cambridge, I met and became friends with Ysenda Maxtone Graham, who is now an author. She also loved choral music, and I remember going to her house and sitting in her bedroom listening to ALLEGRI's Miserere, sung by King's College Choir under David Willcocks - I could scarcely believe that any human could produce the purity of Roy Goodman's soaring voice as the treble soloist. When we then went up to Cambridge, we went pretty regularly to evensong at King's.