Dave Cash, who has died aged 74, was one of the original disc jockeys on the BBC’s pop network Radio 1 when it was launched in 1967.
In a line-up featuring star DJs like Tony Blackburn, Ed Stewart and Jimmy Young, Cash hosted several different daily record shows and for a time was ranked among Swinging London’s most eligible bachelors, being photographed at trendy night spots with glamorous models and in powerful Aston Martin cars.
Dropped from the Radio 1 roster in April 1970, he was billed as the network’s first casualty of the controversial BBC policy document Broadcasting in the Seventies, which reduced the station’s hours and finally separated it from Radio 2.
Cash resurfaced three years later as a member of the launch team on Capital Radio, London’s first commercial pop station, working as production director and a presenter alongside Kenny Everett, the madcap DJ with whom he had worked on the pirate station Radio London during the 1960s, and reviving their popular anarchic Kenny and Cash Show.
.
Tony Blackburn described Cash as a Walter Mitty-like character “full of big ideas that never seemed to come to fruition”, and who repeatedly boasted of a multimillion dollar deal he was about to sign with a major American network. But in the early 1990s, Cash surprised his critics with the success of his first novel, The Rating Game (1991), a steamy tale of boardroom intrigue set against a background of commercial radio in the 1980s.
READ THE REST OF THIS OBITUARY HERE AT THE TELEGRAPH’s WEBSITE
On his Facebook page, Red Robinson describes Cash’s broadcast origins at C-FUN Vancouver and CJAV Port Alberni.
