A FAMILIAR face as the Asian Media Group’s ebullient awards dinner host, Nihal Arthanayake has carved a rather special place for himself in the British media scene.
A presenter both on TV and radio with a permanent show on BBC 5 Live’s Afternoon Show (1pm-4pm), now named simply after its presenters, he’s one of the most prominent Asian faces on the national media scene.
He won Interview of the Year (2019) at the BBC’s own Radio & Music Awards.
Arthanayake’s interviews with young YMCA charges in Salford, Manchester, illustrated his qualities as an interviewer: empathy, a close listener, and able to relate to people with a different life trajectory and background. He’s just as adept with business figures when he interviews millionaires and billionaires at AMG Asian Business Awards dinners.
One of his interviewees was a Salford teenager who had reported his own neglect at home when he was just 10 years old. This Afternoon edition of Five Live, YMCA: How it changed the lives of three young people, is available online. Arthanayake said this particular interviewee moved him to tears (even as a professional broadcaster).
Being in the moment and alive to immediate events is something that any afternoon presenter must possess if they are to be in some very rare instances, the eyes and ears of a nation (around five million tune into 5Live every day on average).
Perhaps, that was no more apparent than when Arthanayake hosted his 5Live show during the last hours of prime minister Theresa May government on July 24 and the first few of her successor, Boris Johnson.
As the unmistakable winds of change blew through Westminster that day, Arthanayake reminded his 87,000+ Twitter followers that he had a Johnson story, “Everyone in the media seems to have a Boris Johnson story. Here’s my own from 2008”, he tweeted.
The link was to an Evening Standard story where Johnson claimed he could ‘out-ethnic’, Arthanayake himself (Sri Lankan, second generation Brit); Johnson extolled the example of his own great-great grandfather, Ali Kemal, who came to Britain in the 1900s, from Turkey.
His great-great grandmother had changed the surname from Kemal to Johnson (a quintessentially English surname) and Boris had married Marina Wheeler (daughter of the celebrated and venerable late BBC journalist, Charles who had married Dip Singh in India in 1961; Wheeler was India correspondent for the BBC at the time).
Johnson proudly asserted that his children were a “quarter Indian, so put that in your pipe and smoke it”, he told Arthanayake, dismissing talk about his interest in Turkey or bhangra gigs.
As a BBC correspondent, Arthanayake has to maintain his neutrality (though that is suspended when it comes to football and supporting Tottenham Hotspur FC!) but it was interesting to see him tweet that: “An Asian Home Secretary (Priti Patel) and Chancellor (Sajid Javid). Politics aside, for Asian kids up and down the country that is a very visible example of representation.”
He started out as a rapper (MC Krazee) and still swears allegiance to the hip-hop scene. He played along with some of the best known Asian groups of that time and genre in the 1990s. He was the first south Asian to have his own show on Radio 1 (with Bobby Friction) in 2002.
His switch to promoter and then journalist probably worked out better than he could have imagined.
Now among the coporation’s top radio earners, he appeared in the BBC salary list, earning between £175,000-£179,000 band this year.
