On any radio station, it's Breakfast presenters who have the greatest impact on the audience. We're quite often asked for news of Rob's predecessors - Dave Windsor, Duncan Larkin and Alan West. We wrote about the last-named not so long ago after he sent us information about his involvement with community radio in Wales. He didn't tell us about some of his other activities, though.

West - under his real name of Alan Charles Fossey - has been convicted on "16 counts of making indecent images of children, one charge of possessing 4405 indecent images of children with a view to their being distributed or shown and one charge of publishing an obscene article".  He was jailed for thirty months and banned from possessing a computer for 10 years (how can that be enforced, I wonder?).

His claim that his accumulation of 4405 indecent images of children was on a par with stamp collecting did not impress the judge. The most extraordinary fact to emerge from the hearing was that a charge of publishing "an indecent article" related to obscene verbal fantasies posted on West's website. Described by the judge as "shocking" and "sickening", these totalled two million words ...

According to one Welsh newspaper, West "had set up Riviera Radio in Monte-Carlo". Not so. The effective founder was Richard Yonge, now living on Queensland's Gold Coast, who recruited West ... and once mused to me "you know, he's a talent but I can see him being led out of a courthouse one day with a blanket over his head". Got it in one, mate!


From Riviera Reporter issues 112 and 114