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.
He followed this in 1993 with All Night Long, based on his experiences with the pirate operator Radio London in the 1960s, and in 1995 King Of Clubs, a political thriller set in Romania during the overthrow of its communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu.
The only child of a psychiatric nurse and his wife, also a nurse, he was born David Charles Wish on July 18 1942 at Bushey, Hertfordshire, and grew up in north London, but in 1946, when he was four, his parents emigrated to Canada. At the age of 11 David returned to Britain on a scholarship to the Royal Hospital School near Ipswich, after which he served with the Merchant Navy in Canada, an experience that left him with the North American accent he would retain all his life.
In 1963, while working as a copywriter for a Vancouver menswear shop, Cash seized his chance to appear on the city’s CFUN radio station when an actor booked to record a commercial voice-over called in sick. Restyling himself Dave Cash after the American singer Johnny Cash, he stepped in and three weeks later was contracted for more commercials and offered shifts as a disc jockey. When a friend wired him from Britain about the launch of pirate radio, Cash hastened back to London.
Although he had intended to apply to Radio Caroline, he chanced to run into Ben Toney, the Texan programme director of the rival station Radio London, who in December 1964 took him on as an afternoon DJ and commercial writer. Once on board a rusting former American minesweeper renamed MV Galaxy anchored three-and-a-half miles off the Essex coast at Frinton-on-Sea, he collaborated with a 19-year-old trainee from Liverpool called Maurice Cole, better known as Kenny Everett, on the Kenny and Cash Show.
With Radio London and other pirate radio stations under threat of imminent closure from the British government, Cash joined Radio Luxembourg before moving to the old BBC Light Programme in 1966. The following year a successful audition with Robin Scott, the first controller of Radio 1, led to his being awarded a midday slot on the new pop station, followed by a subsequent move to early evening drive-time, and a popular Sunday show Cash at Four.
In 1969 Cash was behind a Top 30 entry of his own, the novelty single Groovy Baby, featuring Microbe, a character from his radio show who was actually the gurgling three-year-old son of a BBC colleague .
Following his departure from Radio 1, Cash settled at Capital Radio in 1973 and remained there for 21 years. As well as reviving the Kenny and Cash Show, he hosted a lunchtime quiz competition Cash on Delivery and several weekend programmes for the station’s oldies service Capital Gold. Following the success of his first novel The Rating Game, he left Capital in 1994 to concentrate on writing.
In the late 1960s Cash hosted episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC Television. He supplied the voice-over in The Who’s cult film hit Quadrophenia in 1979 and took a cameo role alongside Dennis Hopper in the sci-fi comedy The American Way (1986). By then he had become programme controller of Radio West, the commercial station based in Bristol, when it was launched in 1981.
In 1999 Cash returned to the BBC, working in local radio across the south of England, broadcasting weekend shows of rock classics and country and western tracks on Radios Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Solent, Berkshire and Oxford. His recollections of life aboard a pirate radio ship, He Sounds Much Taller, appeared as an audio book in 2012.
Dave Cash was married three times. His first marriage, to Dawn in 1968, was short-lived, and in 1973 he married the actress Monica Evans, best known for playing Cecily Pigeon in the stage and film versions of Neil Simon’s comedy The Odd Couple. They divorced in 2010 and the following year he married Sara Davies, who worked on his Radio Kent show as “Emily Email” on account of her role answering listeners’ queries. She survives him with a daughter and a son of his second marriage.
Dave Cash, born July 18 1942, died October 21 2016
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