Dotun Adebayo
Encyclopedia
Oludotun Adebayo MBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

 (born 25 August 1960) is a Nigerian-born, British-based radio presenter, writer and publisher. He is best known for his work on Up All Night
Up All Night (radio show)
Up All Night is a programme broadcast on the national radio station BBC Radio 5 Live in the United Kingdom, and is on air between the hours of 1 am and 5 am every night...

on BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 5 Live is the BBC's national radio service that specialises in live BBC News, phone-ins, and sports commentaries...

, as well as the obituary programme Brief Lives.

Early life

Dotun Emmanuel Adebayo was born in Lagos
Lagos
Lagos is a port and the most populous conurbation in Nigeria. With a population of 7,937,932, it is currently the third most populous city in Africa after Cairo and Kinshasa, and currently estimated to be the second fastest growing city in Africa...

 but moved with his family to the UK at the age of five. As a young boy he joined the National Youth Theatre
National Youth Theatre
The National Youth Theatre is a registered charity in London, Great Britain, committed to creative, personal and social development of young people through the medium of creative arts....

 where he starred in Killing Time by Barrie Keeffe
Barrie Keeffe
Barrie Colin Keeffe is an English dramatist and screenwriter, best known for his screenplay for the 1981 film The Long Good Friday....

, Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....

by Shakespeare and several other productions. The American playwright Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...

 chose Adebayo to play a small part in the world premiere of his last play, The Red Devil Battery Sign
The Red Devil Battery Sign
The Red Devil Battery Sign is a 1975 drama written by American playwright Tennessee Williams. It was revised substantially before publication....

, in which Adebayo acted opposite Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brendan Brosnan, OBE is an Irish actor, film producer and environmentalist. After leaving school at 16, Brosnan began training in commercial illustration, but trained at the Drama Centre in London for three years...

. Adebayo also acted opposite Vincent Price
Vincent Price
Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude in a series of horror films made in the latter part of his career.-Early life and career:Price was born in St...

 and Christopher Lee
Christopher Lee
Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ is an English actor and musician. Lee initially portrayed villains and became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer Horror films...

 in The Oblong Box at the age of eight, and Michael Elphick
Michael Elphick
Michael John Elphick was an English actor. Elphick was known in the UK for his trademark croaky voice and his work on British television, in particular his roles as the eponymous private investigator in the ITV series Boon and later Harry Slater in BBC's EastEnders.Robust and ruggedly good-looking...

 in Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier
Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches, and have frequently received strongly divided critical opinion....

's The Element of Crime
The Element of Crime
The Element of Crime is the first feature film directed by noted Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. The film, released in 1984, is also the first in the director's Europa trilogy...

.

As well as claiming to have been the first black teddy boy
Teddy Boy
The British Teddy Boy subculture is typified by young men wearing clothes that were partly inspired by the styles worn by dandies in the Edwardian period, styles which Savile Row tailors had attempted to re-introduce in Britain after World War II...

 in London in his early teens, Adebayo also won a Rotary Club
Rotary International
Rotary International is an organization of service clubs known as Rotary Clubs located all over the world. The stated purpose of the organization is to bring together business and professional leaders to provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help...

 public speaking award as a teenager, and worked for the BBC from aged 12 on Network Africa.

Education

Adebayo was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School
Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School
The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School is a British independent school for boys aged 4–19. It is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference and of the Haileybury Group....

, an independent school
Independent school
An independent school is a school that is independent in its finances and governance; it is not dependent upon national or local government for financing its operations, nor reliant on taxpayer contributions, and is instead funded by a combination of tuition charges, gifts, and in some cases the...

 in Borehamwood
Borehamwood
-Film industry:Since the 1920s, the town has been home to several film studios and many shots of its streets are included in final cuts of 20th century British films. This earned it the nickname of the "British Hollywood"...

 in Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...

 in south east England, followed by Stockholm University
Stockholm University
Stockholm University is a state university in Stockholm, Sweden. It has over 28,000 students at four faculties, making it one of the largest universities in Scandinavia. The institution is also frequently regarded as one of the top 100 universities in the world...

 (Frescati
Frescati (Stockholm)
Frescati is a park-like area on the northern outskirts of Stockholm. The name has occationally been spelled Freskati. Originally it was a part of Norra Djurgården but was granted to the societé for building private villas...

), where he studied Literature. While there, he had a segment on Rock n Roll inside a Saturday night radio programme. He then returned to the UK to study Philosophy at the Wivenhoe Park
Wivenhoe Park
Wivenhoe Park, located on the Eastern edge of Colchester is a multi-acre landscaped green space.Until the 1960s its main claim to fame was that it was the setting for one of Constable's landscape paintings. From the 1960s onwards, however, it has been home to the University of Essex. The park is...

 campus of the University of Essex
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...

.

Career

While studying at the University of Essex, and presenting two programmes on the student radio station, in 1987 Adebayo was elected president of the University of Essex Students' Union to serve in the 1987/8 academic year. Standing as an independent, he defeated Labour Students
Labour Students
Labour Students is a student organisation affiliated to the British Labour Party.Membership comprises affiliated college and university clubs . Membership of Labour Students is through membership of a university or college Labour Club. Affiliation is open to any Labour Club generally supportive of...

 candidate Asad Rehman.

However, Adebayo resigned the sabbatical post within a few months to take up a job with The Voice
The Voice (newspaper)
The Voice is a British national weekly tabloid newspaper owned by the Jamaican publisher, GV Media Group, aimed at the British Afro-Caribbean community. The paper is based in the London Docklands and is published every Monday.-History:...

, Britain's main black newspaper, where he was music editor until 1991. His columns and articles have been published in Pride Magazine
Pride Magazine
Pride Magazine is the largest and most successful magazine targeting Afro-Caribbean women in the United Kingdom. The lifestyle magazine has been in publication since 1991...

and the New Nation
New Nation
This article is about the British newspaper, which is not to be confused with the Apartheid-era New Nation published in Johannesburg, South Africa or the satirical publication in Singapore....

, as well as broadsheet and tabloid newspapers such as The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

, The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...

, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

, London Evening Standard and the News of the World
News of the World
The News of the World was a national red top newspaper published in the United Kingdom from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world, and at closure still had one of the highest English language circulations...

. Some of these columns were compiled into Can I Have My Balls Back Please (2000) and its sequel Sperm Bandits (2002). He is working on his first novel, Promised Land, an epic saga spanning 50 years in the lives of Britain's richest black family.

In 1993, while appearing on Channel4's The Devils Advocate against presenter Darcus Howe
Darcus Howe
Darcus Howe is a British broadcaster, writer, and civil liberties campaigner. Originally from Trinidad, he moved to America in the 1960s, then arrived in England intending to study law, where he joined the British Black Panthers, the first such branch of the organization outside the United States...

, he was spotted by GLR programme executive Gloria Abramov who was looking for a new presenter for the Black London programme. His broadcasting work on BBC London 94.9
BBC London 94.9
BBC London 94.9 is London's BBC Local Radio station, and part of BBC London. Broadcasting across Greater London and beyond on 94.9 FM, DAB, Virgin Media Channel 930, Sky Channel 0152 and also online...

 gave him the opportunity to present other programmes, such as the Saturday night reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...

 show, and he eventually "presented everything except travel!" On his half-week of the Up All Night show on BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 5 Live is the BBC's national radio service that specialises in live BBC News, phone-ins, and sports commentaries...

, he presents both the World Football Phone-in and the Virtual Bookshelf.

Adebayo's television work includes writing and presenting the docudrama Sperm Bandits, the documentary White Girls Are Easy (both for Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...

), and the weekly show Heavy TV. He has made one stage appearance as an adult, featuring in a revival of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in 2002.

Adebayo founded the publishing company X Press, which produces black fiction
Black Fiction
Black Fiction is an indie rock band from San Francisco, CA.-History:The band came about because of a friendship between multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Tim Cohen and bassist Evan Martin. The two met in 1999 while working together, and would write songs during their lunch breaks...

 such as Baby Father; Yardie
Yardie
Yardie is a term stemming from the slang name originally given to occupants of "government yards", social housing projects with very basic amenities, in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by...

, which became the first black British bestseller when it was published in 1992; and Cop Killer
Cop Killer
Cop Killer or cop killer may refer to:*A person who kills a police officer*"Cop Killer" , a 1992 song by Body Count*Cop Killer , the English translation of the ninth book in the detective series written by Sjöwall and Wahlöö...

, which gained instant notoriety when 200 bullets were sent out to press to promote the title. He is also responsible for the Nia imprint of literary black fiction, such as J.California Cooper's In Search of Satisfaction, and the 20/20 imprint for current generic fiction such as the bestseller Curvy Lovebox.

Adebayo is co-founder of Colourtelly, Britain's first general interest black internet television station. To save costs Adebayo uses his own house as the studio. When it launched on 1 August 2007, Adebayo had the aim of attracting 6000 subscribers in order to break even.

In October 1999, he was invited to Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace, in London, is the principal residence and office of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality...

 to meet Queen Elizabeth II
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
Elizabeth II is the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize,...

. Ten years later he was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2009
Birthday Honours 2009
The Birthday Honours 2009 for the Commonwealth Realms were announced on 1 June 2009 in New Zealand and 13 June 2009 in the United Kingdom to celebrate the Queen's Birthday of 2009.-Knights Bachelor:*Professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran. For services to medicine....

.

Personal life

Adebayo is married to the singer Carroll Thompson
Carroll Thompson
Carroll Thompson is an English lovers rock singer, best known for her work in the 1980s.-Biography:Thompson sang in school and church choirs as a girl, but initially studied for a career in pharmacy. In the mid-1970s, she began working as a backing singer at several recording studios after...

. His younger brother Diran Adebayo
Diran Adebayo
Diran Adebayo is a British novelist, cultural critic and broadcaster best known for his vivid portrayals of modern London life and his distinctive use of language.-Education and career:...

 is a novelist.

Adebayo is fluent in Yoruba, English, and Swedish; he has conversational French. He has lived in Nigeria, France, Sweden and the United States.

He supports Charlton Athletic
Charlton Athletic F.C.
Charlton Athletic Football Club is an English professional football club based in Charlton, in the London Borough of Greenwich. They compete in Football League One, the third tier of English football. The club was founded on 9 June 1905, when a number of youth clubs in the southeast London area,...

 and once shared a flat with the "shoebomber" Richard Reid.
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