Stephanie Hirst Biography – Stephanie Hirst Wiki
Stephanie Hirst is an English radio and television host currently heard on Hits Radio. She has hosted Hit40UK and the weekday breakfast show on Capital Yorkshire Hirsty’s Daily Dose. She began her career at age 12 at 96.3 Radio Aire in Leeds as a helper making tea for DJs, where she soon moved up the ranks and was on the overnight show at 16.
Hirst moved onto Minster FM in York, then onto The Pulse of West Yorkshire in Bradford in 1995 to present the evening show. In 1997 she moved to Hallam FM in Sheffield, her local station, where she hosted the drivetime programme for three years. She then returned to The Pulse of West Yorkshire to co-host the breakfast show with Elisa Hilton but quickly left to take over the breakfast show at Viking FM in Hull – the one area of Yorkshire which had yet to hear her – after the departure of JK and Joel. She and her breakfast team won a Sony Award in 2002. Hirst left 96.9 Viking FM, to take on the breakfast show (entitled Hirsty’s Daily Dose) at Galaxy Yorkshire, a station covering all areas of Yorkshire. The Daily Dose team, led by Hirst, including ex-Viking colleague Danny Oakes and existing Galaxy Yorkshire presenter Joanne (Jojo) Kelly (née Moorhouse), won the title of Commercial Radio Presenter(s) Of The Year at the CRCA Awards and was nominated in the breakfast category of the 2005 Sony Awards.
After Neil Fox quit as the long-running host of the nationally networked Hit40UK in 2004, Hirst – one of Fox’s stand-ins previously from 2003 – was recruited, at first with Katy Hill, to host the programme each Sunday from the studios of Capital Radio in London and went on to host the programme alone. She was up against JK and Joel on BBC Radio 1 for the chart audience on a Sunday afternoon – the presenters whom she succeeded at Viking FM and with whom she remains close friends; in fact, during her chart reign, she shared a flat in London with Joel Ross. Also, a spin-off TV show Hit40UK TV hosted by Hirst was broadcast on a weekend on Channel 4’s youth strand T4. She won a Sony Award for the show in 2006. During Hit40UK on April 2, 2006, she announced that Gnarls Barkley had made pop history as the UK’s first number one song based on download sales alone.
She hosted her last Hit40UK chart on October 15, 2006, due to objections from Galaxy’s rival Yorkshire radio stations Viking FM, Radio Aire and Hallam FM who were due to start broadcasting the chart on 22 October 2006. They were unhappy that a Galaxy Yorkshire presenter would be heard on their station since they could possibly lose a proportion of their breakfast audience to Hirst’s weekday breakfast show.
In May 2013, she returned to hosting nationally on Gold on Saturday afternoons between 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm, later moving to the earlier time of 12:00 pm and 4:00 pm, where she went on to create a show called ‘Vinyl Heaven’, with every song played live from the original vinyl copies. On June 20, 2014, she announced that she had left her presenting roles at Capital and Gold, which brought Hirsty’s Daily Dose to an end after 11 years. 2014 also saw her collect a nomination for ‘Breakfast Show of the Year’ at the Radio Academy Awards (formerly Sony Awards). The final edition had aired on 13 June. Adam O’Neill took over as the main host of the newly named Capital Breakfast with Danny and JoJo remaining co-hosts.In January 2015, Hirst started work on ITV’s morning show ‘Lorraine’ as part of a strand called ‘Change One Thing’. Hirst continues to be part of ITV Lorraine’s extended presenter family.
She made a return to radio on July 4, 2015, with a programme called, ‘Nothing but the 90s’ which was aired on BBC Radio Manchester from 10 pm to 12 midnight every Saturday. In a 2015 interview, she said coming back to radio at a time slot that was somewhat tucked away at night and not in the limelight felt just right, so she could find her new voice without huge pressure. On March 5, 2016, she began a new radio programme on BBC Radio York called ‘Stephanie Hirst’s Vinyl Revival’. The show aired every Saturday from 12 noon to 2 pm for 8 weeks while the usual presenter of that time slot was away on leave. She has also presented a few spin-offs of this show including a 3-hour version for Bauer’s ‘Greatest Hits Network’ and a Vinyl top 40 show for the BBC.
As of September 3, 2016, her weekly Saturday night show on BBC Radio Manchester changed to a “Vinyl Revival” show, airing at the same time from 10 pm to 12 midnight. The show was the only one of its kind on UK radio, with Hirst playing each song live from the original vinyl copies, along with taking live listener requests. The show was taken off air – at first, according to the BBC, temporarily – to be replaced by a phone-in during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK in March 2020. However, the show never returned. Subsequent announcements that Vinyl Revival would be revived in another format by Hirst have not yet happened.
At the Radio Festival which took place at The British Library in London on October 26, 2016, she was awarded a ‘Fellowship’, the highest honour The Radio Academy may confer upon a member of the radio industry, to recognise her outstanding contribution to British radio and the industry. In April 2018, she started hosting her first, solo, daily radio show since leaving Capital in 2014. The Stephanie Hirst Show was broadcast on BBC Radio Leeds from 9:00-12:00, then moving to 14:00-18:00 during Covid-19. She left the BBC in April 2021.
Alongside her radio career, she has always DJ’ed live. She created her ‘Kitchen Belters’ brand in 2016 which was born out of DJ’ing in her kitchen when the capability to stream video on Facebook Live arrived in late 2015. Hirst realised early on that a weekly live DJ set of the 90s, 00s & 10s dance anthems was something that her followers would connect with whilst getting ready to go out, or cooking their evening meal. The show gained weekly views & replays of 100k+.
From the success of this she made a return to commercial radio for Bauer’s Hits Radio Pride, initially a temporary ‘pop up’ DAB & Online station for the LGBT community, it has subsequently become a full-time national radio station. She hosted her first ‘Belters’ show on August 28, 2020, and can be heard Saturday evenings from 19:00-20:00.
From the success of her weekly Hits Radio Pride show, she joined the national Hits Radio network in August 2021 to host ‘Stephanie Hirst’s Belters’ – a 3-hour celebration of the biggest 90s, 00s & 10s dance throwbacks. It has since become one of the most streamed shows on the Hits Radio app. She also is a trustee of The Radio Academy and a former chair of the Student Radio Awards sponsored by BBC Radio 1 and Global Radio and can be seen on Channel 5 as an occasional panellist on Jeremy Vine.
Stephanie Hirst Age
She was born on July 31, 1975, in Barnsley, United Kingdom.
Stephanie Hirst Instagram
Her Instagram handle is @stephanie.hirst.
