Simeon Courtie

Supporting Content

• STFC are on the way to Wembley!

  STFC team on reaching League One play-off final, beating Sheffield Utd 7-6 on aggregate

  Duration: 3:57

• Sim helps out plucking his Christmas turkey - Part Three

  Farmer Chris Rumming at Lydiard Turkeys shows Sim how to pluck a turkey

  Duration: 6:18

• The next stage of the turkey's Christmas journey - Part Two

  Sim's following the journey of his Christmas turkey from the paddock to the plate

  Duration: 5:58

• A turkey's Christmas journey - Part One

  Sim's a vegetarian but wanted to eat meat at Christmas and learn about a turkey's journey

  Duration: 5:19

• Sim Courtie's Christmas Turkey

• About the programme

  You can hear Simeon Courtie between 9am and 12pm weekdays on BBC Wiltshire. The show is a fast paced mix of engaging stories, fascinating people and feel-good music. This is the programme that can move quickly from holding local decision makers to account in a challenging interview, to exploring difficult taboos like alcoholism and mental illness, to celebrating the fun of a lost Wiltshire word like ‘ganderflanking’.

  Sim’s career didn’t start in radio. He completed a four year engineering apprenticeship learning how to build printing presses before he pestered his way into BBC Radio Northampton. By the mid 90s he’d landed his first TV job presenting the kids pop show The Ozone on BBC2, and was soon a regular host in the Children’s BBC broom cupboard, linking the afternoon sequence on BBC1 with his sidekick Otis the Aardvark.

  After fronting several kids' TV shows on ITV including ‘Wow’, ‘You’ll Never Believe It’ and ‘Get Wet’, he moved behind the camera to write quiz and game show formats and comedy scripts. Alongside working on many TV and radio projects, he continued radio presenting for the forces radio station BFBS. By 2008 he was hosting the Breakfast Show on their national DAB service, while also being a regular writer on the BBC1 show ‘Have I Got News For You’.

  In 2010 Sim bundled his wife and three daughters into a VW camper van and they spent a year driving from Strawberry Field in Liverpool to Strawberry Fields in New York, busking Beatles songs in every country on the way round for UNICEF. His comedy travel book about the adventure, ‘The Long and Whining Road’, gained several international awards including winning the London Book Festival Grand Prize in 2012.

  In 2013 Sim won a New York Festival award for Best Radio Personality.