Radio

FEARNE Cotton has revealed she felt “shamed, stared at and ignored” by colleagues after the arrest of her former boyfriend Ian Watkins.

While she does not mention him by name, the former Radio 1 star discusses a “life-altering” news story connected to her in her new book.

In Likeable, released this week, the former BBC Radio 1 host hints at the difficult period she endured after the Lostprophets frontman admitted to 13 child sex offences.

The now 44-year-old recalls being live on air when “a horrible news story that doesn’t involve me yet has a tenuous and life-altering link to me will be broadcast on my own radio show again that day”.

Fearne briefly dated Lostprophets frontman Watkins in the mid-2000s after the pair met at the Kerrang! Awards.

The relationship is believed to have lasted around a year, and the presenter largely kept it out of the spotlight at the time.

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His offending only came to light years after the pair had split.

Watkins was arrested in 2012 over child sex offences and convicted the following year, during which time Fearne was hosting BBC Radio 1’s weekday mid-morning show.

The radio star wrote: “I feel simultaneously glared at, stared at, yet utterly ignored by those in the office.

“Are they all talking about me behind my back? Or am I a narcissist for thinking that?”

Ian Watkins later pleaded guilty to offences including the attempted rape of a child and was jailed for 29 years in 2013.

In quotes obtained by The Mirror, Fearne writes that she struggled with intense shame and nausea as she tried to keep broadcasting.

Trying to push through, she explained that she “shoved down the anger, the rage, the sorrow and tears” in order to keep going, describing the period as one of “depression and a heaviness”.

However, she said she has since worked through those feelings in therapy and realised the shame was never hers to carry.

Instead, she wrote that it “belongs to others” and mostly the men from her past.

The mother-of-two added: “Men who have shamed me, treated me badly and left me lumbered with it.”

Watkins died from blood loss at HMP Wakefield in October after being stabbed in the neck.

West Yorkshire Police later charged two men, aged 25 and 43, with murder. Their trial is set to begin in May.

Shortly after the news of his death, Fearne shared a reflective post on Instagram in which she spoke about struggling with shame and sleep.

“Here are four things that I learned this week,” she said in the video.

“The first one was from the Happy Place podcast where I spoke to Charlie Mackesy who talked a lot about shame which I greatly appreciated.

“And the one reminder that I had from that episode was that so many of us feel shame but we assume it’s just us because that is what shame does.

“It wants you to believe that it’s just you but it’s not…”

She added in the caption: “Four life lessons from this week. I’m not sleeping well.

My brain is a bit wobbly at the moment but I’m grasping the lessons life is chucking my way.”

Insiders previously told the Mail the presenter is “haunted” and “very, very humiliated” each time his name is mentioned.

AMANDA Holden temporarily brought her radio show to a halt after co-star Jamie Theakston mentioned her rival Phillip Schofield.

The Heart Breakfast hosts, both 55, had Brit Awards host Jack Whitehall in the studio ahead of Sunday’s ceremony at the Manchester Co-op Live.

The banter was innocent enough, with Amanda quizzing Jack about the type of socks he’s planning on wearing.

Suggesting he won’t be going for the type of outlandish pair favoured by his dad, Michael, Jack said: “Well, I don’t want to be upstaged by a sock.”

Amanda turned to Jamie and said: “Well, Jamie, I rest my case.”

Unsure why she was sticking the boot in about socks, he replied: “What are you talking about? Children’s television? That wasn’t me, that was Phillip Schofield.”

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Amanda then took a dig at her long-running rival, saying: “Oh God, please, let’s not mention that name on air, it’s a family show!”

Phillip and Amanda’s feud is rumoured to have begun when she was passed over for a hosting gig in favour of Phil’s first choice, Rochelle Humes.

Amanda had been tipped to stand in for Holly Willoughby on This Morning during her time away hosting I’m A Celebrity in 2018 but The Saturdays star Rochelle booked the job instead.

A former daytime TV executive told The Sun at the time: “Phillip actively campaigned for Rochelle to get the job despite Amanda being more experienced — and having been told privately she’d got the gig.

“She feels Phil unfairly used his powers of persuasion. She was told he’d chosen Rochelle because she was easier to ‘manage’ on air – and understandably that incensed her.”

An ITV spokesperson denied the claims at the time and released a statement of support for Phillip.

The statement read: “Presenter line-ups on This Morning change regularly. Final decisions are made by producers, not presenters.

“Phillip is a much-loved broadcaster and part of the ITV family. He’s a consummate professional and held in high regard at ITV.

“Amanda is also held in high regard as a judge on one of our biggest shows.”

Shortly after Rochelle was confirmed as Holly’s replacement, Amanda appeared on This Morning to talk about her work with pregnancy and baby loss charity, Tommy’s.

During an ad break on the October 2018 episode, Amanda reportedly confronted Phil about her suspicions that he had campaigned for Rochelle to replace Holly instead of her.

A source told The Sun: “She made it clear that she felt very let down.

“He was lost for words but didn’t have much time to respond to Amanda’s claims because the show was going back on air.

“Neither of them realised that Amanda could be overheard by most of the team because she was still wearing her mic pack.”

In 2019, Amanda confirmed her and Phillip’s feud to Jamie Theakston on Heart and insisted they’ll never reconcile.

She said she asked to meet Phillip in a bid to clear the air but was ghosted by the star.

“I’ve moved on from it Jamie, you need to move on from it,” she said.

He replied: “You might have moved on but I just wanted to know, is there any more to the story?”

She then revealed: “I did offer to meet him for a coffee months ago, he didn’t reply to my text. What can I say?”

Jamie pushed again: “The olive branch had been extended.”

“Oh, yes,” Amanda replied.

Referring to the famous photo of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift hugging while dressed up as fast food after they’d resolved their own feud, Jamie asks Amanda if there will be a “burger and fries moment” – but Amanda said “no”.

Phillip has not directly addressed his rumoured fallout with Amanda but, prior to the alleged end of their friendship, he had revealed what it was like to work with her.

In 2015, he spoke to Heat magazine about his former co-worker, saying: “She kept me on my toes.

“She has a faulty edit button and she forgets she’s on the telly, which is enormously endearing and funny, but occasionally quite scary.”

He also appeared to reference the rumours surrounding his relationship with Amanda after The Sun reported that she had made a formal complaint to ITV boss Kevin Lygo about the This Morning hiring incident.

Phil addressed the speculation on Twitter, saying: “The end of another really sad weekend.

“When you try for 35 years to be the easiest, most fun person to work with and you read such hurtful and wildly untrue stories from nameless ‘sources’.

“Obviously I’ll take it on the chin.. .I just hope you know me better.”

Stepping into Jr. Market boutique in Highland Park is like entering a 1980s time warp. Built into a refurbished shipping container, it’s filled with everything from tiny Walkman-style portables to colorful, number-flip clock radios and, naturally, boomboxes of all sizes. Few are more imposing than the TV the Searcher, a Sharp boombox from the early ‘80s that features a built-in, 5-inch color television.

“Try lifting it, it’s really heavy,” warns Spencer Richardson, the shop’s owner. Indeed, the machine is at least 15 pounds without the 10 D batteries that power the unit. He adds, “I don’t think you’re taking this to the beach so you could watch TV while you listen to music.”

An affable, hyper-knowledgeable proprietor in his early 30s, Richardson repairs and resells analog music technology from the 1980s or earlier. In bringing these rehabbed players back into circulation, he’s helping others rediscover a musical format once left for dead. While his hobby-turned-side hustle started as “a gateway to discover sounds” that he otherwise would not have heard, it now attracts curious customers willing to drop $100-plus for a vintage Technics RS-M2 or My First Sony Walkman. His customers include older baby boomers and Gen X‑ers nostalgic for the players of their childhood, but most have been millennials like himself, drawn to something tactile and analog in an era when everything else disappears into the digital ether.

A rare Technics RS-M2 stereo radio tape deck. “I’ve worked on a lot of tape players and this one shouts quality inside and out,” Richardson writes on Instagram.

(Spencer Richardson)

Unlike turntables, which have become increasingly high-tech thanks to the “vinyl revival” of the last 20 years, almost all cassette players in current production rely on the same, basic tape mechanism from Taiwan, Richardson explains. Though cassette culture is enjoying its own period of rediscovery — albeit on a far smaller scale — he hasn’t seen a market emerge for newly engineered tape decks. And he’s fine with that.

“I’m not one of those people that’s like, ‘Why don’t they make good new tape players?’” he says. “No one needs to make it better. You’re still better off buying a refurbished one from the time when they made them.”

That’s where he steps in.

Richardson works on a Nakamichi tape deck out of his repair studio in downtown L.A.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

It’s easy to forget that when cassettes debuted in the mid-1960s, the technology was groundbreaking. Not only were the players far more portable than turntables but unlike records, tapes were resilient to being tossed about. Even more profoundly, cassettes democratized access to the act of recording itself since cassette technology required minimal infrastructure and cost.

“I think about how incredible it must have been for people to realize they could just put whatever they wanted onto a tape, dub it, give it to a friend,” says Richardson.

Entire genres of music, especially in the developing world, became far more accessible across borders. In some countries, big records are still released on cassette. “I have a Filipino release of Kanye West’s ‘College Dropout’ on tape,” Richardson says.

The constraints of the technology guided the listening experience. Because skipping songs on a player was a hassle, most people sat with cassette albums as a track-by-track, linear journey, the antithesis to the algorithmic, shuffle-centric playlists ubiquitous on today’s streaming platforms. It’s a pace that Richardson appreciates.

“I want things to be intentional and slow,” he says. “I don’t need them to be optimized.”

He learned how to repair gear by watching YouTube videos, perusing old manuals and through trial and error.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Born in the early 1990s, Richardson grew up in Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades, where his mother’s home was lost in the L.A. wildfires last year. He’s just old enough to remember cassettes as a child: “My mom had books on tape like ‘Winnie the Pooh,’ but I wasn’t out buying tapes.” Fast forward to the mid-2010s and he was working at the now-defunct Touch Vinyl in West L.A. “Back in 2014, we started this little in-store tape label,” he explained. “Bands would come to play, and we’d duplicate 10 tapes and give them away or sell them.” Richardson slowly began collecting cassettes but after the store closed a few years later, he realized how hard it was to find people to service his tape players.

Finally, once the pandemic hit in 2020 and everyone was stuck at home, he decided to learn how to repair his gear by watching YouTube.“I was just fascinated by the videos, absorbing soldering techniques and tools you might need,” he said. With no formal engineering background, Richardson began collecting information online, perusing old manuals, learning through trial and error. “You just need to get your hands in there and be like, ‘Oh, OK, I see how this works,’ or maybe I don’t see how this works, and I’m just going to bang my head against the wall, and then a year later, try again.” His first successful repair was for his Teac CX-311, a compact stereo cassette player/recorder that he still owns. “It has some quirks but runs well.”

A few years later, Richardson’s girlfriend, Faith, suggested he start selling his players online via an Instagram account — jrmarket.radio — originally created for a short-lived internet station. Tim Mahoney, his childhood friend and a professional photographer, shot the units against a plain white backdrop, as if for an art catalog. A community of enthusiasts quickly found his account and Richardson began selling pieces online and via pop-ups. In 2024, the owners of vintage clothing store the Bearded Beagle invited him to take over the parking lot space behind their new location on Figueroa St. Opening a brick-and-mortar store hadn’t been his ambition but Richardson accepted the opportunity: “I never envisioned opening my own physical store. It’s hard enough to have a retail space in Los Angeles to sell something that’s very niche.”

Jr. Market operates as a shop Thursday through Saturday in Highland Park.

(Spencer Richardson)

Jr. Market — whose name is inspired by Japanese convenience stores known as “junior markets” — isn’t trying to appeal to audiophiles though Richardson does stock studio-quality recording decks. He primarily looks for players with appealing visual design, most of them made in Japan where Richardson has been traveling to since graduating high school. Through those trips, he’s learned where to source pristinely-kept gear, including his best-selling Corocasse: a bright red plastic cube of a radio/tape player, introduced by National in 1983. He also keeps an eye out for the unique Sanyo MR-QF4 from 1979, an elongated boombox with four speakers, designed to play either horizontally or flipped into a vertical tower.

The store also stocks a small selection of portable record players, including a Viktor PK-2, a whimsical, plastic-bodied three-in-one turntable, tape player and AM radio that looks like something designed by a modernist artist for Fisher-Price. That went to local author and historian Sam Sweet, who visited the store with no intention of buying anything and left with the Viktor, which now sits on his writing desk. “Spencer’s part of a grand tradition of workshop tinkerers and specialty mechanics,” Sweet says. “The refurbished devices he sells are as much a reflection of his ethos and expertise as they are treasures of the past.”

Last year, Imma Almourzaeva, an Echo Park art director, came to the store and purchased a massive 1979 Sony “Zilba’p” boombox, which is nearly 2 feet wide and over a foot tall, with wood veneer panels to boot. Almourzaeva, who grew up in Russia in the ‘90s, wanted a player that offered “the tactile feel of my childhood and bringing it back into my daily routine, something familiar, something warm.” The Zilba’p is the largest boombox Richardson has carried and Almourzaeva said, “It’s aesthetically a showstopper. Maybe I have a Napoleon complex because I’m pretty small too. It’s like ‘go big or go home’ for me.” She shared that she recently bought a Soviet-era boombox from Richardson for her brother for Christmas. “It turned out my mom grew up using the same brand of stereo,” Almourzaeva says. Richardson had told her that Soviet boomboxes are “very DIY, more funky and finicky.”

Refurbishment is one of Richardson’s specialties, including repairing customer units, each of them a puzzle he enjoys solving. No matter if a player is sparse or feature-packed, the simple act of playing a cassette creates a sense of calm and focus for him. “You’re not distracted, because it doesn’t do anything else,” he says. In a time where every “smart” device is marketed with dizzying arrays of features, that simplicity can feel downright revolutionary.