BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Hello, I'm Chris Van Tullican.

And what you're about to hear was recorded just a few minutes before I met up with Michael at the Hay Festival and what I didn't know was that it would be the last time I ever saw him because two weeks later he died on holiday with his wife in Greece.

As you're listening to Michael, I want you to reflect on his style, dryly witty, modest,

humble.

This style disguises that he is one of the most important broadcasters of recent decades.

Before Michael, doctors in white coats told you how to live from their ivory towers.

Michael's genius was to make himself the patient and the

guinea pig in a way that's utterly relatable. We'll never forget him infecting himself

with a tape worm or having a camera put up his back passage, all for

our benefit.

And he is the reason that so many programs on radio and television have adopted this

style. He's the reason that I've adopted this

style. Off-camera and off-mic he was the same, humble, kind and above all generous.

And that generosity set the tone in the BBC Science Unit in a way that meant everyone who worked there became friends and collaborators rather than competitors.

For me, these friendships have endured for well over a decade.

Michael's death has moved so many of us so really I'm speaking for lots of

television and audio presenters and producers.

His legacy is going to live on in our memories. Every time we brush our teeth standing on

one leg, we fast a little longer between meals, we build up our strength with squats or do any one of the

other hundreds of tricks that he taught us. I'll miss him as a friend and as a mentor,

but perhaps most of all I'll miss him as a broadcaster.

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