Nigel Wrench

Stephen Wrench, previously known professionally as Nigel Wrench, is an award winning British radio presenter and reporter.

Wrench spent much of the 1980s reporting on the anti-apartheid protests of the era. His first radio job was with Johannesburg-based Capital Radio 604, which provided the first independent source of broadcast news in South Africa.

At Turnstyle News, an independent radio news agency, Wrench reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the UK-based Independent Radio News and London Broadcasting Company.

In December 1985, he was among those detained briefly by police when reporting the illegal return of Winnie Mandela to Soweto.[1]

In published diary extracts, Wrench has revealed the personal thoughts behind his South African reporting. In the aftermath of one police shooting in Soweto in August 1986 he wrote: "A kid showed me welts from shotgun wounds. I came away mentally wounded myself. Cry for the country! I throw an ANC thumbs-up salute through the sunroof [of the car]. It is less a gesture than a commitment, quite frankly. This after once pleading non-involvement. Enough, no longer."[2]

Reporting on demonstrations in Windhoek, Namibia, in September 1988, he was among those beaten up by police.[3]

Wrench was also a pop music columnist for the Mail & Guardian[4] and reported on Johannesburg's thriving underground nightlife.

In 1989, he moved to London and joined the BBC as a reporter for the Today programme. In 1990, he was among the reporters at the prison gates when Nelson Mandela walked free.[5] Wrench reported from a wide variety of other locations for BBC Radio including Jerusalem, St Petersburg, Bucharest, Kiev and Bosnia.

Wrench was the co-host of Out This Week, a weekly gay and lesbian news programme on BBC Radio 5 Live for which he won a Sony Radio Award. He won a New York Radio Award for his 1998 Radio 4 documentary Aids and Me,[6] while also regularly co-presenting the Radio 4 programme PM.[7] Wrench later worked as a culture reporter for PM, interviewing leading artists, performers, playwrights and novelists as well as reporting regularly from the Edinburgh Festival.[8]

Nigel Wrench is one of the few journalists to have met and interviewed Banksy. The graffiti artist spoke to Wrench for PM at the opening of "Turf War", the first Banksy exhibition in London in 2003.[9]

Among Wrench's radio documentaries was a major BBC World Service series Pills, Patients and Profits[10] which examined the global pharmaceutical industry.

Wrench publicly announced his status as HIV-positive in 1994, in a speech while accepting his Sony Radio Award.[11] He wrote extensively about living with HIV and AIDS, including a regular column for the Pink Paper[12] and made a television documentary called From Russia With Love for BBC3 in 2003.[13]

For the rest of his time at the BBC, Wrench continued to report extensively on culture for PM and presented news programmes for the BBC World Service.

In February 2015 Wrench released ZA86,[14] a limited-edition cassette, through specialist label The Tapeworm. A sleeve note says: "apartheid South Africa, 1986, through the headphones of a young radio reporter".[15]

Nigel Wrench now uses the name he was born with, Stephen Wrench, and has contributed, among others, an interview with Lloyd Russell-Moyle for Brighton's Gscene magazine.[16]

Wrench also co-presents a podcast called Shake The Bag Shake The Bag with Rebecca Sandles.