FOR many people except, perhaps, those who know him best, Nicky Campbell's latest change of direction has come as something of a shock.
For Campbell himself, broadcaster, DJ, presenter and, now, songwriter, it amounts to a kind of homecoming.
Not only is Moonlight's Back In Style, his album of self-penned swing jazz songs with actor Mark Moraghan of Holby City fame, the fulfullmen
t of a boyhood dream, it is also means a return to a place which played a special role in his childhood - Harrogate.
It was here as a youngster first falling in love with music that he used to visit his maternal grandmother in the late 1960s.
And it's here at Harrogate Theatre where in two months' time some 40 or more years later he and Moraghan (plus a seven-piece swing band) will present the stage version of songs which have won him unexpected acclaim from the likes of Sir Terry Wogan, Michael Parkinson, Michael Ball and Sir Tim Rice.
Talking over lunch in The Mitre in Knaresborough after a Sunday morning which has seen him first presenting a live debate show The Big Question in York for BBC 1 before dashing across to Harrogate to make an emotional pilgrimage to his late grandmother's house, the memories come flooding back for Campbell.
"I remember visiting my granny and grandpa on my mother's side in their house on Leeds Road. I think he was captain of Harrogate Golf Club. I can remember coming for holidays and It's A Knockout being held there one summer's evening on an expanse of green meadow. It was around about the same time I started writing music and lyrics, bashing away at an old baby grand piano."
Despite an unusually varied career in TV and radio since then taking in everything from Radio 1 DJ to Watchdog, Wheel of Fortune, Radio 5 Live and, a brief and ill-fated stint presenting flagship current affairs show Newsnight, the one thing this sharp-witted son of Edinburgh has not been known for is music.
All that changed when he met actor Mark Moraghan on BBC celebrity singing contest Just The Two Of Us in 2006.
Bonding over their shared love of swing jazz and Big Band Music; Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr, one thing led to another and the idea for an album of songs written by Campbell, sung by Moraghan, was born.
"Not matter how busy I was, I never really stopped writing music.
