Peter Levy

Peter Levy (born 5 September 1955) is a BBC television and occasional radio presenter on BBC Radio Humberside. He previously worked in commercial radio.

Since November 2002, he has been a weekday presenter of the BBC regional news programme Look North. The programme is broadcast from the BBC's Kingston upon Hull studios to the areas of East Riding of Yorkshire, Northern Lincolnshire and parts of Nottinghamshire via the Belmont transmitter.

Levy was born in Farnborough, Kent, England, but attended a secondary modern school in Truro, Cornwall. He first came to Yorkshire in his late teens. He was an actor in his teenage years, with small roles in shows such as Dixon of Dock Green, Man About the House, Comedy Playhouse, The Mike Yarwood Show.

Radio

Levy was a disc jockey at Bradford's Pennine Radio (now The Pulse of West Yorkshire) from its launch in 1975 – having been hired by the then television journalist and later Member of Parliament Austin Mitchell. He became a presenter at Liverpool's Radio City in the 1970s, starting on the afternoon show before progressing to the drive time slot.

Television

He originally pursued an acting career and was a minor character in Last Of The Summer Wine. He was then involved in local radio in the south of England before moving to Leeds to co-present BBC Look North.

He moved to Leeds-based Radio Aire, and then, in January 1987, to the BBC, eventually having a lunchtime show at BBC Radio Leeds. At this time he started as a regular stand-in presenter for the Leeds edition of Look North, always doing the breakfast bulletins. From between 1992 and 1993, Levy presented a BBC Two series entitled Famous Faces, Favourite Places in which he met well-known individuals who would revisit places of interest. During the programme he met individuals such as John Godber, Fred Trueman and Kathy Staff.

Look North was broadcast across the whole of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region at the time Levy started to work on it. He became the regular breakfast and lunchtime presenter of the programme in the mid-1990s. When the BBC split the region into two, Levy moved to present the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire edition from studios in Hull full-time from 11 November 2002.

In May 2005, a strike held by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) saw 15,000 journalists and technicians leave their posts in what was seen as one of the biggest walkouts in the BBC's history. NUJ members in Kingston upon Hull estimated that only a quarter of the 120-strong workforce, including Look North presenter Peter Levy, crossed the picket lines at the city's BBC centre at Queen's Court.

Levy's on-screen rapport with weatherman Paul Hudson has made him a popular local figure. The duo visited shopping centres around the region and met the public as part of the 2006 Look North Sofa Tour, this was repeated in 2009. The pair have made public appearances as part of a campaign in the East Riding of Yorkshire's libraries concerning reading among the under 11s. Levy made reference to this campaign on his radio show saying he could not read properly until he was ten and this is why he is passionate about campaigns such as this.

He also appears on a regular basis in the ‘Nationwide’ segment on BBC News Channel’s ‘Afternoon Live’. He has the same witty repartée, usually with regular Afternoon Live presenter Simon McCoy, as he does with Paul Hudson on Look North.

Levy appeared in a 2003 Last of the Summer Wine episode called "The Man Who Invented Yorkshire Funny Stuff". He was also mentioned in episode 6 of series 1 of The League of Gentlemen. He has also appeared in the comedy show Still Open All Hours.

In 2012, Levy opened the Beverley Food Festival along with the Mayor of Beverley, Margaret Pinder; he is a supporter of the Driffield Show and other country events. He owns five cows, and keeps them for part of the year on Beverley Westwood, an area of common land where people can graze livestock during the summer months.

Levy lives in Hull; he says "Because it’s such a close community in Hull, you can't really step out without being spotted. It is a little bit like being in a goldfish bowl. I'm a pretty shy person when it comes down to it, so it did take some getting used to, but the people of Hull are incredibly warm and friendly so it’s not really a chore." He is very protective of his adopted home, and once said live on air that the man who wrote the book Crap Towns (a book that had Hull as one of the "crappest") was an idiot and everyone who had been to Hull knew it was a "lovely city".

He regularly visits Cornwall, where his mother lives – it is here he indulges his love of bodyboarding and suggest he is "probably the oldest surfer in town."