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Kara Noble
Noble: sacked when the scandal broke over the royal topless pictures
Noble: sacked when the scandal broke over the royal topless pictures

Kara Noble makes radio comeback

This article is more than 18 years old

DJ Kara Noble, who was cast into the radio wilderness after selling topless photographs of the Countess of Wessex, is to make a comeback on Tony Blackburn's breakfast show.

The former Capital and Heart presenter will co-present Blackburn's Classic Gold breakfast programme tomorrow. Although it is a one-off, station bosses are hopeful she will return to the station on a regular basis.

Noble, who rose to fame as Chris Tarrant's co-host on Capital, was sacked by Heart in 1999 after she sold topless pictures of Sophie Rhys-Jones to the Sun.

The pictures, which were published on the eve of the countess's wedding to Prince Edward, caused a national scandal and Noble's radio career never recovered. She will fill in for Blackburn's regular co-presenter Laura Pittson.

"It seems to me that her absence from radio for the last six years has been a terrible waste," said the Classic Gold head of programming, Bill Overton.

"Kara is the perfect co-host. We understand there may be a bit of history there in some people's eyes, but what happened [with Sophie Rhys-Jones] is irrelevant to most people turning on the radio in 2005."

Controversy

Noble read the traffic and weather bulletins on Capital's Chris Tarrant breakfast show for nearly a decade. Their partnership came to an end in 1995 when she left to join Capital's London rival, Heart.

But she was sacked by the Chrysalis-owned station four years later when the scandal broke over the royal topless pictures. The 11-year-old photographs were taken in Spain when Noble and Ms Rhys-Jones were working together for Capital.

Heart management said she had brought the station's name into disrepute. Noble was understood to have received around £80,000 for the pictures.

The Sun was forced into a humiliating climbdown, apologising to Ms Rhys-Jones and Buckingham Palace, and pledging the £1m it had made from the photos to charity. The palace accused the Sun of "pre-meditated cruelty" and a "gross invasion of privacy".

Classic Gold is 80% owned by UBC and 20% owned by Capital's parent company GCap Media. A classic music station aimed at over-40s, it has 18 AM stations and 20 digital stations with a total of 782,000 listeners.

It hit the headlines last year when it suspended Blackburn for playing Cliff Richard records, which it had banned from the playlist. He was later reinstated with the promise that he could play as many Cliff Richard tunes as he liked.

Noble is now based in Los Angeles. Along with voiceover work, she has appeared as a guest on ITV's Loose Women, Living TV's Mystic Challenge and the Christine Hamilton Show on BBC3.

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