For a 9 month trial period, digital radio listeners in the Manchester area will be able to listen to a brand new, unique radio station featuring Wind Up/Prank phone calls 24/7.

John Evington and David Duffy at NioCast, who submitted the Manchester multiplex bid to Ofcom, approached me to see if I would be interested in joining the bid, and I am delighted to be part of it.

What excites me the most about this, and the main reason I wanted to get involved, is there will be nothing like my channel anywhere else, it's unique, and a radio station with this format and content 24 hours a day, will be a first for any city in the United Kingdom.

The Steve Penk Wind Up Channel will have no music, but will feature my trademark Wind Up Phone Calls, all day, everyday, plus I plan to showcase Prank calls from other broadcasters from around the world, and may also later introduce a daily (speech based) LIVE breakfast show.

I am determined to make the radio station a must listen in the digital age.

Manchester is a hugely competitive market, I couldn't possibly expect to successfully compete if I was simply introducing another music radio station, against the massively resourced radio stations run by the likes of Global and Bauer, but this will be something very different in that market.

Everyone is playing pretty much the same music these days, so I want to offer something completely different for the listener in a market I know very well.

I am delighted to be part of this exciting new Digital Radio development in Manchester, especially as it's where my radio career originally started.

It will offer listeners something new, something very different, and I absolutely believe that giving listeners more choice is a good thing for the future good health of the UK radio industry.

Ofcom, who regulate radio in the UK, have awarded 10 trial licences across the UK. I hope it's a great success and the Wind Up Channel can be heard, in the future, in other cities around the country on digital radio.

Because of my time on Capital Radio in London, and my heritage in that market, I would love to roll out the channel in London and the South East, again simply because the channel will be unlike any other radio station currently broadcasting in that market.

I personally believe the major growth area in UK broadcasting in the next few years will be speech based radio, and the Penky Wind Up Channel very firmly ticks that box.

The next 12 months should be very exciting.

You'll also be able to listen online to the Steve Penk Wind-up Channel. The Steve Penk Music Channel is also available online.

For over 20 years I have been making Wind Up prank phone calls to people across the world. There are many different types of Wind Ups you can do.

First, you can call someone who has been nominated by a close friend or family member, someone who knows them very well and knows a subject that will press all the right buttons to get the Wind Up reaction you need, and as a result some great entertainment value for the audience listening at home. This also serves to defuse the situation afterwards when you explain they were nominated for a wind up by their husband, wife, brother, sister or best friend, resulting in a nice warm friendly conclusion.

The other type of Wind Up is the cold call, nobody knows you're about to call, you don't know the person you are calling, and you are literally flying by the seat of your pants.

This was the type of call made by Australian DJ's Mel Greig and Mike Christian when they called King Edward VII's hospital in London, with a terrible impression of The Queen in an attempt to speak to Kate Middleton.

What everyone needs to remember, at the time of this call, that this was a big news story: plus Kate was in for nothing major, she was in hospital suffering from 'morning sickness' something millions of pregnant women suffer with everyday and I'm not belittling it, I'm simply pointing out it was a trivial matter she was in hospital for, nothing life threatening for her or the baby. My wife simply ate extra strong mints to deal with her heartburn and morning sickness when pregnant with our children, but I suppose when you're royalty, you simply check into a private hospital for a few days, because you don't really live in the real world.

On the morning the call was made to the hospital by the DJ's, Jacintha Saldanha answered the phone, she spoke 4 words, when asked by Mel (who was pretending to be The Queen) could she speak to Kate her granddaughter, Jacintha simply replied "Oh yes, hold on".

The call was then transferred to the Duchess's nurse who then spent a further two minutes talking to the DJ's, who were pretending to be The Queen and Prince Charles. Both impressions were terrible, but that was part of the fun and the charm of the Wind Up. Not for one minute when they placed the call did Mel and Mike think anyone in London would believe them, but astonishingly, and comically they did. At this point no real harm had been done.

Nobody could ever have predicted what happened next when two days after the call was broadcast in Australia, Jacintha was found dead in her nurses quarters at the hospital.

Everyone was very quick to push ALL the blame of this tragedy solely onto the radio station and the DJ's. But I have a problem with this. There was no malice involved in this Wind Up, it was harmless fun. Even the impressions of The Queen and Prince Charles were like something out of a Carry On film: they were ridiculous, caricature, jokey impressions.

I found it odd and uncomfortable how quickly the hospital came out and were keen to push all the blame onto the Australian radio station.

Of course this made it all rather convenient: it immediately helped minimise the extreme embarrassment the hospital must have felt at the time. As the Royal hospital, they had failed the most basic levels of security by putting this call through in the first place. We live in a world of blame culture, and if someone can pass all the blame to somebody else and take it away from themselves, people do it.

I find it rather strange that nobody has ever questioned how the hospital bosses dealt with Jacintha on that particular day when she put that call through. The hospital were a little to quick for my liking to come out and say that neither Saldanha nor the other nurse was disciplined by the hospital. Well, of course. If that's what they said happened, then I suppose we have no choice but to believe them, do we? However, it was reported at the time that Jacintha had left three handwritten notes, one of which was directed at her employer, criticizing their handling of events that preceded the prank call. You can draw your own conclusion.

When I made my Wind Up call to Tony Blair, when he was Prime Minister, I didn't sit there before I made that call thinking to myself... I wonder if the person who answers the call at 10 Downing Street switchboard has issues? Will the person who answered the 10 Downing Street switchboard feel so ashamed and embarrassed after putting my call through to Tony Blair, that she will kill herself in a few days time? Of course that thought never crossed my mind, and neither did a similar thought cross the minds of the Australian DJ's either. The call was made as an item within an entertainment based radio show, no malice, no nasty undertones, no hidden agenda, just a bit of lighthearted fun.

If we over analyse everything we do in life we would never do anything.

Someone lost a wife, a daughter, a mother, and that is terribly sad. What happened with Jacintha was a tragedy nobody could ever have predicted, but to keep on pushing all the blame onto the Australian radio station and DJ's is ridiculous and ludicrous.

If the Australian radio station and its DJ's broke the law, then I am also guilty as charged for calling Tony Blair.

I expect to be arrested and thrown in the Tower immediately.

• Mel Grieg is speaking at Radiodays Europe in two weeks giving her own side of the story.
• Steve has just launched a YouTube channel featuring some of his new and classic Wind Up phone calls.

January 21st 1998 is a date I will never forget...

I had been presenting the mid morning show on London's Capital FM for just over a year, with my trademark Wind-Up phone calls being the highest rated part of the show.

Everywhere I went the wind up calls were the number 1 topic of conversation, it’s all people wanted to talk to me about: every London taxi driver would spend the entire journey telling me about their favourite calls.

On Tuesday January 20th 1998 whilst doing prep for the show the next day, I had the idea to call 10 Downing Street, but I needed a fresh approach. I had called 10 Downing Street a few years earlier to talk to John Major, who was at that time the Prime Minister, I called as a simple minded member of the public with a complaint about the price of onions in my local supermarket and insisted I speak to the Prime Minister immediately, but never got any further than the tough lady on the switchboard at Number 10, who told me the British Prime Minister “has more important things to worry about than the price of a pound of onions” and the call ended.

I ran that wind up a few years earlier on my show at Key 103 in Manchester and the listeners loved it, so I knew this time, and with a different Prime Minister, I needed a fresh approach.

The idea behind my next call to 10 Downing Street, calling Tony Blair, was to see how far I could get through the security phone system of number 10 and my thought was, for my listeners that would be the interesting and entertaining part of the call, little did I know what was about to happen.

I had recently met an impressionist (new to London) who at that time had told me he was finding it difficult to find work, he was struggling to get noticed in London and was thinking of moving back home to the north, his name was Jon Culshaw.

On the Tuesday night I rang Jon to ask him if he could do an impression of the then leader of the opposition William Hague, he did it for me down the phone and it sounded perfect, so I asked Jon to meet me at the studio in Leicester Square at 8am the following morning, which he did.

My daily show on Capital FM started at 10am, so I knew I had limited time to try and record the wind up, edit it, have my daily pre show meeting with the Programme Director and get stuff ready for the show at 10.

At 8:20am I went into a studio to make the call to 10 Downing Street, and like any wind up you only get one chance to get it right, it’s a one go hit.

I rang Directory enquiries to get the number for 10 Downing Street, rang the number and the switchboard answered, at this point Jon launched into the voice of William Hague asking to speak to Tony.

She put us through immediately to Tony Blair’s PA who at first wasn’t quite sure, saying it didn’t sound like him, but after a few more lines of dialogue, confirmed that she was convinced it WAS William Hague she was talking to and would go and fetch the Prime Minister.

During this brief moment, I closed the microphone and told Jon, he was almost certainly about to talk to the Prime Minister and to be prepared, 30 seconds later a very familiar voice said “Hello”…..it was Tony Blair. Jon’s face was a picture, I will never forget that look of total shock in his eyes, he literally started to sweat.

The conversation with Blair lasted less than 60 seconds and ended when security who were monitoring the Prime Ministers calls in a separate office, pulled the plug. I later found out, Tony was thoroughly enjoying the call and would have let the call last far longer, but the call ended and at that point, Jon had done his bit and left.

Because I’d been doing wind up phone calls for years, at the point Tony Blair picked up the phone I knew I had the most almighty dilemma. This wasn't some local builder or housewife, THIS was the British Prime Minister, one of the most powerful people in the world and I had just wound him up.

I didn’t know him, I didn’t know if the man had a sense of humour, or if that morning something world threatening was going on, and here I was trivialising his day.

The call ended with Tony Blair at 8:25am. Every morning at 8:30am I had a daily pre show meeting on the 6th floor with my Programme Director, Richard Park.

Richard Park was a tough man to work for, almost brutal at times if your work wasn’t to the highest standards, he expected nothing less. As I entered the lift, alone, on my journey from the 3rd floor of Capital Radio HQ in Leicester Square to the 6th floor (30 seconds) my whole life went into slow motion.

I had worked all my life to get to the very top of my career and the decision I was about to make right now could destroy everything overnight. The dilemma was, when Richard asks me in 2 minutes time what do I have on today’s show, do I tell him I have just wound up the British Prime Minister or do I say nothing and just run the call without telling anyone.

If I tell Richard, his next question would be, do we have permission from number 10 to run it, at which point my answer would be: "No we don’t". He'd have no alternative than to stop me playing it on my show, three hours later.

As a creative bit of content I knew Richard would have loved it, but as the Programme Director it would have placed Richard in an impossible situation, without permission from number 10 he would have had no choice but to ban me from playing it on the air.

This was a total make or break decision for me. If I played the call, and Downing Street, Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell came down on Capital Radio, not only would my own career be over but Capital Radio could have been heavily fined by Ofcom, or worse, had its licence taken away.

Holy sweet Jesus, what a moment, what a decision.

As I’m going up in the lift, I’m thinking - ’Steve, you don’t fuck with the British Prime Minister’

The lift doors opened on the 6th floor and there was Richard in his office, he welcomed me in and we sat down, my heart beating faster than ever, sweaty palms, my head racing.

His opening question……What’s on the show today Penky?

At that moment, I froze, it seemed like a long pause but in reality it was nothing, as I went through everything that was on the show that day……I told him everything apart from the Blair call. The meeting finished at 9am, I got back in the lift, went down to the studio and started to edit the Tony Blair wind up for transmission on my show at 11:30am.

My show started at 10am, Chris Tarrant and I (Chris was on before me doing breakfast) exchanged our usual morning silliness, but still I mentioned to nobody what was coming up.

As 11:30am approached, I was getting more and more anxious and nervous, the question should I play it, shouldn’t I play it, went over and over in my mind.

My wife Helen, daughter Natalie and I had moved from Manchester to London, we were living in a lovely house in Surrey, we had recently had another baby (Andrew) and life was pretty good, but was I about to throw everything away in a moment of creative madness, even my own wife didn’t know the risk I was about to take, I told nobody.

I knew if it went okay everyone would benefit, but everyone else had absolutely nothing to lose, whereas I had everything to lose.

At 11.30am, I played the Tony Blair wind up live on the air.

Initially nothing happened, I had no comments from within the radio station, I suspect on that particular day the Producers, managers and Richard himself hadn’t actually heard it go out on the air, perhaps they were in meetings, as was normally the case in a busy radio station.

I finished my show at 1pm and as I walked through the building after the show, still nobody within the radio station said anything about the fact I’d just wound up the Prime Minister on my show that morning. I made my way home and got home about 2:15pm and started preparation on the following days Show.

Then, everything went crazy.

That afternoon, Tony Blair mentioned during Prime Minister's Question Time that earlier that morning he had received a wind up phone call from Steve Penk at Capital Radio and that the wind up made more sense to him than anything William Hague had said that day in the House Of Commons during Prime Ministers Question Time, much to the amusement of MP’s from all parties.

At the point Tony Blair mentioned the wind up in the House of Commons, the story went into overdrive, I had every single newspaper, radio station, TV station in the world wanting to talk to me.

It was the craziest 24 hours of my professional life, it made Capital Radio even bigger, it took the heat off Tony Blair who at the time was under intense political pressure, it made Jon Culshaw famous and gave him that big break he was looking for, and it made me into troublemaker number one and for a moment, the most famous radio presenter in the World. Everyone was a winner.

On the day I made the Wind-Up call to Tony Blair he was under considerable political pressure and things weren’t great for him, he was being bashed somewhat and a few cynical journalists thought the Wind-Up had been executed so perfectly with Tony Blair coming out of it so well, that they were convinced the whole thing had been stage managed by Alistair Campbell, it most certainly was not, in-fact I’ve never met or spoken to Alistair Campbell.

The following morning as I started my show and every single newspaper was full of the wind up story, the door flung open and Richard Park stood in the frame of the studio door, said nothing and simply stood and applauded me, he knew the enormous professional risk I’d taken, he knew exactly what I’d done.

We’ve never spoken about it, from that day to this.

Happy 20th anniversary Mr Blair.

Listen to the call in full here:

In terms of total audience, it is the worst set of listening figures in Key 103's history.

I will always remain passionate about Key 103 Manchester. Most people in radio feel exactly the same way about the radio station where they started their career.

Piccadilly Radio launched on April 2nd 1974 and rebranded as Key 103 almost exactly 27 years ago.

Piccadilly Radio/Key 103 was built on character.

Many amazing broadcasters started their career at this radio station - Chris Evans, Timmy Mallett, Geoff Lloyd, Susie Mathis, Dave Ward, Mike Sweeney, Mark Radcliffe, Gary King, Scott Mills... the list of unique talented broadcasters that have worked for this great radio station is very impressive.

It always dominated the great City of Manchester, and for many many years was the number 1 choice for hit music radio listeners in Greater Manchester. There are many talented people who still work there, but in recent years the radio station has totally lost its way. The fall in recent years is not a blip, it's a spectacular depressing fall for this once great radio station. Commercially, Key 103 remains one of Bauer's cash cows, but with this huge audience decline, it won't stay that way for long. Urgent action is required.

Programming is where it's all gone wrong and without naming names, I believe it's currently the blind leading the partially sighted. Nobody can defend the Key 103 decline and if they do, they shouldn't be working in radio. There is a major crisis at Key and it urgently needs fixing.

To remain dominant in any industry you have to keep the product exciting for the consumer, but Key 103 has become stale and characterless. It's become the comfy pair of slippers radio station, the radio station that your Mum and Dad used to listen to. I now no longer know what Key 103 is and I work in the industry, so imagine how the listeners feel, whereas across the road, Key's main hit music competitor, Capital FM, sounds exciting, fresh, and connects brilliantly with its target audience in 2015.

In my opinion, Key's owners, Bauer Media, now face the single greatest crisis in the radio stations history. Major changes are needed urgently.

Key 103 listening figures Source: RAJAR / Ipsos MORI / RSMB

To start with, the name needs changing. The name is awful. Key 103 doesn't mean anything anymore, it never really did. When Piccadilly Radio launched, it launched in Piccadilly Manchester, next to Piccadilly Gardens, and so the name made sense. Key 103 is just a name: and in my opinion it's now a damaged brand.

If I was Bauer, I would rebrand all their hit music stations as Kiss FM. Kiss 103 Manchester would sound fresh, new, exciting and sexy. Kiss is a great name, and it would allow Bauer to take on Global's Capital brand, head to head. Advertising agencies would love it, they could sell the brand nationally and Kiss could also advertise on TV nationally, in the same way Capital does. The "Key 103", "Key 2", "Key 3" brands are confusing nonsense and whoever came up with the idea should be fired, they have no place working for the country's second biggest Commercial Radio operator. It was a stupid idea, with a name that no longer has any real connection with its target audience.

Key's entire programme schedule needs ripping up. Key needs a new Programme Director to put this right, someone who is creative, driven, ruthless and fearless, plus it needs to be someone currently outside of Bauer, so they come in with their own fresh ideas, not corporate brainwashed nonsense, and they need to be given total freedom.They should NOT appoint the next Key 103 Programme Director from within. This needs to be done immediately.

Part of Bauer's problem is the layer upon layer of programming management. Key 103 should be a stand alone station (it used to be) where the PD only answers to Bauer's MD, Dee Ford.

All programme decisions regarding Key should NOT be made by committee, they should be made by one person, the Programme Director of Key 103, period. Programming policy and decisions for Key should be stand alone. You can not run a successful radio station making decisions by committee, and that has been one of the major factors in Key's recent spectacular downfall, especially in the Manchester market. Manchester is unlike any other radio market in the UK, and unless you understand that and get the area, the public, and the humour, you will fail.

Too many presenters on the air these days think that if you talk a lot this equates to having a personality. Wrong. Humour, warmth, creativity and 'relate-ability' that's what makes great radio broadcasters. Just talking on the radio doesn't mean you have a personality that listeners want to listen to, and for me there are far to many characterless morons on the air talking rubbish, and Key 103 currently has its fair share. Get rid of them. Key should be the number 1, single best hit music radio station Bauer has. It used to be.

Manchester is the second most important market in the Bauer stable of stations, it is a crucial market for advertisers, and it needs to be right. Capital FM is now the clear hit music leader in Manchester, and if Dee Ford and Bauer don't act immediately, they may never get the crown back.

I wanted to write this today, after hearing the latest Rajar news, because I genuinely feel sad and concerned for this once great radio station.

I love this radio station for many reasons. Come on Bauer, sort it... NOW.