The Roakebook: Emily Drake-Knight
It’s time for the first autumn instalment of The Roakebook, our series of interviews with local women who are also Roake Studio customers. October brings us to the studios of Isle of Wight Radio to meet Emily Drake-Knight, a journalist and co-host of the Topping In The Morning breakfast show, who is also partial to doing a spot of stand-up comedy.
Emily is fresh from presenting the show when we arrive, wearing a gingham Roake Studio Vicky tee and Nicole waistcoat teamed with jeans, chunky socks and Birkenstocks (we wholeheartedly approve of this combo). I start by asking her if radio was her first love.
“I thought that I had fallen into radio accidentally, but when I look back at my childhood there’s quite a clear path,” she tells me, going on to explain that she had a pretend radio station called Radio Wonder as a child, hosted by herself and a friend who spoke in - for reasons known only to them - Texan accents. “I’ve looked for the tapes but I’ve never found them which is a shame because it would be amazing and awful!” At middle school, she entered an Isle of Wight Radio technology quiz, not because she was interested in technology, but because she loved the idea of being on the radio. “It was in this very studio. I remember thinking ‘this is super cool’, so there must have been something planted there.”
Emily’s passion for radio extends far beyond her working life. Her path to the airwaves wasn’t as straightforward as those early encounters might suggest, however. After leaving school with one AS level in Theatre Studies (“I messed up in school badly; I sort of got kicked out because I didn’t do any work.”), she satisfied her wanderlust by moving to Scotland and working for a charity for three years.
“I love radio. I have it on all day. I do believe in the cheesy saying: it’s the third person in the room.”
“Growing up on the Isle of Wight, by eighteen I wanted to get as far away from here as possible,” she continues. “I hated it; I just wanted to go to the city. So I went to Scotland. Which was even more isolated!”
After realising that the charity work wasn’t for her, Emily returned to the Island to do an adult learning course, followed by a degree in journalism at Farnham university. The course covered writing, print and TV, as well as radio and online, which Emily specialised in. “I always thought I wanted to be in theatre and still secretly would love to be a West End music star, but actually I get horrendous stage fright. I knew straight away when I put headphones on that I would be absolutely fine. It’s like a buffer between me and the audience.”
The city was still calling, but Emily ended up back on the Island after her degree. “My plan was never to come back to the Island but we had to do work experience in the 3rd year and everyone was vying for the London stations.” She realised that it made better sense to do a placement at Isle of Wight Radio, staying with her mum rather than having to pay for accommodation in London. After two weeks, the station offered her a job. She accepted, thinking she would stay for about six months, but this island has a magnetic quality (ask anyone who grew up here). During that time, Emily met her husband Rob, with whom she now has three children, and stayed in the job for nine years.
You’d think stand-up comedy would be the last thing someone with stage fright would want to embark on, but in 2019, while on a break from working at the station, that’s exactly what Emily did, following her brother’s recommendation for a course he’d done as a work team-building exercise.
“Stand-up is pushing myself out of my comfort zone. If people don’t like it, they don’t like you. There’s nothing worse than a bunch of young Londoners not laughing at you. But if they hate it and I can get through that, I can do anything.”
Emily travelled to London once a week to do the course, and was enjoying gigging at open mic nights in the capital. “I really got a buzz for it. And then lockdown happened”. With nowhere to gig, she entered the Gilded Balloon’s So You Think You Are Funny? competition, whose previous winners include the likes of Peter Kay and Aisling Bea, and which was running via video entries during the pandemic. “Ordinarily the semi finals and finals were at the Edinburgh fringe. And I got to the semi finals. One of the kids had chicken pox so I had to do it live in the back of our van with my laptop set up because it was the only place I could guarantee the kids wouldn’t come in.”
“There was a point where I really wanted to go and work for the BBC but in reality, while that was a childhood ego dream, day to day I love the job that I do now. I love that I can talk about Norris’s (a local grocer) and people know what I mean. I love that you can be relatable on a really micro level. No-one is stopping me in the street after my autograph but people will say ‘can you give my nephew a shout out because it’s his birthday’. I love local radio.”
Emily wears our Vicky Tee in Mocha Check, Nicole Waistcoat in Black Quilted Cotton, Elsie Long Sleeve Tee in Wild Flower Embroidered Cotton and Maddie Skirt in Chartreuse Linen.
Interview by Hannah Rochell.