With his tongue-in-cheek style, dry wit and cast of fictional comic characters, Kevin Greening reached his biggest audience as a broadcaster when he co-presented BBC Radio 1's breakfast show with Zoë Ball in the late 1990s. But he was a radio veteran with 20 years experience as a producer and and presenter on a wide variety of shows on many different stations.

Born in Kent in 1962, he grew up in Bristol where his passion for music was spawned during the punk era. He later claimed that his life was changed for ever when he discovered the Stranglers, XTC and Eddie & the Hot Rods.

He got his first radio experience while still at school, as a weekend volunteer for the Bristol Hospital Broadcasting Service. After winning a place at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he read chemical engineering, he furthered his experience working as a station manager at Cambridge University Radio.

After graduating he joined the BBC as a trainee studio manager. He briefly worked as a tape editor on Radio 4's Checkpoint programme, hosted by the door-stepping presenter, Roger Cook. “He hated me,” he later noted. In 1989, he moved to the BBC's local London station, GLR, as a producer and two years later became the presenter of the station's breakfast show.

He left the BBC in 1991 to become one of the launch presenters on Virgin Radio. He stayed at Virgin until early 1994 when he joined BBC Radio 1 as the presenter of the Saturday and Sunday Weekend Breakfast Show, introducing several of the fictional comedy characters that were to become his trademark, including the hapless DJ Raymond Sinclair and Eric the Gardener. More noted for his wit than for playing records by fresh musical talent, his biggest discovery was the Mike Flowers Pops, whose cover of Wonderwall by Oasis reached No 2 in the charts at Christmas 1995.

As a disc jockey he came more from the Kenny Everett than the John Peel school, but his sharp intelligence and Cambridge education led the BBC hierarchy to regard him as a safe pair of hands and he swiftly became Radio 1's main stand-in when higher profile presenters were on holiday. In early 1997 he was promoted to take over Radio 1's weekday Drivetime show. He called the show “Driveltime” and introduced such features as the “Joke du Jour”, “60 Second Cinema” (in which a new film was reviewed in under a minute) and the “Waste Paper Web”, in which he highlighted pointless websites.

After just eight months presenting Drivetime, he moved dramatically up the pecking order in October 1997 when he took over the station's most valued slot, the weekday breakfast show, after once more impressing as a stand-in. With the regular presenters Mark and Lard on holiday, he found himself deputising in the week of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

BBC bosses were so impressed with the sensitivity with which he handled the issue that they moved Mark and Lard to a mid-afternoon slot and installed Greening and Zoë Ball as the new breakfast show presenters.

Their arrival was heralded with the cover shot of the Radio Times, although in many ways the pair made an odd combination, for their styles could not have been more different, with Greening's more modest, self-

effacing approach contrasting starkly with Ball's over-the-top ladette mannerisms.

His Raymond Sinclair character made a welcome return and was joined by new characters such as Major Holdups, who read the traffic reports. Yet perhaps inevitably, Ball's effervescent showbiz persona soon overshadowed Greening's subtler contributions and after a year as joint presenters he was moved, leaving Ball in sole charge. A BBC press release attempted to dress up his move as a promotion but the slot he was given on Sunday morning was anything but and the programme's “hits and highlights” format featuring “best of” clips from other shows left little scope for his creative wit.

He continued to stand in for other absent disc jockeys, including a long stint deputising for the pregnant Jo Whiley. He was even allowed to change the show's name from the Lunchtime Social to the Lunchtime Anti-Social and to introduce his characteristic humour via a daily letters slot from a fictional correspondent, Vera Trickle.

He was also presenting radio shows on the World Service and a TV show for the digital station BBC Choice, and he attempted to make light of his status as a stand-in and general first reserve, giving his e-mail address as supply.dj@bbc.co.uk. But in truth it was generally an unhappy time and there was no great surprise when his contract was not renewed at the end of 1999. He presented his final Radio 1 show in January 2000, filling much of his last broadcast with some of his favourite comedy sketches from his various shows for the station, such as his spoof Australian soap opera, Strewth Street.

He found employment as a stand-in at BBC Radio 5 Live before he moved to BBC London Live as a co-presenter of a Saturday morning show. Stints followed on Jazz FM, Heart and the indie-rock station, XFM. In 2005 he took over a permanent slot on Jazz FM's replacement station, Smooth FM, where he worked until his death.

In 1996 he announced that he was gay and that he had a long-term boyfriend, whom he often referred to on air as his “lesbian life-partner”. Away from his work on the radio, he also had a passion for motorcycles.

He died peacefully in his sleep and no cause of death was given.

Kevin Greening, disc jockey and presenter, was born on December 30, 1962. He died on December 29, 2007, aged 44