No relation to Alan Boyd, Tommy Boyd (born 14th December 1952) is a television and radio presenter. He first hosted CITV for a month in July 1983, returning again for December 1984, and became the main presenter between April 1991 and December 1992, barring Summers and the last one or two weeks before Christmas (that was Glenn Kinsey's job). This meant that he introduced most of Series 5 and 6 of Knightmare.

"It's brilliant, it's exciting, it can be a little frightening if you're younger than that (holds up hand to demonstrate), if you're smaller than that, make sure you've got a grown-up or an older brother or sister watching it with you, nothing to worry about, they're actors. BUT IT'S BRILLIANT!" - Tommy introducing Knightmare for the first time (Series 5 Episode 1).

He was famous for suggesting to viewers that they watch Knightmare by drawing the curtains and turning the volume up, a technique he first revealed before Series 5 Episode 2, and repeated many times after. A technical fault meant that the first 40 seconds of Episode 3 weren't broadcast, so he filled the time by plugging the following days' edition of 'Motormouth', ITV's Saturday morning show at the time ("I gather that Andy Crane is having his hair specially styled even as we speak"). He was the second Honorary Member of the Knightmare Adventurers Club, and was interviewed by The Quest in 1992, where notably he said "I wouldn't be at all surprised if in 10 years time it wasn't as big a cult as say Star Trek or Doctor Who, there could be Knightmare conventions where you dressed as your favourite character from all the series!!"

He presented a number of radio programmes from 1995, including on the stations Talk Radio UK, BBC Radio Five Live, and LBC. In 2000 he returned to Talk Radio, now called talkSPORT, and launched the popular unscreened phone-in show The Human Zoo. On the 18th March 2001, Knightmare fan Jake Ash phoned in and talked about Knightmare and Knightmare.com. Tommy remembered the show, and they discussed the Bring Back Knightmare campaign. A large surge of visitors to Knightmare.com followed.

During 2001, Knightmare related phone-ins to The Human Zoo became as much a part of #knightmare chat as Blind Date is today, with the room's assorted users calling in many times throughout the year. He appeared on Channel 4's The 100 Greatest Kids’ TV Shows in August 2001, though, bizarrely, said nothing about Knightmare, despite it being one of the shows on the list. Someone who did was comedian Iain Lee, who cites Boyd as one of his broadcasting heroes and at one point presented a radio show on LBC heavily inspired by The Human Zoo.

The show ended when Boyd was sacked from talkSPORT in April 2002, after, on the day the Queen Mother died (30th March), letting through a call from someone who thought we should "shoot the (expletive deleted) lot of them", and not apologising to listeners afterwards, simply cutting the call and carrying on with the show. He now presents a daily afternoon show on BBC Southern Counties Radio, having his own minisite called the 'Boyd Zone' available here, and on Sundays on the internet radio station Playradio UK.

'The Hyphen Boyd Foundation', a Tommy Boyd/Glenn Kinsey/Human Zoo fansite, was available at http://tommyboyd.50megs.com , though is now offline as of September 2007. A Web Archive version is available here.

(Originally posted on 2005-11-15 09:42:36)

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