music on Sunday evening. In September 2006, his programme's hours changed from 711am to 8amnoon. In 2010 Bates was moved to mid morning (9am to 1pm) and shortly afterwards it was announced he left the station in January 2011 to present a show on Smooth Radio. Gold As well as his daily show for Classic FM, Bates could also be heard on the Gold Radio Network every Sunday morning from 8am to noon. Smooth Radio On 17 August 2010, it was announced that from January 2011 Simon Bates would take over as host of the Breakfast Show on Smooth Radio, leaving Classic FM after 13 years of broadcasting. Bates' show replaced local programming on a number of regional radio stations and began on 4 January 2011, except for Scottish stations which continued with locally produced shows. He brought back both "The Golden Hour" and "Our Tune" to the show. "The Golden Hour" aired every day from 9am to 10am as it did originally, while Our Tune aired each morning at 8:40am. Other features in the show included the Thousand Pound Minute, where listeners needed to answer ten questions correctly within 60 seconds to win £1,000. In September 2012 the radio industry news website Radio Today reported that Bates had started to present a separate breakfast show for Smooth Radio's sister station, Smooth 70s. Smooth Radio did not publicise the show, but confirmed Bates was providing "a little content" when asked about the programme. The content was "voice tracked" from the main breakfast show. Bates left Smooth Radio on 21 March 2014. BBC Radio Devon Bates, who lives on a farm in mid-Devon, started hosting the BBC Radio Devon breakfast show from 6:30am to 10am on weekdays from 12 January 2015. He also featured the Golden Hour from 9am to 10am, the years ranged from 1956 to 2004. 2017 Bates left BBC Radio Devon on 8 January 2017 to "move on to other things." Gordon Sparks took over the breakfast show. On 2 October 2017, Bates participated in Radio 1 Vintage, doing an interview about his time on BBC Radio 1. 2020 In 2020, Bates was hired to do the voice over for Channel 5's weekly countdown of the 30 biggest selling singles of one year in the UK (known under a number of titles such as Britains Favourite 80s Songs, The 90s Greatest Hits 1990 -1999, Britain's Biggest 90s Hits