IN certain industries success inevitably means that you end up in London.

That is normally the course of events in national radio -- the BBC, after all, is based in the nation's capital.

However, the decision by the BBC Director General Greg Dyke to increase the BBC's overall commitment to the North is good news for Ian Bent, who lives in Ramsbottom.

Ian is editor of a new unit based in Manchester and destined to produce around 250 programmes a year covering the whole of the North of England for Radio 4 and Radio Five Live, for which he has a budget of £600,000 a year.

Originally from Leicester, Ian has spent his entire working life in the North and has no intention of leaving.

"Ramsbottom is my home, it is where my friends are, where my children's friends are -- and where I play five-a-side football!" he said.

Raised and educated in Leicester, Ian, aged 37, and married to Christine, with two sons aged eight and five, always wanted to be a journalist: "I can't remember wanting to do anything else, although there was no tradition of journalism in my family," he said.

At school he contributed articles to the school magazine and then, when an internal radio station was started up within the school he more or less took it over.

"I went to Preston Poly -- as it was then -- and from there to Radio Lancashire in Blackburn. I lived in Blackburn for a while before moving to Ramsbottom."

Ian, like many an "incomer" is passionate about the North and giving the area a fair showing on a national basis.

"That is one reason why I am happy about this new initiative. From a personal point of view I can carry on living in the North and further my career, it has always been a bugbear to me that for anyone to progress in national radio it has meant eventually a move down to London.

"Also, it means that we can cover news stories that matter to my mates."

Ian is not anti-London as such, nor is he blinkered into believing that the "North" means just the North-west.

"I have recruited a full-time team, admittedly working from Manchester, but from all over the North.

"In a radio context that means from Stoke spreading across the country coast to coast and up to Newcastle and the Scottish border.

"I can't guarantee that everyone on the team was born in this area but everyone has worked here and has roots and contacts here.

"Radio 4 and Radio Five Live has, in fact, had quite a reasonable input from the North for some time, but now we have a dedicated team who will be working on around 250 programmes a year.

"In addition to the full-time team we will also be concentrating on building up a huge number of contacts, local people actually living out there in the various towns and villages, that's one of the advantages of hiring people who have worked and lived in the North, we already have our contacts."

Ian is not insular either and has no intention of playing on the "cloth cap and whippet" image of the past.

"The programmes that we will be working on are of national importance -- they just happen to be based in the North. We do have a different outlook, we are not fixated on what happens in Parliament -- there are 16.5 million people living in the Northern "patch" and there are a lot of interesting and important stories here which deserve a national hearing.

"I am not "anti" London, I am just determined that the North of England has a fair hearing nationally."