OUTSPOKEN radio presenter Andy Kershaw is bringing his gruff observations and encyclopaedic musical knowledge to the Tivoli Theatre, Wimborne on March 5.

Kershaw, 51, whose varied career as DJ and foreign correspondent has taken him to 97 countries covering everything from Live Aid and the Rwanda genocide, to civil war and Desert Island Discs.

The Wimborne date will draw on his colourful career and his recently published autobiography, No Off Switch. The show takes the form of an interview with journalist Ruth Pitt asking Kershaw searching questions about his life.

Perversely, a media frenzy surrounded him in 2006, when only months after moving to the Isle of Man, his partner of 17 years, Juliette Banner, moved out, taking their two children with her. She’d borrowed his phone and discovered a message from a woman Kershaw had slept with at a music festival almost a year before.

After Banner moved in with a new partner, the whole episode resulted in Kershaw turning to the bottle and repeatedly breaking a restraining order for which, after going on the run, he ended up with a three-month jail sentence.

“When it was all going on, I expected ‘Shamed DJ’ and ‘Disgraced DJ’ from the tabloids. What I didn’t expect was journalists on the broadsheets to buy the whole line as well,” says Andy.

Although this is now firmly in the past for the man who once shared a studio with the late broadcaster John Peel.

“Everything’s going forward. I’m not angry, the book’s not cathartic and I’m not unloading something I’ve been bottling up for a long time,” he added.

“I’m boyishly excited that this is ‘life part two’ now.

“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do, but that’s part of the excitement.”

Kershaw feels much younger these days, he says, and his feelings of positivity are “stratospheric.”

“The way I’m going, I think I’m about to hit teenage years again. And when I get there, we’re all in trouble!”