When Ken Bruce quit BBC Radio 2 recently it made national headlines.

After over 30 years hosting his popular weekday programme, the veteran DJ is moving to a new radio station.

“The danger of staying at Radio 2,” he told Kate Thornton on podcast White Wine Question Time, “was that I would just go into a kind of complacency, and say, ‘Right, it’s great… you know, I’ve got this amount of audience, I’m doing this, everything’s working beautifully.’”

Bruce’s fear, he revealed, was that “I would just spend the next few years gradually, you know, declining into something that was becoming too easy – and so I like to give myself a little kick, every so often.”

That “little kick” was to move to Greatest Hits Radio, taking his famous daily PopMaster quiz with him.

“Another part of the challenge is that, can I go to this station and be successful at it and bring some listeners, perhaps?” He continued. “I like to set myself a little challenge every so often.”

Bruce revealed to Thornton that he is not adverse to making difficult life decisions – in particular, when it comes to his personal life.

“It looks bad on paper, married three times… [with] six children by those three different women, but it’s not as exciting as it sounds,” he joked. “It sounds as if I’ve had the life of a playboy – and, in fact, as somebody once said, I was a serial bridegroom!”

Bruce clarified that his first two marriages were “proper relationships”, that each lasted nine years, and included children.

Today, he emphasised, relations between all involved are “all fine” and that “everybody’s happy”.

Yet the experience, at the time, he admitted to Thornton, left him conflicted about the prospect of marrying again.

“I more or less said that’s it… two failed marriages, I’m not going to get another one,” he recalled. “I’m fine on my own.”

Instead, the radio star entered, he confessed, “slightly midlife crisis” in his mid-40s, which included joining a gym and buying a “convertible”.

It was not a phase, however, that lasted long.

“I only went once to the gym, or twice, I think, because I didn’t like it,” he joked.

The convertible, too, turned out to be “unsuitable for family life”.

When Bruce met Kerith Coldham, a broadcast assistant in 1998 therefore, he told Thornton, it was “a lovely moment because it was totally unexpected.”

The pair met working at the Eurovision Song Contest in Birmingham, at the International Convention Centre (ICC) building, which is located next to a canal.

“We were backstage and there was a clutch of ducklings that had been found just wandering about in the ICC, because they’d come straight off the canal and they’d lost their mummy,” Bruce recalled. “And Kerith is an absolute fan of all animal life… so she said, ‘Come on, come on… look at this!’”

The pair, he said, bonded over “ducks and Eurovision”.

“We got on so well.”