LOLA ALMUDEVAR R.I.P.

26-11-2007

Former Midlands Today and BBC WM journalist Lola Almudevar has died at the age of 29 in a car crash in Bolivia. Stirrer editor Adrian Goldberg pays a personal tribute to a colleague.

I heard the news late last night from a mutual friend, and like any unexpected death, there is at first the sense of unreality. “This can’t be true…” Yet sadly, it is, and one of our brightest flames has been extinguished at a ridiculously early age.

When I joined BBC WM as a presenter in 2003, Lola was only just breaking through on the station after working down the road at the Beeb’s Hereford and Worcester operation.

From the start, she was clearly a bright spark, brimming with ambition and destined for a career outside local radio.

Soon enough, she landed the unenviable job of being “late producer” on my breakfast show – that’s to say, setting up the next day’s items many hours in advance.

It was a thankless job, because if there was a breaking overnight story – or if the presenter and the “on the day” producer simply had other ideas about what was important - much of your hard work could be washed away.

To Lola’s credit, and because she was such a good journalist, her work usually survived – and if it didn’t she took it philosophically, recognising that it was simply part of the job.

More than any of this though, she was great company and a good friend – always up for a gossip and a party, she had a real appetite for life.

Ironically, this is what ultimately led to her death. After a stint on Midlands Today and Inside Out, she’d headed out to Bolivia where she’d become a “stringer” for the World Service.

Nothing typified Lola’s sense of adventure and independent spirit more than this bold decision, and if there’s any consolation to be taken, it’s in the knowledge that she was following her own star and her own dream.

That such a beautiful young life was extinguished in something as mundane as a car crash seems a ludicrously anti-climactic end to a life that promised so much, but if anyone ever typified Neil Young’s line that “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” it was Lola.