Chrysalis Radio’s LBC celebrated double gold at this week’s annual Sony Awards held at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

LBC 97.3FM’s Nick Ferrari celebrated his first Sony Gold win taking away Best UK Breakfast Show, beating rivals BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, while LBC Newsroom and Programming for LBC 97.3FM and LBC News 1152AM’s live coverage of the University Boat Race picked up The Gold Live Event Coverage Award for its coverage of The 2005 Boat Race, sponsored by Xchanging.

Chrysalis took home Gold and Silver in the Best Breakfast Show category with Chrysalis owned Galaxy Manchester’s Wes at Breakfast taking home the Silver Award. Ferrari’s controversial speech based breakfast show is aired live from 7am-10am and is in it’s 4th year. The other finalists were Radio 4s’ The Today Programme, Magic 1152 MacDonald and Maguire at Breakfast and Toolan in the Morning on Key 103.

The only other commercial speech based radio show to win the Sony Best Breakfast Show Award was in 1993 by a previous LBC show Mike Carlton’s Morning Report for LBC News Talk.

Nick Ferrari commenting on his win said "I couldn’t be happier if I sold Andrex toilet tissue to Tottenham Hotspur".

LBC who was up against strong competition for the Live Event Coverage Award namely from BBC Radio Sport for Five Live coverage of The Oval Test Cricket and Capital Radio’s coverage of the Live 8 Concert. LBC won the rights to broadcast the boat race from the BBC, 2005 was the first year since the boat race began over 80 years ago that the broadcasting rights have not been held by the BBC.

David Lloyd, Managing Director of LBC said: "To win one Sony Gold is a dream, to win two is beyond comprehension. We were thrilled that LBC’s boat race coverage, an unusual programme for commercial radio, won the day. And delighted that ‘Nick Ferrari at Breakfast’ won the title it so richly deserved, beating the BBC’s Today programme and proving that you can make great talk entertaining. Our results are both a triumph for LBC and commercial radio."