Katie Puckrik is an American broadcaster and newspaper columnist. Born in Virginia, Puckrik is best known for hosting British youth magazine shows The Word and The Sunday Show in the 1990s. She also created and hosted the British televisiontalk showPyjama Party and subsequently its American remake Pajama Party. She runs a fragrance-themed YouTube series and blog called "Katie Puckrik Smells", writes a column for magazines and newspapers including The Guardian, and is a stand-in DJ on BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Radio 2 and most recently Talkradio.
Biography
Puckrik travelled widely in her childhood due to her father's military background. She spent time in Berlin, Moscow, London, Athens, Tangier, as well as her native USA. She moved to London permanently in 1984 and worked as a singer and dancer, working on Michael Clark's I Am Curious, Orange in 1988 and the Pet Shop Boys' 1991 "Performance" tour. Following the end of this tour, she auditioned to become a presenter on Channel 4's late-night magazine show The Word, beating more than five thousand hopefuls for the job. She co-presented the show's second and third series from 1991 to 1993 alongside Dani Behr, Terry Christian and Mark Lamarr before moving on to present Channel 4's coverage of the Glastonbury Festival in 1994, 4 Goes to Glastonbury, alongside Mark Kermode. In 1995 she moved to the BBC, contributing showbiz reports to Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley's BBC Radio 1 show The Graveyard Shift, presenting the first two series of BBC Two's The Sunday Show with Donna McPhail, and fronting BBC Radio 5 Live's arts magazine Entertainment Superhighway, having previously presented Fashion Icons, a six-part series exploring fashion trends for BBC Radio 5 in February and March 1992. In 1996, Puckrik left the BBC to devise, produce and present Pyjama Party for ITV's post-primetime schedule. As part of a revamp of programming which saw the ITV Network form a uniform schedule through the nightfor the first time, Pyjama Party aired on Saturday evenings from January 1996. The Independent described the show as one in which "young women in frilly nightwear try to recreate their conspiratorial teenage years". In 1999, at the age of 37, she published an autobiography, Shooting from the Lip, in which the chapters were named after songs with personal significance. In 2017 she presented a two-part radio series on power pop. In 2019 she presented a two-part BBC TV series on yacht rock, titled I Can Go For That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock. It was accompanied by a three-part BBC radio series.
