He worked with The Premier Band, Bobby Thompson, Renato Pagliari (of Renée And Renato fame), The Pipe-dreamers, Flintlock, The Dooleys and many others, in a career spanning from the 1950s to the 2010s.
[3] In 1999, he won a Sony Radio Academy Award for his Master Joe Peterson programme (a thirties music hall star whose real name was Mary O'Rourke),[4] and in 2000, he won a second Sony award, for Investigative Journalism, with Wappat unearthing the truth about the death of 1940s singer Chick Henderson, later publishing a short biography of him.
[6] Commenting on this, he said, "The reality is that I can no longer give 110% to my radio shows, so I have sadly resigned from my broadcasting commitments.
This came several months after Wappat suffered a stroke, which left him aphasia.
[8][9] Frank Wappat died of heart failure on 17 February 2014, his 84th birthday, at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle.