Old age doesn't mean listening to Mantovani, says DJ Liz

"Just because you're over 60, it doesn't mean you want to be listening to Mantovani and his orchestra," she says.

"It doesn't mean you have to give up work, it doesn't mean you want to sit in a chair watching crap daytime telly."

It doesn't seem so long ago that the former Radio 1 DJ represented the voice of Britain's youth. But now, having celebrated her 60th birthday last year, she is in now championing the cause of the older generation.

Speaking at Age UK Shropshire Telford & Wrekin's conference in Shrewsbury, she admits to a little trepidation about what old age will be like.

"It's approaching faster and faster, and I think it's quite horrific," she says.

"Not being 60, but what might be approaching if we don't sort it out."

But the broadcaster's drive and anger at the way society views older people goes much deeper than irritation with dated stereotypes. And it quickly becomes clear that it is motivated by much more fundamenta than the typical angst that goes with another milestone birthday.

Her determination to change these perceptions actually began more than 20 years ago, when she was still in her 30s and increasingly disturbed at the way elderly members in her family had been treated.

"If you treat a child the way that older people are treated in our hospitals, you would be prosecuted," she says.

"We are all supposed to say how wonderful the NHS is, but something is going wrong.

"Old people should get the same respect and treatment as somebody who is younger."

Liz says the Stafford Hospital scandal, where substandard care was believed to have contributed to up to 1,200 deaths, merely confirmed what she had suspected for many years before.

"It didn't surprise me, I think it's being going on for decades," she says.

"We had the Liverpool Care Pathway, which was supposed to be about providing palliative care in the NHS, but the attitude towards the elderly seems to be that they will die anyway, and that if you provide treatment you are simply prolonging that."

Liz remembers her shock when she visited her war-veteran grandfather in a private care home on May 8, 1995.

"I remember the date because it was the anniversary of the end of the war in Europe," she says. "My grandad had served in the Second World War in Greece and liberating Italy," she says.

"I was absolutely horrified when I saw him, he was starving to death.

"I ended up calling an ambulance, and he was taken away to hospital with severe dehydration and malnutrition."

But it was the experience of her grandmother at a hospital in Rochdale in 1999 which finally motivated her to become in the charity that was then known as Age UK.

"I spent three weeks sitting at my grandmother's bedside, watching how she was treated, and I was appalled and disgusted," she says.

"When she was in hospital they wouldn't feed her, they were reluctant to put her on a drip, and when she died her body was covered in horrible, rotting bed sores."

It was a similar story 10 years later, when her father Jack was admitted to hospital in Blackpool.

"He couldn't eat his food because it was tightly wrapped in cling film, and they would come back later and throw it in the bin," she says.

For the past 10 years she has been patron of Age UK Coventry and Warwickshire, and tries to use her public profile to raise awareness of the issues facing older people.

Sex and Drugs and Rock & Roll is the title of the conference at Shrewsbury University Society, and tackles issues including substance abuse among the elderly and love in later life.

Age UK Shropshire Telford & Wrekin's chief executive Heather Osborne says: "This year's conference aims to modernise some of the perceptions of old age, and show the new generations of retirees that they can live happy, active and fulfilled lives."

Liz jokes how her son sometimes reproaches her for returning home the worse for wear late at night. And she says many figures in the world of showbusiness show that passing the traditional age of retirement shows that you do not necessarily have to slow down.

"John Peel died too soon in 2004, he was 65. He would be 80 now, and I'm sure he would still be playing records," she says.

"Annie Nightingale, she's 72 and still doing two hours a week on Radio 1.

"Then I think of the people I interview. "You have Mick Jagger, who is 75, having to cancel a massive tour for serious heart surgery, but he then says it will be reorganised for the following year," she says.

"Keith Richards, I love the way he says he is cleaning up his act by giving up drinking spirits, from now on it will be just beer and fags.

"I wouldn't say that I would like to live like Mick Jagger, but there are plenty of good role models, like Jane Fonda and Lulu, really glamorous, beautiful women in their 70s and 80s."

But she says there is still much work to be done, recalling her own experiences in broadcast media.

"When I was on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire there was a play list of records, we used to play the same records every day, which were supposed to appeal to the over 60s," she says.

"That was when I was 50, and even then I knew it was wrong because my cousin, who was 70, and she had grown up with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks.

"Why would people get to a certain age and say 'I'm not going to listen to any new music any more, I'm just going to stick to the music I was listening to when I was 15 in 1974?'"