Ray Moore - a little bit more

I'm taking the opportunity to post a little bit more about Ray Moore as further research has unearthed these two articles that I want to share with you.

Firstly back in June 1986 the Guardian’s TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith felt moved to write about radio rather than TV and penned this homage to Ray when The Early Show changed its start time.  

I don’t think I shall bother to wake up at all this morning. For years I have been roused by the sound of Ray Moore coughing on Radio 2, like an early bird choking on a worm. It is a great comfort to his faithful if bedraggled following that he always sounds worse than we do.

All the ill-attended meetings of the Ray Moore Appreciation Society we all agree that he is the least well-known of all the well-known people in the history of the world. This is, of course, because he isn’t on TV. Some claim to have sighted him late at night dressed as a penguin, behind a potted palm and speaking highly of the paso doble but it seems unlikely. A leaked BBC memo states with a wince, “We have grave reservations about Ray Moore appearing on TV mainly arising from his face. As none of us has seen him we don’t know what this means and we’re not sure we want to know. 

He inhabits by early light a Lowry-like landscape. Here in a knit and spit (apparently a seaside shelter) sit a cottage loaf woman and a man in cut-down wellies, their little legs dangling. In the Terminal Café, regulars are eating breakfast with nonchalant haste. In Oxford Circus is a whey-faced busker sitting on a stool, who can only play two tunes. One is Cavatina. The other isn’t. 

Moore comes from a long line of wooden-legged greengrocers and short-sighted undertakers. His father used to take him to school in the hearse. Listeners sometimes (though not often) request a moving poem about Moore senior’s myopia, which he delivers in a monochrome chant.

My father had a rabbit

And he thought it was a duck

He put it on the table

With its legs cocked up

He claims to be related to Fletcher Christian, which gives you a faint frisson of sympathy for Charles Laughton. He is married to Management, referred to by Wogan as “a big Alma”. Consequently one imagines Moore as being exceptionally small.

Internal evidence like cries of “It’s Burt Bacharach, me old scouse mucker” lead one to suspect he may be Liverpudlian. He will sing you “Mersey Dock and Harbour Board” to the tune of Mersey doats and dozy doats if you’re not careful.

Like all Liverpudlians, he lives on the other side of a distorting mirror where nude ballooning is all the rage or if you don’t have the figure for it, single-handed round the world golf. Familiar buildings and singers emerge slightly askew as in the Royal Halibut Hall and Julio Double Glazing Arse. He seems to live in the plaintive hope of meeting Frank Sinatra, who never answers his letters.

Wogan called him a journeyman broadcaster, a jobbing jock. People used to set their alarms to catch the moment when those two programmes touched for a few fizzing minutes and Moore and Wogan went into their two-jocks-on-one-horse act. Wogan’s hole, so to speak, has never been filled. The head of Certain Things and Bits of Bent Wire at the BBC, as Moore puts it, has dropped Derek Jameson into Wogan’s hole today.

The splash of the displacement washes Ken Bruce forward, his psychedelic Scottish sweaters (“You could riddle bulldogs through them on a clear day”) disappearing dazzling into the distance. And it has washed Moore into the dark backward and abyss of time or 5.30 am if you insist, where he can be heard coughing in the dark like a Thurber seal.

There will be an extraordinary meeting of the Ray Moore Appreciation Society to discuss this at the Terminal Café. Big Alma in the chair, mixed gorilla on the menu, bring a fistful of wet change. And ‘phone Frank Sinatra.

And from The Independent dated 13 January 1989 here’s Richard North’s obituary for Ray. 

I was also reminded about the notes made by John Peel when he was drafting ideas for his autobiography, and reproduced as an appendix to Margrave of the Marshes. John wrote: " Trips to Eurovision Song Contests in Brussels-return to Heysel and hilarious meeting with King and Queen of Belgium in small party including the late Ray Moore leading to reflections on the really great broadcasters Moore, Lyttelton, Clayton, Arlott..."  

Anyway time for a bit more audio. First another Monday Movie Quiz, this one from 7 March 1983 that follows the edition I've already posted. So if you were waiting for some answers to the last lot of film questions here you are:

A couple of years ago in January 2009 Colin Berry paid tribute to Ray on this BBC Three Counties show. He included some links from Ray's last Early Show on 28 January 1988: