Once Upon A Time...

In the second festive offering I bring you not one, not two but three traditional fairy tales. These comedy pantomime retellings are from December 1985 and are packed with names familiar to Radio 4 audiences of the time.

Once Upon a Time... was written by Paul Shearer and Nick Symons. Both were ex-Cambridge Footlights with Paul going on to be a comedy performer and Nick mostly on the comedy production side. They had worked together earlier in 1985 on the Radio 4 series Nineteen Ninety-four. Paul’s comedy career was on both TV and radio in shows such as The Russ Abbot Show (BBC1), Gorham and Swift (Radio 2) and as co-writer on If You’re So Clever, Why Aren’t You Rich?  (Radio 4). He is now a property journalist. Nick Symons went on to produce A Bit of Fry and Laurie (BBCtv), became Controller of Comedy for Carlton TV and, from 2002, a freelance producer working on TV shows like TV Burp and Al Murray’s Happy Hour. He died in 2023.

Once Upon a Time ... Cinderella was broadcast at 2330 on Saturday 21 December 1985, the usual late-night comedy slot. In One Ear had just finished its second series the week before, indeed one of the stars of that show, Nick Wilton, played Buttons in this production. Nick regularly appears in panto as the ‘dame’ and this year is in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Festival Theatre in Malvern. Appearing as Cinderella is Helen Atkinson-Wood, from the cast of Radio Active. Chair of Just a Minute, Nicholas Parsons adopts a Noel Cowardesque voice to play a suave Prince Charming. Sounding as if they’ve just stepped out of an I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again sketch as the Ugly Sisters are Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden, with Tim occasionally dropping into his Lady Constance de Coverlet voice. In a nod to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue there’s a quick game of Mornington Crescent and Late Arrivals. Midweek’s Libby Purves is the Fairy Godmother and Nick Maloney (Son of Cliche and The Fosdyke Saga) is Beamish. Providing other voices, in this case Ted Lowe, Denis Norden and Robin Day, is Rory Bremner, pretty new to the comedy scene at the time and heard that year on Radio 4’s The Colour Supplement.      

Once Upon a Time...Jack and the Beanstalk was broadcast at 2215 on Sunday 22 December 1985. The Today presenters were more than willing to drop their serious image and in this show its Sue MacGregor’s turn as Jack. Peter Jones, one of the regulars on Just a Minute, plays Jack’s Mother, and there’s an impromptu round of the game. Barry Took, of The News Quiz, is Sir Norbert and the Giant. Helen Lederer, another star of In One Ear, is Jill and Rory Bremner is again on hand to play sundry characters and impersonate Johnners, Parky and Prince Charles. Also credited as playing ‘traders, villagers, serfs, kettles etc.’ are the Incredible Bending Bodger Brothers. I assume this is the act usually known just as The Bodgers, who were John Docherty, Gordon Kennedy, Moray Hunter and Pete Baikie, who four years later would be part of Channel 4’s sketch show Absolutely. Fans of the shipping forecast should pay attention about half way through. In this particular show some of the jokes seem to fall flat with the Paris Theatre audience, or maybe they’re just not that funny.

Once Upon a Time...Rumpelstiltskin was broadcast at 1530 on Thursday 26 December 1985. This time the cast features Margaret Howard who has great fun as the Queen, for some reason adopting a t’Yorkshire accent. I wonder if this show made that week’s Pick of the Week? Today presenters John Timpson and, complete with a Geordie accent, Brian Redhead, play the King and Dad respectively. Putting in an appearance as the Pardon the Butler , plus some other roles, is Richard Baker, presenter of Radio 4’s Start the Week and Baker’s Dozen. Hale and Pace, recent stars of Don’t Stop Now – It’s Fundation play DI Broker and DS Bailiff. Sally Grace, a Week Ending regular, is The Storyteller, and very briefly Mrs T, whilst Nigel Rees, another voice from Week Ending and The Burkiss Way and at the time the chairman of Quote...Unquote, hams it up as a very Orish Rumpelstiltskin and other parts.

Music in all three shows is provided by I’m Sorry’s Colin Sell. The producer is Alan Nixon who at one time or another had already worked with many of the performers on shows such as The News Quiz, The News Huddlines, Quote...Unquote, In One Ear, Stop the World, Don’t Stop Now –It’s Fundation, Son of Cliche, In Other Words...The Bodgers and The Fosdyke Saga.  

Professor Unwin’s Jazz Lecture

For the first of this year’s Christmas posts I’m taking you back over six decades to Boxing Day 1959. On the BBC Light Programme that evening, between Ken Sykora’s Guitar Club and Radio Newsreel was the regular Saturday evening show Just Jazz with Steve Race. For this holiday edition Steve’s guest was Professor Stanley Unwin, ‘Professor of Jazz Studies at Brewflade University’. Deep joy.

An article in that week’s Radio Times told us what we could expect:

We have often wondered from what university Stanley Unwin got his title of Professor – we have learnt to be cautious from past experience with such other luminaries as Jimmy Edwards. The answer, it seems, is Brewflade University, where he holds the Chair of Jazz Studies. Well, well. Anyway, you can hear his Inaugural Lecture on this subject in today’s Just Jazz (Light), which will be introduced as usual by Steve Race. 

Professor Unwin has apparently undertaken to supply a critical commentary to the discs that Steve will put on the turn-table. The result will be some surprising new insights into jazz.  

By a stroke of luck a recording of that show has survived, or at least part of it has, and was recovered in New Zealand by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I pass on my thanks for forwarding it on.  

Just Jazz was broadcast on Saturday evenings on the Light from Saturday 5 October 1957 to 15 July 1961. The regular presenters were Steve Race, Charles Melville, Sim Copans and Frank Dixon.

The Morning of the Year

In a recent edition of University Challenge (1) Amol Rajan asked “Give me the composer of this piece which became, in 1927, the first musical work commissioned for the radio by the BBC.” After hearing an excerpt, which neither team identified, the answer was given: “It’s Gustav Holst with The Morning of the Year”. Needless to say I got to thinking why was this commissioned and who commissioned it, and when it was it first broadcast. Here’s what I found.

The person behind the commission was Percy Pitt, (pictured above) the BBC’s director of music. Pitt himself was a composer and conductor most notably working for the British National Opera Company in Covent Garden before joining the BBC on a full-time basis in November 1924.

In 1926 it was decided that the BBC should broadcast a series of ‘national’ classical music concerts which would ‘present important works on a scale which cannot be attempted in the ordinary concert or a studio performance’. These twelve concerts would be broadcast every two or three weeks between September 1926 and April 1927 (2) and relayed on all BBC stations live from the Royal Albert Hall. The concerts included a mix of established works and some world premieres and, in the case of Gustav Holst, a work specially commissioned for the season. Pitt and Holst had first worked together some three years earlier when as director at the Royal Opera House he had organised the premiere of Holst’s The Perfect Fool.       

Holst started work on what would be the choral ballet The Morning of the Year in November 1926. Based on a scenario by Douglas Kennedy and with words by singer Steuart Wilson (3), the music stemmed from traditional English sources and was intended to portray mating rituals in the Spring. The work would be dedicated to the English Folk Dance Society of which Kennedy was the director. 

The work received its world premiere in the tenth National Concert broadcast on Thursday 17 March 1927, though being a radio broadcast the ballet was not performed with just the music played and sung by the orchestra and chorus. Holst was quoted in the press that he considered it his most important work since The Planets but in a letter to Percy Pitt he denied this and suggested that what he actually said was that it was the best thing I’ve written in the last two years “which is a very different matter. “  

Like all the other concerts in the season the music was performed by a National Orchestra of 150 musicians. This was actually the combined forces of the Covent Garden Orchestra and the BBC’s Wireless Orchestra. For the tenth concert the orchestra was joined by the National Chorus under chorus master Stanford Robinson which comprised the London Wireless Chorus (what would become the BBC Singers) plus choristers drawn from the Civil Service Choir, Lloyd’s Choir and the Railway Clearing House Choir.

The first part of the concert was the first performance of Arthur Honegger’s King David, a symphonic psalm in three parts after the play Le Roi David by René Morx, which Honegger conducted. The second part was the premiere of The Morning of the Year with the Orchestra conducted by Holst (pictured above), followed by Honegger’s steam locomotive-inspired symphonic movement Pacific 231.

The notes in that week’s Radio Times described The Morning of the Year as ‘a representation of the mating ordained by Nature to happen in the Spring of each year’. The characters are the Headman, the Hobbyhorse, and Youths and Maidens’. It then goes on to quote the scene and story from the published foreword to the score which all sounds a little bit racy for Reith’s BBC:  

The Voice of Nature is represented by the Chorus. The singers take no part in the action.

The Scene is laid in an open clearing in the forest.

The Voice of Nature is heard calling on mankind. The Headman and Hobbyhorse, representing the human and animal worlds, enter and dance together.

Nature calls on the Youths to enter. At the conclusion of their dance and under the direction of the headman they form a moving pattern in the background. The Calling-on-Song is repeated and in response the Maidens enter. While they dance the background of Men moves independently.

This continues until the two groups become aware of one another. They hear the Voice of Nature calling them together: O Dance of Love, O Joy of Dancing! This is the Dance of My True Love.

The Mating Dance follows, and at its culmination these words are sung again.

All the couples go out with the exception of the youngest Youth and Maid, who are mated by the Headman.

The Voice of Nature is heard in the distance as the youngest couple and later the headman disappear into the forest. 

A few weeks after the BBC broadcast, in June 1927, the ballet was given a private performance at the Royal College of Music by members of the English Folk Dance Society. Again Holst was on hand to conduct. Later that month it had its first public performance at London’s New Scala Theatre on Charlotte Street.   

The critical response was mixed. “Unfortunately some of the audience expected an orgy on the lines of Le Sacre du Printemps. They did not get it. The music was austere, as usual. And, as in several of his recent works, there were times when the writing seemed calculated rather than inspired. (4) The crucial Mating Dance is rather too bland and folksy (5)

Since that 1927 concert The Morning of the Year doesn’t appear to have been broadcast again as part of a concert performance - it’s certainly not featured in any Proms concert – other than a 1956 recording by the LPO under Sir Adrian Boult that was on the Third Programme the following year. When it is played on Radio 3 it’s usually the 1982 recording made by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Atherton. There is also a 2008 recording made by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Richard Hickox.

So if The Morning of the Year was the BBC’s first commission, I wonder what the second one was!

(1) Southampton v Imperial broadcast on BBC Two 17 November 2025 

(2) The 1926-27 season of National Concerts started on 30 September 1926 and ended on 7 April 1927. There was a second season between October 1927 and April 1928 mostly from the Queens Hall just across the road from Broadcasting House. By this time the BBC had also taken over the administration of the Promenade Concerts which effectively brought the National Concerts idea to an end. 

(3) Wilson was involved in a successful libel case against the BBC when in 1933 the Radio Times published a letter criticising his performance in a broadcast of St Matthew Passion. Despite this, during World War II, he was appointed music director for the Overseas Service and in 1948 director of music for the whole BBC.     

(4) Quoted in Gustav Holst: A Biography by Imogen Holst

(5) Quoted in Gustav Holst: the man and his music by Michael Short