In All Directions

 

Ad-libbed or improvised comedy was unheard of in post-war comedy shows. Scripts had to be written and typed-up in advance of broadcast with producers ensuring that they didn’t breach any of the rules in the BBC’s variety programme policy guide, the so-called ‘Green Book’. Even music shows were not immune. Presenters of Housewives’ Choice had to turn-up to the studio extra early to rehearse the running order. Guests on Desert Island Discs would have a preliminary chat with Roy Plomley who would then type up a script for them to use in the recording. But there was one comedy series that tried to be different and was wholly improvised, albeit recorded and edited ready for broadcast, and that was In All Directions.   

In All Directions was broadcast between 1952 and 1955 and although there were just nineteen episodes it still stands out as a remarkable comedy success. All the voices, and some of the sound effects, were provided by Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones. The outline for each episode was conjured up by those master script-writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden, who at the time were otherwise engaged in scripting Take It From Here. Denis Norden tells the story as to how the series came about and how it was put together:   

For us, In All Directions represented two quite separate but equally satisfying achievements. First, the preliminary lunch at the Caprice where Pat Dixon, the producer, Frank and I met Peter Ustinov to try and persuade him into taking on a radio series. It went on till half past four and racked up the largest expenses bill thus far (1952) for the BBC Light Entertainment Department.

Its second departure from the norm, one that worried the executive high-ups no end, was that it was the first ever BBC comedy series to be broadcast without a script.

During the exploratory lunch, we found that Ustinov could improvise such extravagant and wondrously complex conceits on a minimum of prompting, we were all for putting this rare gift at the programme’s centre. Pat, always the most radical of the Department’s producers – across the wall behind his desk he had nailed the rebel flag of the US Civil War – saw virtue in this and promised to shield us from the inevitable wrath the execution of this format would provoke.

The series, which took its title from a favourite Stephen Leacock line, ‘He jumped on his horse and galloped off madly in all directions’, purported to be an ongoing car journey undertaken by Ustinov and Peter Jones – every bit as equal as an improviser – in search of a mythical Copthorne Avenue, with the two of them supplying the voices of all the characters they meet on the way, as well as providing most of the sound effects. Ustinov was particularly hot on car noises and creaky doors opening.

The two Peters would come into our office at the beginning of each week and ad-lib various responses to the characters and situations we suggested they might encounter en route. (‘Why don’t we pull up and ask that debby-looking girl selling flags where we are?’; ‘Look, outside that Boy’s Club there’s a poster announcing that Field Marshall Montgomery will be opening their new table tennis room.’)

We would record all their improvisations on such themes with a primitive tape machine Pat scrounged for us. Then, after they had left, listen to the various segments, choose the most apt, then rearrange them into some kind of coherent running order. This we would issue in note form to the two Peters, who would turn up on the day of transmission and recreate them, still sans any kind of script.

My one regret about In All Directions is that, somewhere down the years, the recorded bits of Ustinov and Jones we had not selected for the programme went missing. I’m quite sure that, even today, their wit and agility of comic invention would still be something to savour.   

What was also different about In All Directions was that there wasn’t a studio audience, obviously the method of constructing the programme precluded that. It wasn’t totally unheard of for comedy shows to be without an audience, the more cerebral offerings on the Third Programme – including Third Division (1949) also written by Muir and Norden and produced by Pat Dixon - for instance or Just Fancy and Breakfast with Braden were all studio-based. 

The first series of six programmes of In All Directions aired on the BBC Home Service in September and October 1952. They had actually been recorded in July so we must assume that Denis meant that the Peters would recreate the scenes on the day of recording, not transmission. 

The BBC only retained two episodes of the show. This is the first of them, the third show from series number one, as broadcast on the Friday evening of 3 October 1952. Musical links and interludes are provided by the Aeolian Players and singing is Rose Hill who, some three decades later would be known for playing Madame Fanny Le Fan, the bed-ridden mother in ‘Allo ‘Allo. The announcer is none other than Wallace Greenslade.

The ‘star’ characters of In All Directions would be, to quote Ustinov, “two deplorable spivs, Morrie and Dudley Grosvenor ...who have never reached a point of criminal proficiency where their activities would cause Scotland Yard to lose a wink of sleep.” They were already part of Ustinov and Jones’s repertoire before the series, dropping into impromptu routines at showbiz parties. In his autobiography Peter Ustinov explained further:

Peter and I invented a couple of characters out of the folklore of London, Morris and Dudley Grosvenor, low characters with high ambitions, as their name suggests. They spoke in the lisping accent of London's East End, and had endless wife trouble with their platinum-haired companions, as they did with the wretched character called simple  'The Boy' who was sent out on dangerous and sometimes criminal errands, in which he consistently failed. These programmes were improvised within a certain framework, and often they reached satisfactory heights of comic melancholy. Foolishly asking 'How's Zelda?' on one occasion, I received the following exercise in gloom from Peter Jones.

'Zelda? I'll tell you this much, Mowwie, if every evening after work you are hit on the head with a beer bottle with monotonous wegularity mawwiage soon loses its magic.'

So successful was the first run that it was swiftly repeated on the Home Service in January and February 1953 and again on the Light Programme in July and August. A Christmas special, broadcast on 24 December was quickly commissioned.

A second series of six episodes followed in May and June of 1953. Ustinov told the Radio Times that ‘Dudley Grosvenor and his brother Maurice will continue to crop up throughout the programmes. The only difference is that we’ve given up looking for Copthorne Avenue. Instead we shall be searching for such things as Britain’s Heritage and True Love: we think this idea will give us more scope.’

To give a flavour as to what the programme offered here’s a review from the Yorkshire Evening Post from 28 July 1953:

The sketches of In All Directions written and acted by Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones, revealed a barbed and brilliant wit.

There was the amiable and oh so amenable Yorkshireman who, with unsolicited patience, put up with the irascibilities of the Italian cafe proprietor in Soho in the vain hope of being served with food of some sort; and the air charter firm whose crew parachuted to safety, leaving the lone passenger to his fate.

But the shaft that really hit the bull’s eye was the peep behind the scenes of television’s In the News, the MP contestants simulating a towering rage with each other in front of the mike as a signal from the producer and pretending that the party bickering was unscripted whereas it had been carefully gone over beforehand. Afterwards the ‘enemies’ went off to dine together, the producer’s congratulations on the (spurious) quarrel ringing in their ears.

The inebriated, but extremely polite, gentleman in the bus shelter and the historian on the street corner were refreshingly funny caricature.   

It would be nearly two years until the third and final series came to fruition, this time they were in search of ‘a guide, philosopher and friend’, i.e. the producer Pat Dixon. This is the third episode from Friday 11 February 1955. There are a number of sketches spoofing BBC radio programmes including Animal, Vegetable and Mineral and World Theatre meets Mrs Dale’s Diary.

In the week after the first episode of the third series BBC television made an outside broadcast from Ustinov’s Chelsea home prosaically titled Peter Ustinov at Home. It was contrived that Peter Jones would happen to be in the study with his friend and they would perform an impromptu sketch along the lines of In All Directions. It was great publicity for the radio show.    

It is interesting to see how Ustinov is viewed as the senior partner in the show. The BBC classed it as a ‘personality-type show’ with Ustinov as the ‘personality’ and up until the third series all the fees were paid to his agent, much to Peter Jones’s chagrin. Barry Took recounts the time Peter Jones spoke as at a Press Association dinner and told a long anecdote about a dream he’d had at the end of which he was supposedly dead and hovering  over central London when he sees a newspaper placard that reads: Peter Ustinov Bereaved.

Of course, by this time Ustinov had already been acting on stage, in film and making radio appearances for just over a decade and had appeared in his first Hollywood film, Quo Vadis, a year before the first series of In All Directions. And if being a castaway on Desert Island Discs is an indication of stardom, Peter Ustinov had already appeared on it in 1951 and would feature twice more in 1956 and 1977. Peter Jones was a guest in 1962. 

The end of the third series of In All Directions wasn’t quite the end of the Ustinov-Jones partnership, nor the last we’d see or hear of Dudley and Maurice Grosvenor. On Boxing Day 1955 the two Peters were All at Sea, an hour long special on the Light Programme. They got together again for the 10^th anniversary of the Third Programme for In Third Gear (29 September 1956) which offered ‘much the same formula as In All Directions but set within the Third Programme orbit’. (An off-air recording is on YouTube).

In April 1959 Peter Jones was playing Dudley Grosvenor once more in the series We’re in Business with the Radio Times telling us that this was ‘a reference to the fact that Dudley is taking a new partner – Harry Worth. ‘With my brains and your private income ‘Arry, we’ll do alright,’ says Dudley’. Guest appearances were made by the likes of Dick Emery, June Whitfield, Nicholas Parsons, Harry Locke ad Frank Thornton. A second series followed in 1960 this time with Barry Took and Marty Feldman (their first joint writing venture) on board to help Peter Jones write the scripts. Dudley and Harry’s business headquarters moved from Syd’s Cafe to a boarding house run by Miss Jubilee Boot, played by Irene Handl. Dick Emery Graham Stark and Hugh Paddick were also in the cast.

The Grosvenor characters provided the influence for ‘The Winsome Welshmen’, two used- car salesman by the name of Dudley and Dunstan Dorchester in the 1960 film School for Scoundrels. Played by Peter Jones and Dennis Price they manage to flog Ian Carmichael a 1924 4-litre Swiftmobile – “make the cheque out to bearer if you don’t mind. And please don’t cross it sir, it confuses our books”. The on-screen writing credits are for Patricia Moyes, who was Ustinov’s personal assistant at the time, and producer Hal E. Chester but it was actually by Ustinov himself and Frank Tarloff, an American writer who was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings, that adapted the Stephen Potter books.

In All Directions and the Grosvenors were back in 1966 when BBC2 featured them as part of the Show of the Week strand. Frank Muir takes up the story:

I went over to Paris where Peter Ustinov was editing a film, and persuaded him to do an In All Directions for television with Peter Jones. There was no scenery or costumes. In one sketch Ustinov played a fat American speed cop. He asked the props department for an armchair fitted with good castors, and in the sketch it became his motorbike. He propelled it about the stage with his legs making motorbike and siren noises, and then went into a marvellous accent, brow-beating the unfortunate Peter Jones, an English tourist he had caught speeding.

The programme was broadcast in April 1966 and repeated over on BBC1 on Christmas Day. It was the last hurrah for In All Directions.   

“Dudley. Run for it!”

Series information

Series 1: 26.9.52 to 31.10.52 6 episodes on the Home Service repeated HS Jan-Feb 1953  and on the Light Programme July-Aug 1953

Christmas Special: 24.12.52 (HS) rpt 25.12.52

Series 2: 12.5.53 to 16.6.63 6 episodes (HS) repeated LP Aug-Sept 1953

Series 3: 28.1.55 to 4.3.55 6 episodes (HS) repeated HS May-June 1955

Peter Ustinov at Home 3.2.55 BBCtv

All at Sea 26.12.55 Light Programme

In Third Gear 29.5.56 Third Programme

We’re in Business series 1: 3.4.59 to 26.5.59 13 episodes (HS) – the final episode was retained by Sound Archives

We’re in Business series 2: 19.2.60 to 13 May 1960 (HS) – Transcription Services selected 7 episodes for release

Show of the Week presenting In All Directions 26.4.66 BBC2 repeated BBC1 24.12.66

Quotes from Clips from a Life by Denis Norden, A Kentish Lad by Frank Muir, Dear Me by Peter Ustinov and Laughter in the Air by Barry Took,  

America’s Greatest Hits

On Saturday 27 September 1975 Radio 1 introduced a new programme to the schedule, presented by Paul Gambaccini in concentrated on the latest music Stateside. As the DJ told the Radio Times ‘The American pop charts are the best and most forward-looking in the world, and bringing the new pop and soul hits from across the Atlantic to Radio 1 listeners should give them a chance to hear the acts they will be listening to in the future’. That show, which became known as America’s Greatest Hits, comes to an end tonight on Greatest Hits Radio.

In 1975 the US Billboard charts were significantly different from the UK ones. In that week’s Hot 100 half of the songs in the top ten never charted in the UK, records by John Denver, The Isley Brothers, Janis Ian, David Geddes and Freddy Fender. The US number one was a British artist, David Bowie with Fame, which only got to number seventeen in the UK. The show would be a mix of album tracks, classic hits from previous charts and the Top 30 singles of the week.

Radio Times billing for Paul's first
regular Radio 1 show on 27
September 1975

When the new series started in 1975 Gambo had already been broadcasting on the BBC for two years. Prior to that he’d made his first broadcast in December 1966 for Dartmouth college-owned WDCR and subsequently worked at WBZ in Boston. In 1973 he was studying at Oxford and also freelancing as British correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine. Attempting to grab an interview with Elton John he encountered Helen Walters, the press officer for Elton’s record company. Helen was married to John Peel’s producer John Walters. Walters told him that later that year he would be starting a weekly rock magazine programme on Radio 1. He wanted to include a ten minute look at the London rock scene from the perspective of an American and asked Paul “Would you be interested in writing and presenting this piece?”

Gambo takes up the story: ‘In late September 1973, I ventured to the BBC near Oxford Circus to record my pilot piece. Rolling Stone had run my Elton and Bernie interview as a cover story to coincide with John’s summer tour of the States, so there was no embarrassment in greeting Walters. He turned me over to producer Tony Wilson and in the third floor studio of Egton House, home of Radio 1, I read my written piece. It included four or five brief breaks for topical tunes, including Al Green’s You Ought to Be With Me and Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman. At the end I waited, expecting measured criticism from Wilson. “Fine,” he said. “That’s it.” And that was it. The pilot piece was broadcast in the first edition of Rockspeak the following week. I was on the radio again.’

That first report aired on 5 October 1973. You can hear that recording plus other clips and reminiscences in this Radio 2 programme Paul Gambaccini: The Way It Was broadcast to celebrate his 40^th year on BBC radio, It was broadcast on 4 October 2013.

In 1974 Paul worked on researching, writing and presenting a series for Radio 1 on All American Heroes. Broadcast weekly from November that year to January 1975 it featured Carole King, Steve Wonder, Roy Orbison, Aretha Franklin and eight other major performers. In 1975 he was working on Radio 1’s documentary strand Insight and also started to make his first appearances on Radio 4 presenting the arts magazine Kaleidoscope. He was given a tryout on a couple of Saturday afternoons in August covering John Peel’s show before launching his new series on 27 September. The idea for the show with an American slant came from producer Stuart Grundy, who’d worked with Paul on the All American Heroes series. It had been agreed in principle with executive producer Teddy Warwick but BBC cutbacks – the loss of the 2 hour late-night show which meant the dropping of Rockspeak and Bob Harris and the sharing of David Hamilton’s afternoon show with Radio 2 – meant the start date was delayed.  

Radio work for both Radio’s 1 and 4 continued and there were major series such as The Elton John Story (1977) star interviews and depping for Peel, Anne Nightingale and others. TV work followed and, of course, nearly every reader of this blog will have had a copy of one of the editions of the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles on their shelf.   

The American chart show ran on Saturday afternoons on Radio 1 for just over ten years. In the 70s it was sandwiched between Alan Freeman’s rock show and In Concert. It benefitted from being heard in stereo as Radio 1 borrowed the scarce VHF/FM resource on Saturday afternoons whilst Radio 2’s Sport on 2 on beaming out long wave (later on medium wave). Paul would always sign off the same way: “Until next week’s Paul Gambaccini show plays next week’s American hits Joan Jett and the Blackhearts are still number one with I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”, to take an example from 27 March 1982.    

America’s Greatest Hits of the Radio 1 era ended on 15 February 1986. The following week it was replaced by The American Chart Show hosted live from New York by Gary Byrd.

Many ILR stations carried the American Chart Countdown
including Viking Radio (Autumn 1987)

Paul had left the BBC to work for Piccadilly Productions, a production arm of Piccadilly Radio under the direction of Simon Cole (later at Unique), set up to develop a market for sponsored network programming for ILR stations. Paul would present two shows, the Network Album Show and the American Countdown Show. His first commercial radio US chart show was on 1 March 1986 and by the following year twenty ILR stations were taking the Pepsi-sponsored show. His American Countdown programmes ended in 1989 by which time many stations were taking the Benny Brown fronted US chart show. During this time (1984-89) Paul was also presenting an American Charts show for BFBS. In 1990 he presented a retro US chart countdown for Capital Gold.

The America’s Greatest Hits show would return in 1998 but in the meantime Paul was on Classic FM, made a brief return to Radio 1, Radio 3 with Morning Collection, regularly presenting Kaleidoscope and on the TV-am and GMTV sofas.

Radio Times 18 April 1998

On 18 April 1998 Radio 2 revived two shows as part of their Saturday afternoon schedule. After Fluff’s Pick of the Pops Johnnie Walker was back at 3.30 pm with album tracks and sessions not dissimilar to his Radio 1 Saturday Sequence programme. At 5.30 pm Paul was back with America’s Greatest Hits playing music from the current US chart and from the past four decades, though the chart rundown element had now been dropped. His first record was Springsteen’s Born to Run, the same record that had book-ended his shows on Radio 1. Paul would go on to open his last Radio 2 show with it as well as his first Greatest Hits Show. It's also the first record he plays after 5pm on his last GHR show.

Here’s that first Radio 2 version of America’s Greatest Hits.

The last Radio 2 show aired on 2 July 2016 as Paul was to take over Pick of the Pops the following week. But it was revived by Greatest Hits Radio on 15 February 2020. Here’s an aircheck for the show on 14 March 2020.

Earlier this month it was announced that Paul would stop presenting the show, the last one airs tonight. He’ll continue to work for GHR and from next Monday will present a daily Paul Gambaccini Hour on Greatest Hits Radio 60s. And of course you can still hear Gambo on Radio 2’s The Paul Gambaccini Collection on Sunday nights and asking the questions on Radio 4’s music quiz Counterpoint.   

Here's the last America's Greatest Hits show from 28 February 2026.  

That Was the Week - Newsjack

Back in 2015 I wrote a series of posts about comedy shows that poked fun at the week’s news, from Listen to this Space and Week Ending to The News Quiz and The News Huddlines. I ended with The Now Show, which itself has ended in 2024 – see blog post The Not Now Show. Radio 4 had already commissioned pilot shows in 2023 as likely replacements and those that made it to full series are Too Long; Didn’t Read with Catherine Bohart and The Naked Week fronted by Andrew Hunter Murray.  But another show I also mentioned in passing has also ended, this time in 2021, and that was Newsjack.

Newsjack was unusual in that it had an open door policy and that anyone could submit jokes and sketches. It was also unusual in that it aired only on BBC Radio 4 Extra (initially on BBC Radio 7), normally a station packed full of archive material and narrative repeats.

In building the show it was up to the producers and a core of script editors and regular writers to sift through the submitted one-liners and sketches. In 2012 producer Lyndsay Fenner reported that they would receive around 500 emails a week, about half of them had 2 or 3 sketches and the other half could have anything up to 10 one-liners attached. Later a restriction was imposed of two sketches and/or six one-liners per week. All non-commissioned material that was used would bag the writer a fee; £22.75 for a one-liner or per 30 seconds for a sketch, or £45.50 per minute for a sketch. The Newsjack website gave advice on what sort of material the show was looking for as there were some recurring sequences such as Breaking News, Number Crunchers or the Newsjack App, as well as how to write sketches and even the mundane stuff like fonts, formatting and submission dates.

The series provided a rare chance for budding comedy writers to get their foot in the door or, at the very least, put a writing credit on their CV, when such opportunities are dwindling on radio and most definitely on television. Some writers went on to be script editors for the show or were offered other regular work or received the BBC Radio Comedy Writer's Bursary. Across the 24 series 1,476 writers were credited. Initially those credits were posted online on the relevant programme page, but from series eight they were all read out in the closing credits.

Each show was performed by a cast of four (usually two men and two women), including the presenter, with at least one of them expected to pull off some political impressions. There were six presenters over the show’s 12 year run: Miles Jupp (series 1-4), Justin Edwards (series 5-9), Romesh Ranganathan (series 10-11), Nish Kumar (series 12-15), Angela Barnes (series 16-19) and Kiri Pritchard-McLean (series 20-24). 

Early series tended to have the same cast across all episodes in each series. The performers in those early series included Lewis Macleod, Jess Robinson, Asdi Osho, Pippa Evans, Cariad Lloyd, Margaret Cabourn-Smith and Morgana Robinson. Later series tended to have what they called ‘a revolving cast of sketch performers’ and that in itself provided a great opportunity for national radio exposure for many of the actors and comedians that appeared.  

Some of those appearing on Newsjack were, in no particular order and by no means a complete list: Philip Fox, Kate Norris, Natasha Demetriou, Lolly Adefope, Jenny Bede, Thomas Nelstrop, Luke Kempner, Jason Forbes, Mandheep Dillon, George Fouracres, Mali Ann  Rees, Kieron Hodgson, Gemma Arrowsmith, Ed Kear, James Meehan, Jessica Ransom, Emma Sidi, Paul G. Raymond, Alison Thea-Skot, Daniel Barker, Joe Barnes, Celeste Dring, Freya Parker, Ellie White, Alice Levine, Nadia Kamil, Josh Berry, Jo Barnes, Chiara Goldsmith, Mike Wozniak, Henry Perryment, London Hughes, Chris Kendall, Lorna Shaw, Vivienne Acheampong, Dominique Moore, Camille Ucan, Kiell Smith Bynoe, Damien Slash, Gabby Best, Colin Hoult, Emily Lloyd Saini, Jon Pointing, Raphael Wakefield, Arnold Jorge, Róisín O'Mahony, Tayo Cousins, Kath Hughes, Tom Burgess, Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong      

The pilot episode was broadcast on BBC Radio 7 on 4 June 2009 (no writers were credited on-air) and the first series followed on 18 June (most series ran for six episodes). Here is that first show with Miles Jupp, Lewis Macleod, Philip Fox, Andi Osho and Jess Robinson. Where the writers are not credited at the end of the show I have added them to the YouTube programme description but unfortunately I’ve been unable to track them down for this show.

We move on three years to the start of the seventh series. Justin Edwards is joined by Nadia Kamil, Cariad Lloyd and Lewis MacLeod. A couple of years later Lewis would join the cast of the revival of Dead Ringers and perfect his impressions of Trump, Johnson and Jeremy Vine. This show was broadcast on 20 September 2012.

In 2013 Justin voiced this promo ahead of the eighth series that started that night. Both Miles and Justin would go on to star in the Radio 4 sitcom set in the world politics, Party’s Over (2019-22).   

From 3 April 2014, and the tenth series, the cast is Romesh Ranganathan with Lewis MacLeod, Morgana Robinson and Pippa Evans.

The start of the thirteenth series and we join Nish Kumar, Lolly Adefope, Jenny Bede and Thomas Nelstrop. This was broadcast on 10 September 2015. One of the script editors at this point was Tom Neenan who had previously performed with Nish as part of the double act Gentlemen of Leisure and would also write for The MASH Report. Newsjack was usually broadcast as part of 4 Extra’s Comedy Club strand, hence the introduction here from Diane Morgan.  

Over to Angela Barnes for an episode from the seventeenth series broadcast on 21 September 2017. With Angela are Luke Kempner, Mandeep Dhillon and Jason Forbes. 

In 2018 son of Newsjack appeared in the form of Newsjack Unplugged. Clocking in at just under 15 minutes these shorter shows were again composed of submitted sketches and gags but this time all studio based, so no live audience. Over five series they were hosted by Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Darren Harriott and Eshann Akbar. They ended in 2019 and the final series is still on BBC Sounds. But here, from24 October 2019, is the first episode of the fourth series with Darren Harriott and Katia Kvinge. 

A final audio selection from the start of the twenty-second series in February 2020 with Kiri Pritchard-McLean , Luke Kempner, Mali Ann Rees and George Fouracres. By the end of this series COVID-19 restrictions meant the last episode was performed without an audience. The next series was all recorded remotely without an audience. The twenty-fourth and final series was also recorded remotely in front of a Zoom audience. The four episodes from this series are available on BBC Sounds as is the fifth and final series of Newsjack Unplugged.  

The end of Newsjack in March 2021 wasn’t the end of comedy sketch shows written by the public. In June 2022 came DMs are Open. Again there was an open request for sketches and also voice notes, but the difference was, at least from the second series, that the shows were non-topical and submissions had to be based on a weekly theme. The hosts were Athene Kugblenu and Ali Official (series 1 &2) and Stevie Martin (series 3&4).

DMs are Open started on Radio 4 Extra but the first series didn’t have a live studio audience so sounded a little flat. Subsequent series benefitted from being recorded with an audience with the second coming from various locations including Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush, the third performed at the Backyard Comedy Club in East London and the fourth at Greenwich’s Up the Creek.

Series three and four were broadcast on Radio 4 in the Wednesday night late comedy slot which you might think was some kind of promotion but at the same time it was cut to just 15 minutes. The programme still proved popular with both budding and experienced comedy writers as the last series as a total of 2,356 sketches were submitted. But presumably it was not so popular with audiences and/or comedy bosses as the programme  ended in April 2025 and doesn’t look set to return – recent comedy commissioning briefs make no mention of it. In the meantime all episodes of DMs are Open are on BBC Sounds

Radio Newsreel

In an era of 24-hour rolling news it’s difficult to comprehend that there was a time when broadcasters found that “the prospect of filling fifteen minutes each night with original actuality material was a terrifying problem”. That was the problem facing the producers of Radio Newsreel when it started in 1940. It was a programme that ‘provided a model for news coverage that was urgent and involving’, it would be heard around the world for half a century and in post-war Britain it was one of the most listened-to news broadcasts. Here is a brief history of Radio Newsreel.     

The idea for a daily programme that was “about the news of the day, introducing the voices of the men and women of Britain” came from two men in BBC’s Overseas division. First was Michael Barkway, the news editor for the Empire Service. But the main driving force was Peter Pooley, a former Empire Service announcer and by 1940 the Overseas News Talk Editor. He recalled the difficulties in sourcing news and actuality as “there were no news agencies to collect it for us and send it ticking into the office day and night. We had to wait for the news to break, then try frantically to collect our sound pictures and stories in broadcastable form and have our programme on the air by midnight”.

The first Radio Newsreel was broadcast on the North American service on 8 July 1940 live from a Broadcasting House basement studio at 4.30 in the morning. Producing and presenting that first edition was Robin Duff who opened with “The British Broadcasting Corporation presents Radio Newsreel – Edition Number One.” The title was meant to suggest the commentary with pictures approach familiar to American movie-going audiences who would see newsreels produced by Fox Movietone, Universal, Paramount and the March of Time series. Indeed the producers were always on the lookout for ‘radiogenic’ stories. The approach of the writers and presenters was to adopt a more conversational and informal approach than could be heard on the news bulletins.   

In that first edition there was a talk by a bomber pilot about the fortnight he’d spent drifting in an open boat, Geoffrey Cox (ITN’s news editor from 1956) on a meeting of the French cabinet days before Petain’s surrender and an interview with three Canadian soldiers in hospital.    

It was Duff who supposedly selected the library music that would open the programme, a piece called Imperial Echoes by Alfred Safroni in a 1928 recording by the Band of the RAF. It formed part of an opening sequence that was eventually introduced with the recorded voice of Canadian announcer Byng Whittaker who would intone “Whilst Britain awaits another dawn, we bring you news from the Battle Fronts of the World in – Radio Newsreel”. 

Audrey Russell and Barry Milne editing a disc for Radio Newsreel.
The Sketch 5 January 1949 

By October 1940 Radio Newsreel was also transmitted on the Pacific Service and the following year by the African Service and on the main General Overseas Service (World Service from 1965). There were also some Latin-American editions: Radio Panorama in the Spanish Service and Radio Gaceta in the Brazilian Service. Its style heavily influenced War Report when it started on the Home Service in June 1944. With the launch of the General Forces Programme in February 1944 it also carried a daily edition (initially with the presenters Phillip Robinson – a post-war Manchester-based producer - and actor and newsreader Norman Claridge) meaning that, until July 1945, it also had a domestic audience. In December 1940 the Newsreel team had temporarily decamped to Abbey Manor near Wood Norton but by June 1942 returned to London at the Overseas HQ at 200 Oxford Street (see Life at the ZOO). Reporters working on the programme in the wartime era included Audrey Russell, Alan Melville, future BBC tv newsreader Robert Dougall, John Irwin (later a post-war tv producer on Picture Page, In the News etc.) and George Weidenfeld (of Weidenfeld & Nicolson publishing fame). Two of the producers were Stanley Maxted who went on to became a war correspondent and George Innes, the creator of The Black and White Minstrel Show.

By November 1947 Radio Newsreel was a well established, well respected world-wide programme with the Radio Times reporting that there had been 2,676 editions for North America, 2,586 for the Pacific and 2,168 for Africa. So on Monday 3 November 1947 in addition to the six international editions a seventh domestic one was first broadcast on the Light Programme. News editor Stanley Rumsam explained that “every night at 7 o’clock it will bring to Light Programme listeners not only the hard news facts of the day but a series of sound pictures illustrating the news and current events. The editors will draw upon live and recorded despatches from BBC correspondents in Washington, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, the Middle East, the Balkans, New Delhi or Karachi and elsewhere. Happenings at home will be covered by radio reporters who will sometime be able to illustrate their accounts with actuality recordings made on the spot”.

Of course, this now sounds like every news programme but at the time all bulletins were straight reads by an announcer and there were no other news or current affairs shows. For nearly a decade Radio Newsreel was the major source of broadcast evening news, the only other being a film newsreel on BBC tv, though few folk had sets at that time, and competition from ITN was still eight years away. The listening figures for the Light Programme edition hit 4 million in the early fifties and it was still pulling in 3 million at the end of the decade, despite the draw of television.

Radio Newsreel always used staff announcers/newsreaders for the international and domestic editions, unlike other news programmes that followed such as The World at One and Outlook that relied on presenters with a journalistic background. Here are some examples from the Light Programme, Home Service and World Service dating from the 1960s and 1980s. The announcers I can identify, or who are indentified on-air, are Jimmy Kingsbury, Ronald Fletcher, Brian Hudson, Michael Murray, Pamela Creighton, Sandy Walsh and Jasper Britton. There are reports from Leonard Parkin, Reg Turnill, Conrad Voss Bark, Peter Nettleship and Harold Brierley.   

The ‘Light Reel’, as it was known in-house, came to be seen as the ‘master edition. A Radio Times article for the 21^st anniversary explained just how many daily editions were produced: 

Half-way through the evening programme, at 7.15 exactly, another Radio Newsreel goes on the air from another studio; this is heard by listeners in Africa and the Mediterranean area, and it is one of six such programmes broadcast daily in the BBC’s Overseas Services to different areas of the world. In fact, out of 49 weekly editions, 42 are broadcast overseas.

The Newsreel’s day starts just after midnight in London with an edition broadcast to America and Asia. Some hours later, while in Britain we are just getting up, another edition is being heard by West Africans at their breakfast and Australians at tea-and so on through-out the twenty-four hours. Besides those who hear it directly from the Overseas Services, in seventeen countries listeners have it relayed to them by their local stations. And some foreign station stations record it for re-broadcasting later, or select items of particular interest to them. For instance, one network in the United States broadcast 300 hours of Radio newsreel material in a single month; and 656 U.S. stations re-broadcast an item on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s retirement.  

The domestic edition of Radio Newsreel moved from the Light to the Home Service from Saturday 31 December 1966, although the Sunday edition had been carried on the Home since September 1957. However, it was dropped entirely in 1970 as part of the Broadcasting in the Seventies re-alignment, with the final edition going out on Radio 4 on Friday 3 April. The following week PM was launched at 5 pm with a 15-minute news bulletin at 6 pm and a 30-minute News Desk at 7 pm.  

London Calling billing from October 1988

Radio Newsreel continued for a further 18 years on the World Service though the number of daily editions started to reduce: five per day in the early 1980s and down to four by the middle of the decade. By 1988 the newsroom was producing three editions a day plus similar newsreels for the Australian and New Zealand broadcasting services

In 1979 the old version of the theme was dropped, much to the consternation of many listeners. The old 78 recording of Imperial Echoes was now too worn to run off any more copies so the BBC commissioned a new recording by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, who had also recorded a new version of Lillibullero. But as luck would have it some months later studio manager Keith Perrin had spotted a mint copy of the 78 in a junk shop in Tiverton, Devon which meant the ‘rightful’ sig tune could be restored.

In October 1988 the World Service announced ‘a new mix’ with some old programmes being dropped, some renamed or retimed and the introduction of Newshour. As for Radio Newsreel, presenter Sandy Walsh told listeners to the edition broadcast at 1500 GMT Friday 28 October that “our programme style is changing” and that it was the final edition of the programme. From the following day it had a shorter title, now just Newsreel, and a new theme. Out went the old 1928 recording of Imperial Echoes and in came a new electronic theme composed by Richard Atree of the Radiophonic Workshop which borrowed the melody of the old one.

Newsreel was broadcast just three times a day at 0215 GMT for Asia only (the rest of the world got Network UK), 1200 and 1500. But Newsreel’s days were numbered and just over two and a half years later the final edition was heard at 1500 GMT on Friday 31 May 1991, some 51 years after its first broadcast.

It’s back to 1961 and the 21^st anniversary of Radio Newsreel. It’s likely that this recording was taped off a shortwave broadcast so the sound quality is very ropey. The recording was recovered by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I extend my thanks.      

 Notes

Michael Barkway became the BBC’s Canadian correspondent and between 1962 and 1974 was editor of The Financial Times of Canada.

Peter Pooley resigned from the BBC in 1947 at a time when the news division came under the management of Tahu Hole. He joined the Crown Film Unit and from 1951 worked for NATO eventually becoming Assistant Director of Information.

Robin Duff would go on to become a war reporter and covered the liberation of Paris in 1944.

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