Tuesday, 12 February 2013

The Viking Invasion – Part 4 – Country Wars

It was High Noon in Hull. Viking versus Humberside. The battle was over country music presenter Tex Milne.


Tex had long been on the BBC station and, as the Hull Daily Mail of 16 January 1986 reported, he had “dropped a bombshell on Radio Humberside by announcing on air that he is leaving to join commercial rivals Viking.” Apparently he’d been feeling “uncertain” about his future and had heard that he was due to be dropped by boss Geoff Sargieson.  For Viking’s manager Roger Brooks it was the second coup that month as they’d also secured the services of Paul Burnett.

Country music shows were not uncommon on the early ILR stations with their public service remit.  From day one Viking Country was hosted by Pete Ryan but it seems he was dropped a couple of years later. I’ve no idea why or indeed what happened to him after that.
Pete Ryan

Meanwhile Tex Milne (was a country music presenter better named, though I’m guessing it wasn’t his actual name) was already well known for presenting Country Music Time and had been with Humberside since 1972. He was a storeman with a Hull based company but his interest in country and western dated back to 1959. For a while he worked in a record shop and in 1968 was compering at the original Hull Country Music Club. 
Tex Milne

It wouldn’t be too many years before Viking, along with many other commercial stations dropped their specialist music shows. Meanwhile over on Radio Humberside regular Sunday country music shows continued with Tammy Cline and later Bob Preedy.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Tex Milne was really Terry Milne. As a record shop worker at Gough and Davey in the late 1950's and early 60's he would host music nights in the shop, when some of the latest tracks were played.

robin said...

do you have any Tex Milne shows on cd or cassette if you have i will buy them from you ok email me at www.dog10@live.co.uk i love tex milne shows of country music

Andy Walmsley said...

Sorry Paula I don't have any of Tex's shows other than the short clip above.

andybat48 said...

Depends on how good the sound quality is. But I have quite a lot of his shows on Cassette that I used to record on a Sunday morning. I also used to record BBC radio 2's country club with Wally Whyton too. I loved these old shows. Today's country pales in comparison.

Andy Walmsley said...

Andrew, if you've digitised Tex's show perhaps Paula would be interested in copies.
I had planned a blog post about country music programmes (national ones at any rate) so if you have any of Wally's shows (or David Allan) I'd be interested.

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