1985 was the year of Live Aid, the end of the miners' strike,
riots on the streets and in football stadia and the rise of the Militant
Tendency. These, and other events, are recalled in this end-of-year round-up
from the Newsbeat team introduced by Frank Partridge.
This programme was broadcast on Tuesday 31 December 1985.
A couple of health warnings: It was recorded on Radio 1 medium
wave in the evening so expect the sound to dip now and then. The original
programme was 2 hours long but, for whatever reason, I only recorded one hour.
I edited it as I recorded it, so apologies for any jarring edits or major
stories I may have chopped out.
Whenever Radio 4 (or Radio 7 or 4 Extra) repeats the special
Christmas edition of After Henry, The Season of Relative Goodwill, it
never gets to pull off the neat scheduling trick of the original 1987 transmission.
Eleanor (played by Joan Sanderson): I really think you two
should be getting dressed now.
Sarah (played by Prunella Scales): What?
Eleanor: Well it'll soon be the broadcast. You weren't
thinking of lolling around listening to Her Majesty in your night things were
you?
Sarah: Hmm.
Clare (played by Gerry Cowper): But Granny
Eleanor: You have to
have some standards.
Sarah: Yes. Yes of course. What's the time?
Eleanor: Well it's ... oh goodness, it's nearly half-past.
Clare: Well I haven't got time to get dressed.
Eleanor: No. Oh dear, you really should have set the alarm
earlier Sarah, then you'd have had time to make yourself look respectable like
me.
Sarah: Yes, you look very smart Mum.
Eleanor: Thank you dear.
Clare: I still think the hat's a bit much Granny.
Eleanore; We all show respect in our own ways Clare.
Clare: Of course.
Eleanor: That is those of us who have any idea what showing
respect means.
Clare: Listen Granny ....
Sarah (interrupting): It's nearly time. We'd better switch
on.
Eleanor: Yes. Er, Just a moment before you do. Clare. At
least do your dressing-gown up.
Clare: All right.
Eleanor: And empty that mouthful immediately. You can't
listen to the Queen witgh your mouth full.
Sarah; Oh mother!
Eleanor: Quiet Sarah. And Sarah for heavens sakes sit up
straight.
Sarah: Better?
Eleanor: It'll have to do. You might at least have run a
comb through your hair. Now don't frown Clare. (clears throat) Very well Sarah
dear, you may switch the wireless on now.
FX: Sound of radio clicking on.
And there the programme ends. But back on Christmas Day
1987, Radio 4 continuity announcer Laurie MacMillan comes in with "an
almost merry Christmas After Henry. (pause) It's coming up to nine thirty.
(longer pause). In a few moments, after Big Ben, Her Majesty the Queen".
Followed by a short set of chimes and the Queen's speech to the Commonwealth.
(One is always tempted to say "And, cue Queen.")
This is exactly how that half hour was broadcast with the
complete edition of After Henry and
The Queen's Speech.
A festive radio fixture for the last 30 years is the mixture
of music and religion offered by the Canon Roger Royle. By my reckoning he's
had a Radio 2 Christmas Day show every year since 1985. (BBC Genome shows that
the 1986 programme was on Christmas Eve but thereafter its always on the day
itself).
For many years Roger offered wisdom and solace with a touch
of good humour on Pause for Thought.
For six years between 1984 and 1990 he presented Good Morning Sunday and from 1990 to 2007 regularly presided over Sunday Half-Hour. Nowadays the Christmas
Day show, this year relegated to a 3 am slot, is Rockin' Roger's only radio gig.
This is how that 1985 Christmas Day show sounded.
There's rather more of this Christmas Eve edition of Good
Morning Sunday. Roger's guests are General Eva Burrows of The Salvation Army
and, in the second part, Roy and Fiona Castle. This programme aired on Sunday
24 December 1989.
T. S.
Eliot's collection of feline-based poetry gets another airing this Christmas
when Jeremy Irons reads Old Possum's Bookof Practical Catson Radio 4. The BBC publicity tells us that they first appeared on
the radio on Christmas Day 1937. Sure enough tucked away in the afternoon on
the Regional Programme is Practical Cats.
The billing tells us: "For some time past Mr. Eliot has
been amusing and instructing the offspring of some of his friends in verse on
the subject ofcats.These poems are not of the kind that
have been usually associated with his name, and they have not yet been
published. With his permission, some of them have been arranged into a programme,
and they will be read by Geoffrey Tandy ".
The
collection was published two years later and they would soon find a young
audience as they cropped up in Children's
Hour and programmes For the Schools
from 1940 through to the late 50s. I dare say they continued to be featured in
English programmes for schools but these billings have so far fallen through
the Genome net.
The Cats only put in occasional TV appearances;
the first in 1952 on Children's Television
when actor Anthony Jacobs read a couple of the poems. In 1971 they got the full
Omnibus treatment as part of an
appreciation of Eliot's work.
In 1954 Alan
Rawsthorne set six of the poems in a work for speaker and orchestra, the studio
recorded version featured the voice of Robert Donat. This has made several
appearances on Radio 3 - it is first
billed on Network Three in 1965 - right into the noughties. A similar idea by Humphrey Searle only seems
to get the one billing, in 1985.
Straight
readings of the poems are heard on the Home Service in 1962, read by Val
Gielgud and Hugh David. In November 1974 BBC2 closes down each evening with a
poem read by either Sian Phillips or Richard Bebb; The Naming of Cats appears on the 27th.
Radio 4 broadcast
the reading of all 15 poems in a five-minute slot just before the 9 am news
during September and October 1988. It offers a starry line-up of readers: Alec
McCowen, Anna Massey, Roger Daltrey, Richard Briers, Fenella Fielding, Wendy
Hiller, Maurice Denham, Penelope Keith, Derek Jacobi, Michael Bryant, Max Wall,
Charles Gray, Alan Bennett, Ian McKellen and Bernard Cribbins. These are so successful that they get a
repeat in 1989 and in 1994, though they have not, to my knowledge, been heard
since.
The installation of Eric Gill's sculpture of Prospero and
Ariel over the original entrance of Broadcasting House was mired in controversy
from the moment it was unveiled in 1933.
The nude Ariel, or at least the size of his
"organ", caused maidens to
"blush and youths to pass disparaging remarks", according to the Daily Herald. An unrepentant Gill
retorted that he had only followed the Corporation's request: "I am only a
servant of the BBC, and if a statue is placed under the responsibility of Sir
John Reith and other directors then it must be all right. Supposing I want to
erect an immoral statue outside Broadcasting House, I could not do so. Ariel,
the boy, is only ten years old. He cannot be offending women, and are men going
to be offended? I think not "
Local MP George Gibson Mitcheson passed the sculpture every
day on his way home and is reported to have claimed in Parliament that the
figures were "objectionable to public morals and decency". Eventually
Gill compromised and chiselled a bit of the offending part of Ariel. He did,
however, leave behind a hidden memento at the back of the sculpture, the face
of a girl that "nobody will find until Broadcasting House falls
down". In the event it was uncovered in 2004 when work began on cleaning
and remodelling the building.
Referring to the carvings at Broadcasting House in his
autobiography Gill viewed them as a "failure". Elaborating on this he
said: "I mean simply that I don't much like looking at them. The idea was
grand but I was incapable of carrying it out adequately. Prospero and Ariel!
Well you think. The Tempest and
romance and Shakespeare and all that stuff. Very clever of the BBC to hit on
the idea, Ariel and aerial. Ha! Ha!"
As to why he chose to represent them as Father and Son:
"I don't know anything about Shakespeare's intentions, but it didn't seem
to me to be unduly straining the poem to see in the figure of Prospero much
more than that of a clever old magician, or in that of Ariel more than that of
a silly fairy. Had not Prospero power over the immortal Gods? At any rate it
seemed to be only right and proper that I should see the matter in as bright a
light as possible and so I took it upon me to portray God the Father and God
the Son. For even if that were not Shakespeare's meaning it ought to be the
BBC's".
He was pretty scathing about his fellow artists too: "My
sculpturing experiments were, after all, only an extension of my lettercutting
into another sphere - but it was a sphere into which the arts and crafts
movement of William Morris and his followers had not only never extended, but
had fought shy of and turned away from. My friends in the arts and crafts
circles rather looked askance at me. I seemed to be deserting their homely
fireside and going into brothels and dance-halls. They really are like that;
they're terribly strait-laced and prim."
Gill was, and remains, a controversial figure, though his
sculptures are much admired and his lasting contribution to typefaces - see
Gill Sans etc. - and through to modern-day fonts is undeniable.
Seventy years after his death Gill was back in the news in
the wake of the Savile scandal with the Daily
Mail, never failing to hop onto any passing bandwagon, calling for the BBC
to "remove sculpture of naked boy from outside Broadcasting House".
This picked up on some disturbing revelations in a Gill biography, though this
had been published some twenty-odd years earlier. Needless to say they still standing,
overlooking Portland Place.
You can hear more about Eric Gill and his work for the BBC
when Radio 4 Extra repeats The BBC Tour
on Saturday 12 December.
References:
Autobiography by
Eric Gill (Jonathan Cape, 1970)
The Story of
Broadcasting House by Mark Hines (Merrell, 2008)
Action Stations by
Colin Reid (Robson Books, 1987)
This year has seen the celebrations of the Sinatra Centenary
marking one hundred years since the birth of Francis Albert Sinatra in, as
every quizzer knows, Hoboken, New Jersey.
Sinatra's meteoric rise to worldwide stardom happened over just a few months between the autumn of 1942
and the spring of 1943 and coincided with the Golden Age of US radio.
Frank's musical ambitions were set a decade earlier in 1933
after watching a well-known crooner in concert. "I saw Bing Crosby tonight
and I've got to be a singer", he told his parents. Most of his early performances
were in local talent contests but by September 1935 he made his first broadcast
whilst singing as part of The Hoboken
Four. The show, at New York's Capitol Theatre, was carried by one of the
local radio stations.
His time with the singing group was brief and he was soon back
to touring the clubs and theatres. But he realised that he'd only make the big
time with radio exposure so he'd offer to sing for free whenever a station had
a vacant spot. WNEW provided him with a number of opportunities but seemingly
only WAAT in Newark paid him a fee - the 70 cents bus fare home.
His break came when he filled a vacancy for a singer and
compere at the Rustic Club, a local roadhouse on Route 9W in Alpine, New
Jersey. Quickly building up a repertoire of songs and a neat line in audience
repartee, Frank's shows were wired into the local stations. The Rustic Club's
management relished the publicity and upped his weekly wage from $15 to $25.
Those early broadcasts proved invaluable. In the summer of
1939 Benny Goodman's former trumpeter, Harry James, was establishing a new band
and was looking for a vocalist. Hearing one of the Rustic Club shows James
asked who this kid was. Young Frank was signed up just days later. His first
performance with Harry James was on 30 June and he cut his first record just a fortnight
later.
Sinatra's time with James was brief, by January 1940 he'd been poached by Tommy Dorsey and was
touring, recording and regularly appearing on the radio. With Dorsey he honed
his craft and learnt his distinctive
musical phrasing, though he was still unnamed on the records they released with
their generic credit to "with vocal chorus". Ambitious to the last he
eventually flew the Dorsey coop in September 1942.
It was Marnie Sachs at Columbia Records who found Sinatra
his first solo break, a twice weekly slot on CBS titled Songs by Sinatra. Next he was the "Added Extra
Attraction" on the bill of a New Year's Eve Benny Goodman show at the
Paramount Theatre in New York. The screams that greeted the scrawny young
singer stopped Goodman in his tracks. A star was born. It was the start of the
infamous bobby-soxers period. Time
magazine proclaimed that "not since the days of Rudolph Valentino has
American womanhood made such unabashed public love to an entertainer".
The impact of the Paramount shows, which eventually ran for
a recording-breaking eight weeks, was immediate. In January he negotiated a
film contract with RKO and was then signed up to replace Barry Wood on the
weekly networked Saturday night concert show, Your Hit Parade. By February the programme had doubled its
audience.
Sinatra's fame was also spreading across the Atlantic. He'd
first appeared on BBC radio in 1940 when it broadcast a recording of a Harry
James show. But in 1944 the General Forces Programme relayed a joint production
with NBC called Atlantic Spotlight
that featured Frank. From December 1944 to May 1945 the BBC also carried the Your Hit Parade shows, though it just
billed them under the name of the show's musical director as Mark Warnow and his Orchestra.
By 1947 Frank was earning $12,000 a programme even though
his career was now on the wane. The mainly Republican press laid into Sinatra;
they frowned upon politically committed stars, his private life came under the
spotlight, especially his dalliances with actresses like Lana Turner, and there
were verbal and physical punch-ups. Even his radio appearances were coming
under fire with Metronome describing
them as "alternately dull, pompous and raucous". He gave up the shows
in May 1949 fed up with both the songs he was given to sing and the style in
which he had to sing them.
Frank starred in a
number of other US radio shows in the early 1950s, these are listed in
this Wikipedia entry. Meanwhile, in the way that Sinatra would continue to make
several comebacks during his lifetime, by 1953 his fortunes had revived: he
signed up with Capitol Records and established his superb musical relationship
with Nelson Riddle and Billy May and there was a successful tour of Britain.
That British concert tour led to a couple of appearances
that summer on the Light Programme's Show
Band Show as well as an interview with David Jacobs on his Radio Luxembourg
show Portrait of a Star - David
recalls this meeting in All or Nothing At
All below. Apart from a 1954 disc jockey show on NBC that seems to the end
of Frank's radio career. After that its programmes about the man himself, some
concert recordings and film reviews and soundtracks (see the BBC's Movie-Go-Round for instance).
Firstly, on the occasion of Frank's 70th birthday, comes
this appraisal of his life and career from American novelist and screenwriter
Clancy Sigal, All or Nothing at All.
It aired on BBC Radio 4 on 8 December 1985.
Secondly a programme presented by the British DJ that knew
the man himself, David Jacobs. This is the first edition of a 13-part series
titled Frank Sinatra: The Voice of the
Century. It was broadcast on 4 October 1998.
And finally all I have of a 3-part series written and
presented by Benny Green, Sinatra! A Man
and his Music. This was first broadcast in December 1985 but my recording
comes from a November 1986 repeat.
Reference: Frank Sinatra by John Howlett (Plexus, 1980)
By the late 1980s it was, perhaps surprisingly, ITV that
dominated the satirical news landscape with Spitting
Image. This was followed in 1990 by Have
I Got News for You over on BBC2. Meanwhile it was Radio 1 that was leading
the way with shows such as The Mary WhitehouseExperience and Loose Talk - both
transferring to TV of course. The newly
launched Radio Five Live offered The
Treatment initially with Simon Hoggart (later to chair The News Quiz) bur for most its run (1994-2001) with Stuart
Maconie.
We'll come to The Now
Show and It's Been a Bad Week in
a moment but by the time we get to the noughties there were a flurry of shows
that took at least some of their inspiration from current events:
Parsons and Naylor's
Pull-Out Sections (Radio 2, 2001-2007) starring Andy Parsons (now a team
regular on BBC TV's Mock the Week)
and Henry Naylor with musical interludes from Richie Webb.
Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive (Radio 4, 2005-2007). According
to Iannucci "the aim of Charm
Offensive is to take the talking points of the week and address them as a
team of colleagues having a chinwag, in front of a studio audience." (RT 110807)
I Guess That's Why
they Call it the News (Radio 4, 2009), a short-lived panel show hosted by
Fred McAuley.
Newsjack (Radio 4
Extra, 2009 to date) which extends the open door policy of Week Ending to any budding comedy writing willing to email their
sketches and one-liners.
7 Day Sunday
(later 7 Day Saturday) (Radio Five
Live 2010-2015) with Chris Addison and then Al Murray picking over the week.
But the regular purveyors of topical comedy for nigh on 30
years have been Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis.
Steve and Hugh's first on-air collaboration was the 1988
series for Radio 4, Live on Arrival.
This was a rare venture into live comedy, previously done by the In One Ear team (1984-86), coming each
Saturday night from the old Paris Studios. With Punt and Dennis was Flip Webster
and singer/songwriter Guy Jackson. Here's the first edition from 30 April 1988.
In fact Punt and Dennis had worked together previously on a
Radio 4 comedy, Project Santa Claus,
with Hugh in the cast and Steve providing the script. Indeed Steve's comedy writing
pedigree was well-established by the time they came to perform together. He'd
submitted sketches and quickies to Week
Ending since 1983, contributed material to the Jeremy Hardy comedy Unnatural Acts (1987) and to Loose Ends(1987-90) as well as writing
for Jasper Carrott and Rory Bremner's TV outings in Carrott Confidential and Now-Something
Else.
On Radio 4 in 1988 Punt and Dennis wrote and starred in a
two-part comedy about "the oddities of Olympic antics" called Olympiod 88. Meanwhile Live On Arrival's producer David Tyler proposed
a 15-minute edit of the show for a try-out on Radio 1. Controller Johnny
Beerling turned the idea down but did ask David to develop a new comedy show
for the network. The result was Hey
Rrradio!!! (1988-89) with Patrick Marber acting as host and during the series Punt and Dennis popped
up as guests. Following Hey Rrradio!!!
on Radio 1 was The Mary Whitehouse Experience
(1989-90) featuring the combined talents of Punt and Dennis and Newman and
Baddiel. It was this that helped secure them more TV work: the TV version of The Mary Whitehouse Experience itself, Canned Carrott and The Imaginatively Titled Punt and Dennis Show. Whilst Hugh has
continued to regularly perform on TV, e.g. Mock
the Week and Outnumbered, Steve
has largely remained behind the scenes acting as script associate, i.e. writing
the gags, on many shows including most of the run of Mock the Week.
However, on radio Punt and Dennis have remained consistently
employed, and consistently funny, since 1998 on two series that have relied
heavily on topical comedy.
On Radio 2 from 1999 to 2006 there were fourteen series of It's Been a Bad Week, perhaps best
remembered for Van Man and the Worst Week of the Week Award, Awarded Weekly on
a Week-by-Week Basis.
It's Been a Bad Week
was an independent production from Celador, who described the programme thus:
"Hosts Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis trawl the world’s media outlets in
search of tales of woe, disaster and misfortune – and then have a good laugh at
them. From gigantic corporate cock-ups to the sad failures of the humblest
individual, It’s Been a Bad Week is
unflinching in its search for stories that reflect the calamitous misfortunes
which occur daily around the globe. Drawing on a mixture of sketches, songs,
impressions, guest contributions and scripted news items, the show targets the
week’s well-known bad news stories, governmental disasters, royal excesses,
celebrity misbehaviour as well as a myriad of less well-publicised stories from
Britain and abroad".
From 2005 this is the fifth programme in the eleventh
series. With Punt and Dennis are Sue Perkins, Simon Greenall and Mitch Benn.
Starting in 1998, and still running to this day - the 47th series kicks off this week - is The Now
Show. Make that The Noooow Shoooow! A typical edition would go like this:
Steve and Hugh pick on the week's top story for a routine invariably involving
Hugh doing a comic voice or impression with support from Laura Shavin; a comic rant
from someone like Marcus Brigstocke or Andy Saltzman; a song from Mitch Benn; a
routine from vertically-challenged Jon Holmes ("his dream is to be the
present in a Kinder egg") and rounding off with answers from the audience
to a question set before the show.
This is first ever edition of The Now Show from 26 September 1998. With Punt and Dennis are Jane
Bussmann, Dan Freedman, Simon Munnery, David Quantick and Nick Romero. Of the
initial cast only David Quantick has remained a semi-regular guest.
This next audio upload concludes this series of posts. It's
another Now Show from 2012, the final
show of series 36. With Steve and Hugh in this pasty and petrol-fuelled edition
are John Finnemore, Jon Holmes, Mitch Benn and Laura Shavin.
You'll have no doubt heard or read the news last week of the
passing of Peter Donaldson, the former newsreader and announcer on BBC Radio 4.
His voice was part of the fabric of the network for over four decades. This is
my tribute to Peter:
Whilst Peter is mainly associated with Radio 4 I thought it would
be interesting to look in a little more detail at his early radio career in the
late 1960s/early 1970s.
He first started broadcasting for the British Forces
Broadcasting Service in 1967 - a year earlier than I posted in the above video
and as quoted in a number of obituaries. Working for BFBS Aden he was there
during the Aden Emergency and was on-air when the station was forced
to close in November. His next posting was with BFBS Dhekelia in Cyprus, the
island on which he'd grown up before leaving in 1960 to continue his education
in the UK. Subsequently he worked for BFBS Tobruk in Libya and, in 1969, BFBS
Malta.
Family Favourites billing, 29 September 1968
His first appearance on the BBC's airwaves was actually on
an edition of Family Favourites on 29
September 1968 whilst he was at BFBS Tobruk. He made further broadcasts on the
show in 1968 and 1969.
Peter joined the BBC on 6 April 1970 as an announcer and
presenter on Radio 2. His first Radio
Times billing was on 7 May when he hosted an afternoon of Davis Cup
coverage, playing the music between Maurice Edelston's commentary. He joined
the team of Night Ride presenters in
June 1970, taking care of the Monday night editions until the following
January. In the summer of 1970 he covered for Bruce Wyndham on Saturday's Breakfast Special.
By December 1970 he was doing the occasional continuity
shift over on Radio 4, and continued to do so throughout 1971. Meanwhile on
Radio 2 in 1971 he popped up on Saturday
Night with Peter Donaldson and Strings
by Starlight and was back on Night
Ride, this time the Tuesday night slot, from August through to the
following May. In addition he presented a short mid-morning series called All Kinds of Music on Radio 4.
Radio Times profile from 1990
When Radio 2's Breakfast
Special ended in March 1972 it was replaced by both The Early Show and Terry Wogan. Announcers took turns on The Early Show with Peter's initial stint
starting in May. Again more Night Ride
programmes followed from September 1972 to September 1973.
From November 1973 Peter was now permanently on Radio 4,
first as an announcer and than from 28 December reading his first news bulletin
on the station. In 1974 reading and narrating on The Weekly World was added to his duties.
But by June 1974 he'd disappeared from the airwaves. What
Radio 4 listeners didn't know is that he'd agreed to head north to Sheffield and
be part of Keith Skues's team at Radio Hallam, due to launch that October.
Although he got round to recording a trail for his weekday afternoon show Roundabout he never made it on-air. In
fact he was back on continuity duty at Radio 4 by 20 September, about a
fortnight before Hallam launched. The commercial sector, it seems, was not for
him. Or perhaps it was the thought of being away from, or uprooting, his family.
From November 1974 Peter was back on news-reading duties and
then it was Radio 4 all the way: chief announcer from 1988 to 2003, retiring
from the Corporation in 2005 and working freelance until his final bulletin
just after midnight on 1 January 2013. Here's that final bulletin in full.
Peter Donaldson 1945-2015
You can donate to the Macmillan Cancer Support on JustGiving. This page has been set up by Peter's daughter as a thank you to the
Macmillan Nurses who looked after him during his illness.
A power-hungry citizen; the rent paid in kind by a
12th-century Scottish farmer; and Hollywood Brit ... all sound the same but are
spelt differently. Who (or what) are they and why should the lattermost's
catch-phrase be appropriate to Round
Britain Quiz?
Regular listeners to radio's longest-running quiz will
recognise the question style: three cryptic crossword-style clues providing the
link to an overall question. And, in typical RBQ style even if you know the answer the trick is, according to
one-time exponent of the quiz Irene Thomas, that "it's really a matter of
thinking aloud. If you know the answer and say it straight out, it's no fun.
You have to amble towards it, and the fun always come when you get lost on the
way".
A new series of Round
Britain Quiz kicks off today on BBC Radio 4. Starting in 1947 its
five-years older than Brain of Britain, but its roots go back
to a wartime cultural exchange between the US and the UK. Here's my brief
history of RBQ, which, quite neatly,
fits into three parts.
Part 1 The Hale Years
In April 1944 the
BBC's North American Service and the American Blue Network (formerly part of NBC) launched a joint programme
called Transatlantic Quiz. The quiz
consisted of a chairman and two team members who "traded questions between
London and New York with the idea of testing one team's knowledge of the
other's country. Some of the questions were cryptic, but many were plain
general knowledge." The chairman in New York was Alistair Cooke whilst
back in London it was Lionel Hale (both pictured below). Cooke had already appeared in a similar
venture the previous year, a transatlantic discussion programme called Answering You.
Transatlantic Quiz
featured some well-known participants such as David Niven, Peter Ustinov and
Joyce Grenfell. But the unlikely star was Professor Denis Brogan, a man who
"could identify the most obscure political quotations, or plumb the
shadiest depths of American literature." In July 1945 home listeners got a
chance to hear the quiz when the Light Programme started to broadcast it. It
ran for as further six years, ending its run in 1951.
Meanwhile in 1947 the Light Programme was looking for a
similar UK-based quiz and in November Round
Britain Quiz was launched, This set the basic programme format for the next
fifty years. Each week the two-person London team took on a two-person team
from one of the regions - Scotland,
Wales, Northern Ireland, the West, the North and the Midlands. There were two chairmen,
with the London team it was always Lionel Hale (he remained with the programme
for twenty years) and with the regional teams Gilbert Harding. Like its
predecessor the mainstay of the London team was Denis Brogan, like Hale he put
in a twenty year stint. Others on the London team included Hubert Phillips and
Cedric Cliffe. Long-time participants for the regions included Jack House and
Sir James Fergusson in Scotland and Welsh novelist Wyn Griffith. Following
Gilbert Harding's death in 1960 there were a number of short-term replacements
before Roy Plomley became the regular second question-master.
Inexplicably following the 1968 series Round Britain Quiz was dropped from Radio 4's schedule. It would be
a five years hiatus.
Part 2 Revival and
Expansion into Europe
RBQ's revival was
due, in part, to the persistence of a former contestant Irene Thomas (pictured left), the Queen
of Quizzes long before Daphne Fowler came onto the scene. Irene, a former Brain of Britain winner , had joined the
programme before the end of its 1960s run as one of the London team. Apparently
she wrote some "nice but persistent" letters to Radio 4 controller
Tony Whitby to bring the programme back. He agreed and assigned the production
to BBC Manchester under the guidance of Trevor Hill. The programme returned on
1 April 1973.
Hill recalled that he slightly tweaked the format which saw
the introduction of more cryptic "verbal crossword" questions that
have become the programme's trademark. "I discovered ... that it was no
use for one person to set the questions, however inventive and amusing they
might be, and then for another person to pose them. When contestants are
seeking clues and guidance the quizmaster has to know all he can about the
background in order to 'feed' the teams and often to get their minds working on
another tack so that they see the common link between one part of the answer
and the other parts".
Setting and asking the questions at the London end was
Professor Anthony Quinton and with the regions it was Jack Longland, at the
time well-known to listeners for Any
Questions and My Word! The regular London team consisted of Irene
Thomas and Professor John B Mays - can their ever have been so many professors on the same show since the
days of The Brains Trust? Later
Irene's team mate was Eric Korn.
Jack Longland left the programme in 1976, to be replaced by
Gordon Clough. Familiar to Radio 4 listeners for PM and The World at One,
Gordon contended that RBQ was
"one of the hardest jobs I have to do in radio. I have to aim at creating
questions which contain at least one part that the audience at home can answer
without too much trouble".
Here are a couple of recordings from the mid-80s. From 19
August 1984 this first programme features Irene Thomas and Eric Korn on the
London team and Patrick Nuttgens and Paddy Fitzpatrick representing the North.
Asking the questions are Gordon Clough and Louis Allen, who replaced Anthony
Quinton between 1983 and 1991.
I recorded this edition on 26 September 1985 when the
competing team for the Midlands was John Julius Norwich and Peter Oppenheimer.
The London team had a fearsome reputation for winning, but here the Midlands
team, and in particular Peter Oppenheimer, show their mettle.
Such was the success of the revived Round Britain Quiz that it spawned two spin-offs. First there was Round Europe Quiz (3 series 1977-81)
with Irene Thomas and John Julius Norwich representing England taking on teams
from France, Italy Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark Austria and Poland.
Gordon Clough and Anthony Quinton continued in their inquisitorial roles.
Producer Trevor Hill recalls that the idea came from network controller Ian
McIntryre who asked him to widen his quiz horizons. "needless to say each
European I saw had to have, in the first instance, a very good knowledge of the
English language plus the ability, when I tested them, to take part in and
enjoy that essentially English pastime of doing crossword puzzles."
The second spin-off was our old friend Transatlantic Quiz (7 series 1976-86). Again it was populated with
the usual suspects: a London team of Irene Thomas and John Julius Norwich,
questions posed by Louis Allen and Anthony Quinton (later Gordon Clough). In
the States the team was Brendon Gill and, for the most part, Shana
Alexander.
When the 1995 series of Round
Britain Quiz came to an end it dropped off the schedules. The death the
following year of Gordon Clough seemed to finally have put paid to the
programme's return.
Part 3 Slimmed Down
but Not Dumbed Down
But you can't keep a good quiz format down and in 1997 RBQ returned reinvigorated and with
further tweaks to the format. Gone was the resident London team, they now had
to compete on an equal footing like everyone else. Gone indeed was Irene Thomas
("I loved every minute of it" she told Sue Lawley, "I could have
gone on doing it all the time"). This slimmed down version now had just
one question master, Nick Clarke who was not expected to devise the questions
himself. There was some debate as to whether the questions had been dumbed down
with Roland White noting in the Radio
Times that "the pool of knowledge has been widened". Listening
again to the 1980s editions I'm inclined to agree with him.
Nick Clarke's tenure lasted until 2005 (he died the
following year) when again the programme's future hung in the balance. It did
return, of course, from June 2007 with Tom Sutcliffe now posing the questions.
Tom is back at 3 pm today when Round Britain Quiz returns with Scotland and Wales competing.
And the answer to the question posed at the start of this
post, culled from a Radio Times
article written by Nick Baker in 1985,
refers to a power-hungry citizen, think of Citizen Kane played by Orson Welles
in 1941 film. The rent paid by Scottish farmers was called, assuming you know
your Gaelic, as Cain. That Hollywood Brit is one Michael Caine (who back in 1985 had yet to return to live in the UK). All of which
should lead you to his supposed catchphrase "Not a lot of people know
that", though he has denied ever saying it.
The UK Game Shows website lists some of the Round Britain Quiz question masters but
then they didn't have the benefit of the estimable BBC Genome, The full list is
as follows:
Lionel Hale
1947/1949-68
Gilbert
Harding 1947-60
Leonard
Sachs 1948
Robert
McDermott 1948
Philip
Hope-Wallace 1948
Peter Watson
1949
Howard
Marion-Crawford 1957
Lionel
Gamlin 1957
Stephen
Potter 1960-61
Kevin
Fitzgerald 1961
Edward Ward
1961
Michael
Flanders 1961
Roy Plomley
1961-68
Patrick
Harvey 1962-66
Anthony
Quinton 1973-82/92-95
Jack
Longland 1973-76
Gordon
Clough 1977-95
Louis Allen
1983-91
Nick Clarke
1997-05
Tom
Sutcliffe 2007-2021
Kirsty Lang 2022
References:
Transatlantic Quiz by Lionel Hale in The World Radio and Television Annual
(Sampson Low, Marston & Co 1947)
Alistair Cooke: The Biography by Nick
Clarke (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1999)
Over the Airwaves by Trevor Hill (The
Book Guild 2005)
Riddled with clues by Nick Baker, Radio Times 5 October 1985
Blimey, even I could get that one by
Roland White, Radio Times 16 August
1997
"The World at One. This is William
Hardcastle with thirty minutes of news and comment this Monday lunchtime"
The notion
of a radio programme covering both
news and current affairs is so common that we regularly use the two terms interchangeably.
But in 1965 it was novel and worthy of comment itself when on Monday 4 October,
from Studio 3B at Broadcasting House, the BBC Home Service launched a brand new
programme, The World at One.
By
broadcasting a news bulletin within the programme and then following this with
analysis and discussion about the main news stories at a stroke it blurred the
lines between news and current affairs. This was an important distinction
behind the scenes at the BBC, if not for the listener, as news was in the remit
of the News Division and Current Affairs looked after any interpretive
programming. And, up until that point, never the twain shall meet.
WATO, as it eventually became in the
acronym-loving BBC, had a new hard-hitting Fleet Street edge thanks to main
presenter, for its first decade, William Hardcastle (pictured above). He was a former Reuters
Washington correspondent and editor of the Daily Mail. At the microphone his
voice was breathless and rumbling. He was described by fellow journalist and presenter
Anthony Howard as "an absolutely unorthodox broadcaster; he was an extraordinary
phenomenon in that no-one could have been less suited to do what the BBC used
to call 'microphone work'." His questioning
style was, according to BBC editor Eleanor Ransome "relentlessly
persistent, but seldom rude and abrasive".
The World at One was immediately popular and by the
end of the year pulled in 2 million listeners. By 1968 it hit 3.9 million,
making Radio 4's most listened-to programme.
On its
launch Brian Bliss set out the programme's agenda in that week's Radio Times:
News is
probably one of the most perishable, and at the same time most expensive,
commodities of our age. As world communications improve so the news-man's life
becomes more demanding. There is now a great appetite for news, but equally a
need for information about the news -
'background' as the journalist calls it - and all too often not enough of it is
given.
This aspect
of the news will be just one of the many features of The World at One which begins on Monday this week and be heard
every weekday from 1.0 to 1.30 in the Home Service. very simply, this new
half-hour programme will set out to do just what the title suggests - to keep
lunchtime listeners abreast of the news. But it will do so in two ways.
In the first
place there will always be a news bulletin, but a flexible one of seven to ten
minutes' duration according to the flow of news.
The other
items in this topical half-hour will be for listeners who want to hear not only
the news but also about the news. For
this we shall exploit all the mobility and resources of sound radio to bring
you voices and topics in and behind the headlines.
At the same
time we hope to retain some of the flavour and character of This Time of Day (which ended on
October1) and some of its most popular items and contributors will be heard in The World at One. The programme will be
presented by the well-known journalist William Hardcastle.
You'll note
that WATO didn't exactly appear out
of nowhere but was a follow-on from the early lunchtime show This Time of Day. Broadcast weekdays at
12.10 pm starting the previous December it was a 30-minute "topical
programme of sounds and voices" produced by the Radio Newsreel team. Its presenters were an unusual mix of William S. Churchill, the Earl of Arran,
James Mossman, Ludovic Kennedy and William Hardcastle. For its replacement Home Service controller Gerald
Mansell wanted a "harder, terser title" for a programme that would be
substantially more "newsy" and altogther "brisker". WATO would
also come from the Radio Newsreel
team with Andrew Boyle as its first editor.
Radio Times 4 October 1985
It should
also be recognised that the Home Service had already started to broadcast daily
news and comment when an extended 30-minute news programme, billed as Ten O'Clock was launched on 19 September
1960 (initially gaining an audience of 700,000). But The World at One was the start of a gradual expansion of news and
current affairs on the Home Service and subsequently Radio 4. It's spin-off
programmes were The World this Weekend
(1967) and PM (1970); all initially
presented by William Hardcastle and all, of course, still running today.
In October 1990 the programme marked its 25th anniversary with this report from Stephen Evans: The
earliest complete edition I can lay my hands on is from 28 January 1986 during
the tenure of Robin Day, who presented it between 1979 and 1987. The newsreader
is Pauline Bushnell. Listen out for an appearance by Jim Naughtie, at the time
the Chief Political Correspondent for The
Guardian and later a presenter of The
World at One.
Over the
past fifty years there have been about a dozen regular presenters of WATO. Below I've listed 27 names that
have been attached to the programme aside from Bill Hardcastle. This list is
not exhaustive and excludes anyone who's just appeared on a handful of
editions.
Ludovic
Kennedy, William Davis, Jack Pizzey, David Jessel, Nicholas Woolley, Robert
Williams, Gordon Clough, Michael Cooke, Brian Widlake, Robin Day, Peter Hobday,
Nick Ross, Susannah Simons, Michael Charlton, John Sergeant, Nick Worrall, James
Naughtie, Nick Clarke (to date the longest serving from 1994 until his death in2006),
James Cox, Sheena MacDonald, Alex Brodie, Tim Franks, Mark Mardell, Guto Harri,
Brian Hanrahan, Shaun Ley and Martha
Kearney.
If Week Ending was the Oxbridge Review then The News Huddlines was the end of the pier show. Though poking fun
at the week's news, the music hall tradition was never far away from Huddlines, Radio 2's longest-running,
and sorely missed, comedy show that first aired 40 years ago today.
In fact both Week Ending and The News Huddlines are inextricably
linked. Huddlines' first producers
Simon Brett and John Lloyd had both worked on Ending; Chris Emmett provided the impressions and the same
scriptwriters provided sketches and quickies to the two shows.
The story goes, according to Brett,
that in 1975 Radio 2 was a comedy desert, full of quiz shows, and "people
kept saying 'we need a kind of red-nosed Week
Ending', And Roy's was the nose". Co-producer Lloyd, remembers the
problems with casting. "We had this title you see - The News Huddlines. And we had to rack our brains for somebody
called Hudd who could fit the bill!"
When The News Huddlines launched its star was probably better known on
the telly- if only for those Quick Brew adverts ("it's me little
perforations") - rather than the radio. Roy Hudd's career had already
overlapped the end of music hall and touring variety - he'd worked with his
hero Max Miller - and the 60s satire boom with Not So Much a Programme More A Way of Life, so for a weekly,
fast-paced "topical review" in front of an audience he was a natural.
Young Roy Hudd got the showbiz bug
from his Saturday morning visits to the children's film shows at the Croydon
Hippodrome and trips to the Croydon Empire with his Gran to see the her idols -
Max Wall, Bud Flanagan, Sandy Powell, Jimmy James, Hettie King and Max Miller. "Even
when we were hard up, we'd spend one-and-six on two hours of bloody marvellous
escapism".
Called up for National Service in
1955 he got the chance to perform in a revue show titled The Rafter. "The lads liked it - especially my impression in
drag, of Lita Rosa." On demob Roy and his mate Eddie Cunningham (they'd
first met at a boy's club in Croydon) signed up to join Butlins as Redcoats at
Clacton. They billed their double act as Hudd and Kay "as we agreed that
Hudd and Cunningham sounded more like a firm of solicitors."
After leaving Butlins Hudd and Kay
started touring the variety circuit and managed to get a TV appearance on ABC's
talent show Bid for Fame. "Alas
we were outbid". According to Roy
the best week's variety they did was at the Finsbury Park Empire in 1959.
Topping the bill was Max Miller. "Very good boys", he commended them,
and offered to buy them a drink in the theatre bar. Renowned for his parsimony
they took him up on his offer. Miller continued to talk about their act and
made suggestions on how to improve, but no drinks were forthcoming. More help
and stories followed until the doors of the bar burst open at the first
interlude. "The first bloke in spotted Max and said, 'Blimey" he's
here" What will you have Max?' 'I'll have a large gin and tonic,' Max
replied like a flash. 'And what will you have, Roy? And you Eddie?'"
Roy Hudd recalls those early days in
conversation with Mike Craig in this edition of It's a Funny Business first heard on Radio 2 on 16 August 1976.
Post-Butlins the double act split and
Roy toured the country in revues and pantomime and, on 17 November 1960, made
his first radio appearance on an edition of Worker's
Playtime. More radio and TV work followed with further appearances on Worker's Playtime, Music-Hall and TheBilly Cotton Band Show but his major
break was to be asked by producer Ned Sherrin to join the cast of the TW3 follow-up Not So Much A Programme More A Way of Life(1964-65).
Working alongside David Frost, Willie
Rushton, Eleanor Bron and John Bird Roy felt a little daunting. "I was
petrified, and really did feel completely out of place with this collection of
university-educated, ex-Footlights Revue members, who read newspapers and knew
real politicians. They were certainly a clever lot of smart Alecs".
Roy also appeared in the follow-up
series BBC3 (1966), but his first star
vehicle was the BBC1 situation comedy Hudd
(1965), written by George Evans and Derek Collyer. Roy was an admirer of Jacque
Tati and the writers told the Radio Times:
"We had in mind the sort of character who could do visual jokes with a
minimum of dialogue, rather than the usual verbal jokes, and Roy fitted like a
glove".
The BBC were keen to do a second
series of Hudd but Roy wasn't.
Instead he preferred a revue-style show with sketches and so The Illustrated Weekly Hudd (1966-67) was
born. The cast included Sheila Steafel,
Patrick Newell, Doug Fisher and Marcia Ashton (series 2) and contributing to
the scripts were Dick Vosburgh, Eric Davison, Barry Cryer, Graham Chapman,
Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Dave Freeman. Even so, Roy remained unhappy with
the finished product: "I wasn't ready or good enough to be able to
headline a show as myself, and not clever enough to do sketches that required
top-rate character work".
Roy continued to appear in summer
seasons, panto, West End plays and shows such as Danny La Rue's long run at the
Palace Theatre. In 1968 he got his first starring radio series, imaginatively
titled The Roy Hudd Show which also
featured Sheila Bernette. Yet again Roy seems unhappy with the finished result:
"Somehow it didn't quite gel".
The following year there was a 6-part
series for Yorkshire TV again titled The
Roy Hudd Show and again lacking something:" ...the people hated
it." He was on safer ground with his 1971 and 1972 Charles Chilton
produced series for Radio 4 Roy Hudd's
Vintage Music Hall that built on his love of the old theatre traditions and
for which he would later write about and amass a collection posters and song
sheets.
The first inkling that Roy got about
the start of The News Huddlines was a
call from BBC producer Simon Brett asking "Are you doing anything next Wednesday
lunchtime?" The idea was for a
topical revue type show with Hudd as a kind of Kenneth Horne figure doing a
monologue at the start and then introducing the sketches. Joining him were Week Ending's Chris Emmett and Janet
Brown who'd been in the business since the 40s and had recently been perfecting
her impressions on Radio 2's comedy panel game The Impressionists. One wonders if Brett had Roy in mind having
seen him on the late-night BBC2 satire show
Up Sunday.
The pilot show was recorded on 9 June
1975 and the first edition of the series was heard on Wednesday 1 October that
year. The News Huddlines was a hit
and proved to be a breath of fresh air amongst Radio 2's array of panel games
and indifferent sitcoms. Initially the billed scriptwriters were Peter Spence
and David Renwick but like Week Ending
it relied on a core of commissioned writers and a whole list of people who
would send in gags and sketches.
One such writer was the late Debbie
Barham (she died tragically young in 2003 at the age of 26) who submitted lines
to Week Ending under the name of DA
Barham, as she'd heard that radio comedy was still very much a male preserve.
At the age of 19 she sent in a sketch to Huddlines
regarding the Holbeck hotel in Scarborough which fell into the sea.
"Have you reserved a room?" the receptionist asks. "No, we just
decided to slip away for the weekend", replies the guest. "Yes,
unfortunately, so did our foundations". Speaking in 1994 Debbie said "There are
certain subjects that fit the formula. Pot Noodles, Jeremy Beadle, Germans and
British Rail are perennials".
Reviewing the programme's success in
1994, Richard North of The Independent
observed that it "sends everybody up rotten with special attention paid to
their race, creed and gender, and yet remains affectionate. The Huddlines style of comedy is wholly
un-PC ... the Japanese and the Germans remain fair game, deliciously
perpetuating the ridiculous war-comic images a generation, now middle-aged, so
enjoyed at school. All theatrical agents are Jewish ('Well Jew-ish,' as Hudd
has it)."
The early shows were recorded on
Tuesday lunchtimes but eventually the programme settled into a Thursday
recording/broadcast pattern with a Saturday lunchtime repeat. The scripts were
pulled together in the first half of the week and put in front of the cast at
10 am on the Thursday. There was one complete run through and then at 1 pm a
recording in front of an audience at the Paris Theatre in Lower Regent Street.
"The result is a mixture of high polish and breathless, occasionally
hysterical spontaneity". That
Paris audience was generally filled with coach load of pensioners prompting
producer John Lloyd to quip: "What has 64 legs and one pair of dentures?
The front row of the Paris!"
In 1994 Huddlines reached a comedy milestone as it became the BBC's longest
running scripted comedy show in front of an audience, knocking The Navy Lark off the top spot. By now Janet Brown had long left the show, replaced along the
way by a number of actresses, including
Norma Ronald and Alison Steadman and, from 1984, June Whitfield, an
inspired piece of casting. "No smut could conceivably pass Whitfield's
lips," wrote Richard North. "Even in real life , Roy Hudd and the
team are forever scheming to sneak serious filth past her scrutiny. They often
shock her with their enthusiasm for farts, curries and private parts. 'Oh, they
will have their vindaloo jokes' she says".
Chris Emmett presented this history
of the show titled Behind the Huddlines.
It aired on Radio 2 on 24 March 1994. Taking part are Roy and June, Simon
Brett, John Lloyd, Jonathan James-Moore, Mark Robson, Richard Quick, Jeremy
Brown, Andy Hamilton, Nick Revell, Alan Nixon, Dirk Maggs and Paul Spencer.
There were two spin-offs series with
long-form situation comedy formats. In 1986 Huddwinks
from Huddlines writer Laurie Rowley
featuring Roy, Chris, Denise Coffey, Fred Harris and David Gooderson. And in
1995 Crowned Hudds, six historical
romps penned by Michael Dines, with Roy, Chris, June and Jeffrey Holland.
The News Huddlines clocked up 51 series between 1975 and 2001 and over 20 specials but its
demise was in no way planned, or indeed ever recognised on air. By the 1990s
Roy was also in demand as actor - see Lipstick
On Your Collar and Common as Muck
for example - and in 2002 he joined Coronation
Street as undertaker Archie Shuttleworth. "The Beeb reassured us, and
the listeners, that the radio show would return once I finished my stint in the
Street", recalled Roy. "To
this day", according to Chris Emmett, "nobody has had the guts to
write to Roy and tell him that they were dropping the show". Roy himself
relates that a BBC executive took him out to lunch and "told me that they
wanted me to be more like Jonathan Ross".
A week after Behind the Huddlines the 36th series of The News Huddlines kicked off. All the elements are there Roy's
cheeky asides to the audience and his opening
monologue "so it's snow jobs, no jobs, glow jobs and ...",
June Whitfield playing Norma Major as Eth and the Queen Mum as Irene Handl, non-PC
jokes about Germans and the Japanese, parody songs, Friggins (cue whoosh sfx) and Richard Clegg's
breakneck reading of the closing credits.
This edition aired on Thursday 31 March 1994 and I recorded the repeat
on Saturday 2 April.
The 'replacement' for Huddlines was already on air by the time
it came to a halt in 2001. For topical comedy Radio 2 had been offering Punt
and Dennis in It's Been a Bad Week
since 1999. More on that programme in a future post.
Sources:
A Fart in a Colander by Roy Hudd (Michael O'Mara Books, 2010)
Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me: A History of Week Ending by Ian Graves and Justin Lewis
(Kaleidoscope Publishing, 2008)
Roy Hudd is not just a funny face by Angela Wilkes (Sunday Times Magazine 8.8.82)
Still Hitting the Huddlines by Richard Johnson (Radio Times 26.3.94)
Heard the one about? by Jonathan Margolis (Sunday Times 27.3.94)
Have they got news for you! by Richard North (The Independent 30.3.94)
