The Sarah Ward Collection

It’s the final Sarah Ward Collection on Jazz FM this evening as Sarah ‘steps back’ from the weekly show after seven decades in broadcasting. It marks the end of a career for British radio’s longest-serving female presenter, a feat which deservedly is being recognised. After tonight’s usual show there’s an hour long special The Sarah Ward Celebration in which Sarah talks about her career and we hear from some of the colleagues she worked with. [Note 1]

Ahead of that interview I thought I’d fill in as much as I can about Sarah’s broadcasting career. It’s one that stretches back to the end of the 1950s and would go on to include television roles in the 60s and, from the 70s onwards, radio jobs with both the BBC and commercial radio. But it all starts in Africa.

Sarah was born in Kenya into what she affectionately describes as a colonial family – her grandparents were coffee farmers, her stepfather in the King’s African Rifles. “I’ve heard a lot of people say that Africa’s in your blood”, she told London Calling in 1988. “For me, that’s certainly true. I went there for a visit in the 70s-the homecoming as I arrived at the airport! The colour, the smell, the rhythm. I have very emotional feelings about Africa”.

Staff at FBS Nairobi in 1960. Sarah is on the front row, second in from the right.
Photo Alan Grace in The Link with Home-Sixty Years of Forces Radio

It was in Africa that Sarah got her first taste of radio broadcasting. Aged just 15 it was at the Forces Broadcasting Service in Nairobi that she helped out as tea-maker and general skivvy before getting the chance to do some presenting because “the early hours made it difficult to recruit people”. About a week in she arrived for a dawn shift, switched on the station and saw, coiled round the mic, a snake. She fled the studio screaming – the mic still open. The engineers had beefed up a snakeskin to look like the real thing and made sure the raw recruit got some effective on-the-job training.

After spending some time with the Voice of Kenya English language service, in 1964 Sarah decided to pursue her broadcasting career in the UK. After just six months she landed a job as an in-vision BBC television continuity announcer, presumably they were looking for the next Judith Chalmers. The BBC also appointed two other ‘continuity girls’, Meryl O’Keeffe and Maggie Clews. Sarah was also booked to present the weekly Junior Points of View which she continued to appear on until June 1967. [Note 2]

The Daily Herald of 11 September 1964 reported on Sarah’s arrival:

SARAH—THE NEW FACE ON TV A 23-YEAR-OLD girl who has been working as a waitress and a theatre programme seller is to be an announcer on BBC television. She is Sarah Ward, who came to Britain six months ago from Kenya, where she has worked on TV. Sarah took jobs as a waitress and programme seller while waiting for a ‘break’ with the BBC. Viewers first saw her last Sunday. She appeared in Junior Points of View last night.

Part of her role was to do interview spots at the end of the evening programmes. Her most famous interviewee was undoubtedly Bob Dylan, but it was a bizarre experience. Dylan was at the BBC to record a concert series (shown on BBC1 in June 1965). The interview was live and possibly the first to be done in the UK. Sarah recalls “It was a peculiar interview. He kept spinning round in his chair, sometimes turning his back on me. He’d just been to the BBC canteen and was still eating a biscuit, which he kept waving in my face. He seemed to be fixated by the biscuit, ignoring most of my questions about the pressures of life as a superstar. The only time he really came alive was when I started asking him about the money he was making and he suddenly became very shrewd and on the ball.”    

Sarah with Come Here Often co-host Cliff Morgan

Sarah left the BBC in June 1967 and a month later popped up on ‘the other side’ as co-host, alongside Cliff Morgan, on Come Here Often. Produced by Rediffusion, Come Here Often, was a twice –weekly (Tuesday and Friday tea-time) ‘topical magazine programme dealing with news and interesting events for children aged between nine and fourteen’.  Producer Elizabeth Cowley described it as a ‘junior Tonight’ but it was probably closer to Blue Peter. It can be seen as a forerunner of Thames TV’s Magpie and indeed just before the series ended on 23 July 1968 (as Rediffusion’s lost the franchise to Thames) future Magpie host Mick Robertson had been co-presenting the last few shows with Sarah. [Note 3] Come Here Often wasn’t without controversy as Sarah recalls: “one lively programme [in August 1967] featured a debate between the British Power movement and an opposing group of young blacks. One of the debaters became especially overheated and pulled a knife, which led to the immediate blacking out of the screen and the programme hitting the headlines in the British press the next morning.”   

By the early 1970s Sarah was working for the BBC World Service appearing on the request spot at the end of The Merchant Navy Programme with Malcolm Billings, where she ‘built up a huge fan-club of sailors’. Her ambitions to expand into general presentation were initially thwarted, as whilst her boss at Bush House was “very sympathetic towards her programme ideas ...unfortunately Radios One and Two just didn’t want to know”.

Undeterred, Sarah went for an audition with commercial rivals Capital Radio that was due to launch in October 1973. The audition was for the job of record reviewer on Nicky Horne’s nightly rock show You’re Mother Wouldn’t Like It. “I did a lovely late night audition with Nicky which was relaxed and nice”, she remembers, “and apparently they liked my voice and said let’s use it for something else.”

When Capital started director of programmes Michael Bukht offered Sarah a role as one of the presenters (with ex-BBC radio’s Sean Kelly) of Night Flight ‘late night music that’s easy on the ear, open line for night owls to air problems, ask advice, have a chat’. Later she gained her own show Sarah and Friends. “It was always what I’d wanted to do, in fact ... I was saying to myself and also to one or two people at the BBC that I would like to do a late night show, a combination of music and chat.”

Of those Capital days Nicky Horne recalls that “there were quite a few of us who were the more sort of leftfield thinkers, and Sarah was really part of that gang. She was at the time a bit of a rock chick and loved her rock. I remember in those early days there was chaos all round but that Sarah always had a calmness and a serenity about her”. He describes her as having  a real love for the medium of radio and, unlike a few others, she was unencumbered by ego. A magnificent voice and a beautiful soul.”  Sarah also expressed her preference for radio: “there’s less emphasis on being the polished pretty product. There’s more scope to be genuinely yourself and I enjoy the teamwork which radio demands.”   

Sarah left Capital in 1975 but would return at the end of the 70s and continued to appear on the station presenting London Tonight for a while and latterly, until 1986, a Sunday afternoon show. When Capital Gold was launched Sarah presented the late-night show in 1988 and 1989.

Recalling her time at Capital, Sarah was doing a “fairly hard-hitting interview with a journalist about Idi Amin’s Uganda. He was extremely nervous and I was doing everything possible to help him and put him at his ease. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the studio door slowly open and someone- who shall remain nameless- crawling across the studio floor towards us. To my horror, he grabbed hold of my interviewee’s foot and started to take off his shoe. The interviewee was absolutely transfixed. It was just like watching a rabbit freeze. We had to terminate the interview abruptly and go into a commercial break.”

Back to 1975 ahead of the launch of Portsmouth’s Radio Victory, head of programmes David Symonds recruited the “silky smooth” Sarah to join the team. At first she was on late nights – playing quite a bit of album rock - but was also involved in the Saturday lunchtime kid’s show Up 2 U and then devise, and for a while (in 1977/78) present The Wonderful Wobbly Wireless Show. Both programmes featured significant involvement from local children including two aspiring broadcasters: John Terrett and David Dunning. At any one time about ten kids would be invited into the studio to present reports, choose the music and interview guests, all under the supervision of Sarah. As a reward they were allowed to raid the record box and grab any spare promotional discs – John’s first pick was Springsteen’s Born to Run – but later they were offered expenses for turning up.  On one occasion David remembers interviewing a family friend who was a Solent shipping pilot based at Ryde Pier. Off we went with a UHER tape recorder but “I had no concept of actually arranging it in advance but gave the impression Uncle Sammy would be delighted to talk to us. He wasn’t in the office when we arrived and lovely kind Sarah gave the impression that ‘these things happen’ ...but even a naive 10 year old knew it was my first big broadcasting cock up and she was a tad annoyed.”   

London Calling April 1980

Meanwhile back at Bush House Sarah started to be offered more work. In 1977 she had a daily 15-minute show of ‘music and chat’ as well as being on the rota of presenters of the Request Show.  Between 1979 and the summer of 1986 she hosted a weekly 30 minute show of music and guests called Sarah and Company. When that came to end Sarah was given the opportunity to ‘exploit her broad interest in all kinds of popular music’ in the World Service’s Multitrack 3. This would feature ‘interviews with the more off-beat pop bands, new to the music scene and unlikely to reach the charts but producing a brand of non-mainstream music of interest to the programme’s young audience’.  Multitrack 3 ran until August 1994. [Note 4]  

In 1989 and early 1990 Sarah co-presented the weekend breakfast with Ed Boyle on LBC's short-lived Crown FM service. 

1990 proved to be a significant year for Sarah, with the start of her involvement in what was to become Jazz FM and presenting her first national breakfast show. That breakfast show was on the newly launched BBC Radio 5, the education and sports channel, which came on-air in August 1990. Sarah co-presented Morning Edition with Jon Briggs (ex-Radio Oxford and future Voice of Siri and The Weakest Link) until February 1992.

From Wednesday 29 August 1990 here’s Sarah and Jon with Morning Edition.

In 1993 Sarah started to cover some shows on Classic FM and, from February 1994, took over from Margaret Howard to present the nightly weekday news and arts magazine show Classic Reports. Sarah remained with Classic FM until early 1997 by which time she was presenting the weekend breakfast shows.

Profile from the Radio Times in 1991

Sarah has long shared a passion for jazz with her life partner Ken, himself a jazz saxophonist and composer. She remembers the time they both visited Ronnie Scott’s Club when Charles Mingus was there “and Ken was left in awe after briefly meeting him. Later in the evening, Mingus spotted Ken smoking a pipe and asked him to swap tobacco. The ice was broken after this and they chewed stories, mostly about Eric Dolphy.” She would broadcast on the various incarnations of Jazz FM (Jazz 102.2, ejazz.fm, jazzfm.com) starting shortly after it went on air in 1990 and again from 1997 onwards. Sarah is mostly associated with three programmes: Dinner Jazz that she first presented in 2004 (taking over from Helen Mayhew), and again from the 2008 re-launch as Jazz FM. There’s also Jazz Travels – ‘a musical spin of the globe’ - that started in 2011 and, for almost a decade, The Sarah Ward Collection.

For many years home for Sarah and Ken has been on the edge of Dartmoor. In December 1998 and again in August 1999 she supported and broadcast on the 28 day licence station Palm 106.2 in Torquay. Her shows for Jazz FM have either been recorded at local radio studios in Devon and, more recently, from her home studio.

From 19 December 2011 here’s part of that evening’s Dinner Jazz.

The final edition of The Sarah Ward Collection is tonight at 6pm followed by The Sarah Ward Celebration at 9.pm.  

Note 1: UK radio’s oldest broadcaster with a regular show is David Hamilton, daily on Boom Radio. Until her death earlier this year the second-longest serving female radio DJ would’ve been Annie Nightingale who was a friend of Sarah’s.

Note2:  Junior Points of View had started in January 1963 as a spin-off from the main Points of View programme but aimed at “younger viewers”. Initially presented by Robert Robinson and then young tv announcer June Imray. June’s Scottish accent was itself a cause of some controversy and she left the BBC in September 1964, eventually returning to Grampian Television as an announcer.

Note3:  Come Here Often had some stiff competition on the BBC. On Tuesday it was up against Tom Tom and on Friday Crackerjack and (ironically) Junior Points of View.  All episodes are missing.

Note 4: The BBC World Service Pop Music Unit produced three editions of Multitrack each week. Multitrack 1 (Mons) was the top 20 show, Multitrack 2 (Weds) new releases, interviews and news and Multitrack 3 (Fris) on the ‘alternative’ scene.

Most of the quotes from this post come from Record and Radio Mirror (30 March 1974) and London Calling (October 1988).

With thanks to David Dunning, John Terrett, Nicky Horne and David Symonds

Capital Gold photocard from Robin Blamires and UK Radio Merchandise Archive