Radio Tarbuck

Last month it was announced that Liza Tarbuck had taken ‘French leave’ of her Saturday night show on BBC Radio 2. The murmuration was not happy. Liza’s idiosyncratic presenting style and eclectic playlist were no longer on your radio, or even your smart trousers.    

After hearing the news of her departure I was reminded (actually I came across an old audio clip whilst backing up some files) that Liza wasn’t the first Tarbuck to present shows on Radio 2, that honour goes, inevitably, to her dad Jimmy.  Here’s that clip of him filling in for Pete Murray on the weekend late show on 27 November 1982.

Of course, Jimmy had been popping up on the radio since the mid-60s and had appeared as a panellist on shows such as Does the Team Think, Pop Score and Games People Play. He would be in DJ role in October through to December 1989 as the host of Sounds of the 60s and was back for a week in 1991 for the 4-5 pm show at a time when Radio 2 had a different celebrity presenter in that slot each week.

But I was reminded yet again (this time by a user on X) that Jimmy had starred in his own Radio 2 comedy series, called Radio Tarbuck. The series (there was only one) was based on the premise that Tarby was running Britain’s first commercial radio station (some two and a bit years before LBC and Capital launched). It actually started as a one-off show on the station’s Comedy Parade programme, a sandbox for potential comedy show ideas. The Radio Tarbuck try-out aired on Sunday 7 February 1971, just after The Ken Dodd Show, giving listeners an hour of Liverpudlian humour in the post-Family Favourites schedule. If I told that the cast included Daphne Oxenford and Colin Edwynn and that the writing team was Mike Craig, Lawrie Kinsley and Ron McDonnell you’ll probably guess that it was a Manchester production. And you’d be right. The series producer was James Casey. Also in the cast was Barbara Mullaney, now better known as Barbara Knox, i.e. Rita off of Corrie, plus two comedy veterans. There was Deryck Guyler, another Scouser, well actually from Wallasey, best-known at the time for playing Constable Corky Turnbull in Sykes and school caretaker Norman Potter in Please Sir! He was joined by Richard Wattis, the snobbish neighbour also in Sykes.  

The Radio Tarbuck series was commissioned and an eight-part series started on Sunday 3 October 1971. Frank Williams (Rev. Timothy Farthing on Dad’s Army) replaced Wattis whilst David Mahlowe replaced Edwynn. Pianist Harry Hayward, veteran of dozens of Northern editions of Worker’s Playtime, was on most of the shows. 

Introducing the new series Jimmy spoke to the Radio Times:   

When he is not on stage, which he is twice nightly at Blackpool, or on the golf course, which he is most of the rest of the time, Jimmy Tarbuck can currently be found in a modest little suburban house near the airport (and the golf course) at St Annes. He’d far rather be with his wife Pauline and their three children in their home in Surrey, but then you have to put up with that sort of thing for a summer season.

He seems a bit older off-stage than on-plumper, rather serious. Also he says he’s pretty exhausted at the end of a demanding season, punctuated with recordings for his first ever radio series, Radio Tarbuck. ‘What do you want to ask me, young man?’ he asks as the Jimmy Young Show is blasting out on a portable radio (‘No one can accuse me of not being loyal’), the reaches out to turn down the volume.

‘The radio show. Yes, well, it’s going to be very funny. I think I can say that without fear or favour or contradiction,’ he begins.

But what made him decide to do a radio series after all this time? ‘Yes, well, I’ve never done any radio before you see, and the BBC asked me to do a pilot, and it actually turned out very well.

‘The thing was I had no idea how radio’s done at all. I thought you had to learn the lines off by heart. I thought “Blimey, I’m never going to get through this lot.” Anyway, I learned my lines and turned up to rehearsal to find them all standing round reading it all out with their scripts in their hands. After that I enjoyed every minute of it.

‘So now I nip over to Manchester in the morning, do a couple of rehearsal, then the producer lets me go out and play a few holes at Delamere Forest, then I’m back again in the evening to record. Actually I’m afraid I’m notoriously bad at rehearsing. I really only come alive when there’s an audience.

The idea of the series is that Radio Tarbuck is supposed to be Britain’s first-ever commercial radio station. ‘It’s being run on a shoestring budget so it can’t be heard more than three blocks away. And they’ve only got one record, which keeps playing all the time – a very old, crackly version of Rose Marie. What more can I tell you, except that it’s very funny?’              

Guests on the sixth episode were John Slater (Det. Sgt. Stone in Z Cars) and all-round entertainer and Tarby’s golfing mate Kenny Lynch.

Radio Times billing for the first episode
of Radio Tarbuck on 3 October 1971. It was 
followed by another Comedy Parade show
that went to a full series Just the Job
with Donald Sinden & Bernard Cribbins

The only surviving episode of Radio Tarbuck is the final one broadcast on 21 November 1971. Guest names this time are DJ David Hamilton and Peter Goodwright, who does a mean Deryck Guyler impression. There are plenty of golf references and the show ends with an extended sketch about The Ackroyd Chronicles “the continuing story of a dark satanic mill owner”. Yes, they really do work in the line “there’s trouble at t’mill”. The loudest laugh comes when Tarbuck and Goodwright go off script and mention Ken Dodd. Cue an impromptu impression of Doddy. 

You’ll find some of Liza’s Radio 2 shows on my Mixcloud channel.