Fun at One - Windbags

If the sound of Radio 1's early 90s comedy output was predominantly male - Morris, Lewis-Smith, Lee and Herring etc. - then the female riposte came in the form of Windbags.

Windbags saw the comedy pairing of stand-ups Jo Brand and Donna McPhail and ran for two short series in 1993 and 1994. Tim Worthington describes it as the perfect vehicle for their "established tongue-in-cheek acerbic view of dumb chauvinist attitudes an notions of conventional female deportment, and this made for a hugely entertaining show that strongly appealed to sympathetic listeners". 

In this, the series two finale, from 11 July 1994 joining Jo and Donna are Dawn French, Hattie Hayridge, Sarah Dunant and Sue Carpenter. The producer is Caroline Leddy. (Incidentally I've no idea why, at intervals, you keep hearing "who turned out the lights" during the first half of this recording).

Fun at One – Thirty Minutes of Unadulterated Garbage

With the news that Victor Lewis-Smith’s Radio 1 programmes are to get a Radio 4 Extra repeat next month – their first airing since 1990 – I thought it timely to dip my toe into the VLS archive.

Victor Lewis-Smith studied Music at York University and made his first broadcasts for the campus radio and TV station. His professional radio career started at the newly launched BBC Radio York in July 1983 with a Sunday morning programme known as Snooze Button (followed a year later by One- Way Family Favourites).  (1)

Whilst still on Radio York in 1984 national radio beckoned and Victor performed a series of comic vignettes alongside Laurie Taylor (for many years billed on-air as “Laurie Taylor, Professor of Sociology at York University”) under the title Modern Manners.  These were part of the station’s ill-fated Thursday morning sequence Rollercoaster, the whole being linked by Richard Baker.

Victor Lewis-Smith (pictured top right) was part of the weekend
team when Radio York launched in 1983.

The following year Modern Manners transferred to the second series of the Sunday morning magazine show The Colour Supplement. (2) Here are two clips of Modern Manners from 21 July and 11 August 1985.  All these years later I still call the Radio Times the “Raddy Otimees”!

By now Victor was also working behind the scenes at Radio 4 as a producer on Midweek. Presenter Libby Purves had to deal with an increasingly oddball set of guests and on one memorable occasion  (3), when Libby was on holiday, the replacement was Arthur Mullard, hardly the most eloquent of hosts. This show has now passed into the realms of radio infamy and you can chortle away at clips from that programme on this edition of iPM. Ever the performer Victor Lewis-Smith gets in on the action over the talkback.

Listener reaction to that edition of Midweek was divided: “what a ridiculous programme”, “it was worth the whole licence fee”, “an insult to the listening public”, “sheer genius” and “an insult to one’s intelligence”.

Lewis-Smith worked as a producer on Midweek and then Start the Week in 1985 and 1986 by which time he was appearing on Ned Sherrin’s Loose Ends with his comedy writing partner Paul Sparkes – they’d met at York University. You can hear one of those frenetic sketches on my post about Ned Sherrin.

Amongst the Sherrin acolytes on Loose Ends was Radio 1 producer John Walters and it was John who promoted the idea of Victor putting together a show for Radio 1. That show, airing in May 1988, featured a character first heard in some of the Loose Ends sketches, a spoof DJ named Steve ‘More Music’ Nage, complete with a nasal mid-Atlantic twang, a kind of proto-Mike Smash type. It was a mickey take on the sound of the station that was now employing him – his shows would consistently lampoon the BBC – complete with jingles and faux dedications. Here's a clip from that show:

Victor Lewis-Smith would appear on Radio 1 over two years. The first show in his own name went out late on Boxing Day night in 1989 under the title Victor Lewis-Smith’s Christmas Message, though it contained nothing seasonal.  My tape machine was running that evening and here’s the recording. Note at the end a continuing obsession with mention of TV’s Mr Derek Batey.

His fast-paced approach, slick tape-editing, multi-layered sound, funny voices and musical pastiche contained elements of Jack Jackson and Kenny Everett’s styles – his acknowledged influences. But his comedy, and certainly that on Radio 1, was increasingly dripping with vitriol, insults and sarcasm. At the same time one detects a genuine love of radio and the parodies of old style radio shows, films and newsreels show a nostalgic undertone that would also manifest itself in the TV editions of Buygones.

Listening back to the programmes you can appreciate their technical brilliance with Lewis-Smith providing all the voices, but at the end of half-an-hour it is also quite draining. You feel like you’ve been bludgeoned with a giant comedy hammer.

Two series and two specials followed on Radio 1. It’s the first ten-part 1990 series that’s getting the Radio 4 Extra repeat starting at 22.30 on Friday 8 May 2015. One wonders if they’ve edited out the warnings that preceded and followed each programme. Where Radio 1 listeners really possessed of such delicate sensibilities? “The following programme contains material which some people may find offensive. If you consider yourself likely to be offended then perhaps you’d like to retune to another frequency for the next thirty minutes. You may like to telephone your views about the programme, call 9274364 prefix 01 if you live outside London. Your comments will be passed onto the Controller of Radio 1. Extracts may also be used in future programmes”. I’m still not sure if this was intended to be taken seriously.

Recalling these shows former station controller Johnny Beerling wrote: “It was quite brilliant but there was hardly a single BBC rule which Victor did not seek to break in delivering new and challenging comedy. He would always deliver his finished programme at the last possible moment so there was little time for the poor Radio 1 producer responsible for it to do much editing”.

One rule that Lewis-Smith broke was to obtain permission from the participants to use the recordings of his hoax phone calls. These calls were a staple of the shows, witness the one in the first programme to Harrods complaining of his dissatisfaction with a vacuum cleaner purchased for supposed “specialist” use to “suck the dust off sausages”.

Ahead of the Radio 4 Extra repeats here’s taster of that first show:

I’ve not heard if there are plans to repeat the second series. At the time of its first broadcast a number of edits had to be made (4) and one programme features a skit on the now-verboten subject of Jim’ll Fix It.  

Dedicated to the memory of Mrs Tribley.

(1) One-Way Family Favourites replaced Snooze Button in the Spring of 1984, again on a Sunday morning. A typical Radio Times billing read “a sideways Sunday lunchtime entertainment from the heart of Yorkshire. This week Victor links up with Katie Boyle in the lost City of Atlantis”. 
(2) The first series of The Colour Supplement in 1984 was presented by either Sarah Kennedy or Fern Britton with roving reporter Nigel Farrell.  The second series in 1985 was presented by Margo MacDonald.
(3) The edition broadcast on 21 May 1986
(4) Some of the removed hoax calls made it onto the album Nuisance Calls. “Hear the tapes the BBC never dared transmit”.

Programmes for BBC Radio 1:

Steve ‘More Music’ Nage 30 May 1988  (1 hour)
Victor Lewis-Smith’s Chrsitmas Message 26 December 1989

Victor Lewis-Smith

Series 1: 10 shows 31 March 1990 to 2 June 1990
Bank Holiday Special: 27 August 1990
Series 2: 4 shows 4 July 1992 to 25 July 1992
Christmas Special: 26 December 1992

A Tip Top Christmas

Pull the master switch. All aboard for A Radio Tip Top Christmas.

Yes once again I crank up the Lunewyre technology to bring you this 1996 Christmas Day special hosted by Kid Tempo and The Ginger Prince for what was to be their last outing on BBC Radio 1.
 

May I wish a very Happy Christmas to all readers of the blog and offer particular thanks to all those that have kindly offered feedback, information and old recordings. I’ll be back with some year-end specials next week.

Fun at One – When It Ain’t Tip Top, Then It Ain’t Tip Top

The ‘facts’ are as follows: It was broadcast via the “magic of Lunewyre technology in total Spectrasound”. The hosts were the self-styled Kid Tempo and The Ginger Prince – whose real identity was, at the time, shrouded in mystery though we now know as Eli Hourd and Nigel Proctor. You could enjoy the delights of the Hammond Organ interlude and radio’s only dance troupe Peter Lorenzo and the Guys Now Dancers. It was Radio Tip Top.

It’s difficult to explain what was going on, even for those of us that signed up for Radio Tip Top membership. It was retro but played current hits. It was funny but had no discernible jokes. It aired at a time when loungecore and easy listening were cool. Think Radio 1 Club meets Phoenix Nights with a dash of Austin Powers.

Radio Tip Top had started life as a weekly pirate radio show in London in 1993 and 1994. There was press interest in the Tip Top phenomenon and in late 94 even an ITV pilot show set onboard a giant spaceship. By April 1995 they’d gone legit and moved to Radio 1 for a 12-week Wednesday night run. This is when I became hooked, although I was probably initially drawn in by the old Radio 1 jingles that punctuated proceedings. 

For all you Tip Toppers and Tip Toppettes here are three editions of your favourite show. From series one comes episode eight broadcast on 14 June 1995 with Star Time guest Sandie Shaw, redirection advice from Postman Patois, the Radio Tip Top Big Break Talent of Tomorrow featuring Ken Goodwin and the Radio Tip Top Cabaret Cavalcade with Ken Dodd “who always insists we pay him in cash”.

Episode nine of the first series features the vocal talents of Tony Blackburn, The Bowling Queens Margaret and Maureen, Norman Barrington with a TV Treat, rising talent Lenny Kravitz, the Reverend Ray Floods from the Church of What’s Happening and the headline act, Lulu.

And finally, for the moment, the tenth edition with the 1995 Radio Tip Top Summer Seaside Special. Star Time features Naomi Campbell,  get down with Mr Superbad and topping the bill is Britt Ekland.

I’ll be posting more Radio Tip Top shows over the coming months.

Radio Tip Top series details:

Series one: 12 weeks from 26 April to 12 July 1995
Radio Tip Top Christmas Cracker 25 December 1995
Series two: 14 weeks 3 January to 3 April 1996
A Tip Top Christmas 25 December 1996

Hip and here. Radio Times w/c 29 April 1995

This post was sponsored by the readers of Corsair magazine.

Fun at One – Radio in a Blender

By a strange coincidence ‘Iannucci old’ and ‘Iannucci new’ are on offer this week. Sky Atlantic have series two of HBO’s Veep whilst BBC Radio 4 Extra start re-runs (from tonight) of Armando Iannucci’s eponymously titled second comedy series for Radio 1. 

By 1994 Armando had already worked on Week Ending, On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You and appeared in front of the microphone in the 5-part series for Radio 4, Down Your Ear. He was given a try out on Radio 1 with a couple of 30-minute shows in 1993. These shows demonstrated his witty and knowing style. It was the comedy of parody and the piss-take, poking fun at the grammar of radio with the irony meter set to red. It was radio “put through the blender and re-stitched together the wrong way round.”

The 1993 series has also just had a repeat outing on Radio 4 Extra. If you missed them, here’s some of what you could have heard.

In fact both programmes, plus series two, can be found on the Fist of Fun website, just look under Downloads.  

Fun at One – Lenny Henry

It’s time for Lenny Henry’s biennial Comic Relief appearance in a loud suit this coming Friday. But years before his Red Nose antics Lenny was a Radio 1 DJ.

A guest performance on a 1981 Roadshow and a My Top Twelve appearance convinced network controller Johnny Beerling that Lenny was suitable for radio work. The following year he was given an Easter tryout and then summer cover work for Noel Edmond’s Sunday morning show – the Sunday Hoot was born.

Mixing music and comedy, written by Lenny’s TV scriptwriters such as Kim Fuller and Bob Sinfield, the shows would introduce his audience to characters such as Joshua Yarlog (“Katanga”) and Delbert Wilkins (“Y’know what I mean?”) that would feature in later TV shows.

Much of Lenny’s Radio 1 work was broadcast live and he learnt how to drive the desk. For a short spell in the early 80s (1982-85) he was seen as part of the regular DJ line-up complete with his own JAM-produced ident. Here he is having fun with those jingles in a trailer for his Sunday show.

This is a complete one hour (recorded) Christmas special broadcast on 24 December 1983.

Read more about Lenny’s Radio 1 career in Fun at One by Tim Worthington.

Fun at One - Adrian Juste

It’s what Saturday lunchtimes were made for. For many years filling the 1 to 2 p.m. slot on Radio 1 was an hour of music and comedy pulled together by Adrian Juste.  Think hit records from Kim Wilde and The Eurythmics interspersed with clips of Hancock and Bob Newhart and the occasional specially written sketch.

That mix of pop and comedy had been inspired by Jack Jackson’s ‘record roundabout’ shows on the Light Programme and Radio 1. Jack’s final show, a Bank Holiday special on Radio 2, had aired in 1977. Adrian’s shows became a fixture on most Saturdays between 1978 and the start of 1994, though for a while in the mid-80s he was moved to Sunday mornings and later Sunday afternoons. The Saturday shows benefitted from going out in stereo on VHF, at the time a scare resource for Radio 1, whilst over on Radio 2 we had comedy such as The News Huddlines and then the first half-hour of Sport on 2.    

Juste was the voice of Radio 1 for nearly 17 years. Programme trailers, campaign promos and those Roadshow intros (“today live from the boating lake, Cleethorpes…” etc.), he did them all. In addition he often provided the technical support, playing in the records or on standby at Broadcasting House during an OB should the line go down. Not forgetting a fair few New Year’s Eve Party shows too. No wonder Adrian was bitter was he was given the boot as part of Matthew Bannister’s DJ cull in 1993.

Here’s the second half of Adrian’s last show that went out on 1st January 1994. There’s some fun to be had, not to mention a touch of bitterness, towards the end with Adrian looking for new employment, “Slung out after 17 years” and going into panto, “Have you seen my career? Yes, it's behind you!”

And this is Adrian in the early days with a Saturday lunchtime show from 14th November1981.

Juste has appeared on the radio intermittently since leaving Radio 1, most recently on BBC Radio Devon with a 2012 Christmas special offering much the same mix as before.  

Fun at One - I’m Christopher Morris, Christopher Morris I Am

If Radio 1 wanted comedy that was edgy and subversive, they got it with Chris Morris. Though best known for his TV series The Day Today (“slamming the wasps from the pure apple of truth”) and, most controversially, Brass Eye (“one young kiddie on Cake cried all the water out of his body”) Morris enjoyed a brief, but equally controversial, spell on the nation’s favourite during the 1990s.

Chris Morris was a radio obsessive and first got into broadcasting whilst still at university as the student reporter on Radio West. After graduating he joined the trainee scheme at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, learning the ropes of production and presentation.

It was back to Bristol, on the BBC local station, with a show called No Known Cure that he developed his style of broadcasting that was put into effect at GLR and on national radio: the cutting up of news headlines and vox pops, bizarre phone calls, made-up names, portentous voiceovers and so on.

At the same time as his Radio Bristol programmes, Morris ended up on the revamped Greater London Radio. One of his comic creations on this show was the inept spoof DJ Wayne Carr (pictured above) – sounding not a million miles away from Mike Smash or Dave Doubledecks.  

The first appearance on Radio 1 was tucked away, out of harm’s way, in the middle of the afternoon on Christmas Day 1990, at a time when most of the nation is slumped in front of the telly. The show was not without controversy when Morris suggested that the Pet Shop Boys next collaboration should be with Myra Hindley. It was more than three years before he returned to the station.

Meanwhile, working with Armando Iannucci, he went onto launch Radio 4’s On the Hour, the big break that led to the TV work. Morris continued with occasional shows on GLR but made it back to Radio 1 in 1994 with The Chris Morris Music Show – the emphasis was as much on the music as it was the comedy. This series notoriously got Morris and Radio 1 into trouble, especially the infamous ‘obituaries’ for Michael Heseltine and, prophetically, Jimmy Savile.

Morris was back at Radio 1 between 1997 and 1999 with the post-midnight black comedy series Blue Jam. A couple of appearances in 2000 on Mary Anne Hobbs’s The Breezeblock was his last radio work.    

You can read more about Chris Morris and download many of his radio shows on the @cookdandbombd website. In the meantime, back to that first show on Radio 1. Apparently the BBC don’t have a copy of the two-hour show and I can’t find one online. I’d like to say I’ve uncovered a copy but unfortunately all I have is the first twenty minutes. So here is part of The Chris Morris Christmas Show first heard on 25 December 1990.

Fun at One – Say Kids, what time is it…?

It was nearly The William Rees-Mogg Experience, just in case the guardian of the nation’s morals took legal action. She didn’t.

The Mary Whitehouse Experience burst onto the scene in 1989. Spurred on by the success of the stand-up show Hey Rrradio!!! Radio 1 controller Johnny Beerling asked producer Bill Dare to develop a “sharper, more focussed” show. The performers were comedy duos David Baddiel and Rob Newman with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis. They were joined in series one by Jo Brand (still sometimes billed as The Sea Monster), Mark Thomas and Skint Video.

This is the first programme in series one broadcast on 7 April 1989. It went out tucked away at midnight, sandwiched between Tommy Vance’s’ The Friday Rock Show and The Rankin’ Miss P. 

Baddiel has yet to fully adopt his acerbic political rants whilst Newman does little more than the odd impression (Shaw Taylor, Melvyn Bragg and Ben Elton). Punt and Dennis do their familiar topical satire shtick that they would later transfer to It’s Been a Bad Week and The Now Show.  

Read more about The Mary Whitehouse Experience in Tim Worthington’s book Fun at One: TheStory of Radio Comedy at Radio 1.

Fun at One

“Radio 1 and comedy are, in general, rarely mentioned in the same breath.” So reads the foreword to Tim Worthington’s new book on the subject, Fun at One.

Fun at One demonstrates that there certainly was a rich comedy seam:  from the on-air antics of DJs like Jack Jackson, Kenny Everett, Noel Edmonds, Adrian Juste and Steve Wright to something of a golden period in the late 80s and early 90s when, on the back of the alternative comedy boom, you could hear a raft of out and out comedy shows.

Worthington’s analysis starts in the Light Programme days and he picks out two influential “edgy, impulsive” shows in particular: I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and the little-known David Frost at the Phonograph. (I’ve not heard Frost’s shows so if any recordings exist please let me know).

John Peel’s show provided the springboard for comic talent in Radio 1’s early days - best known being Ivor Cutler and Viv Stanshall - and Peel’s producer John Walters was behind the somewhat surprising comedy outings of one Keith Moon. 

Another early attempt at mixing music and comedy was Eric Idle’s Radio Five series (surely the inspiration for his later Rutland Weekend Television) which poked gentle fun at radio broadcasting itself.

The majority of Fun at One concerns itself with shows transmitted in the period 1989-1994, programmes in the main presented or featuring comedians, many of whom would go onto TV stardom. The roll call includes Victor-Lewis Smith, Chris Morris, Newman and Baddiel, Punt and Dennis, Julian Clary, Harry Hill, Lee and Herring, Armando Iannucci and Nick Hancock.     

Over the coming weeks I’ll be dipping into my comedy archives to bring you a selection of the shows from this era in Radio 1’s history, starting with The Mary Whitehouse Experience.

Fun at One: The Story of Comedy at Radio 1 is published by Lulu at £8.99. You can hear Tim Worthington talking to Ben Baker about his book as well as the opportunity to hear some excellent podcasts of clips from many of the shows on the Talk About the Passion blog.   

The Christmas Knowledge

This Radio 1 show dates from a time when the station was also the home of some cutting edge comedy. Victor Lewis-Smith, Armando Iannucci, Julian Clary and Loose Talk featured in the schedules of the early 90s.

The Knowledge was a four-part spoof documentary narrated by Alan Freeman, this recording is of the one-off seasonal version, The Christmas Knowledge, broadcast on 30 December 1993.

What makes this such a hoot is not just the script but Fluff’s reading of it, a true tour de force. There’s also a bit of fun to be had against his Radio 1 colleagues including “beardy Scouser” John Peel.

The programme also features Tim Whitnall, Bernadine Corrigan, David Howarth, Peter Serafinowicz (man of voices including Darth Maul and Terry Wogan) and Julie Gibbs. Music is by Murray Gold (of Doctor Who fame) and the script written by Andy Riley (Bunny Suicides) and Kevin Cecil (who would both later write Hyperdrive and Robbie the Reindeer).  The Producer is Gareth Edwards.