In All Directions

 

Ad-libbed or improvised comedy was unheard of in post-war comedy shows. Scripts had to be written and typed-up in advance of broadcast with producers ensuring that they didn’t breach any of the rules in the BBC’s variety programme policy guide, the so-called ‘Green Book’. Even music shows were not immune. Presenters of Housewives’ Choice had to turn-up to the studio extra early to rehearse the running order. Guests on Desert Island Discs would have a preliminary chat with Roy Plomley who would then type up a script for them to use in the recording. But there was one comedy series that tried to be different and was wholly improvised, albeit recorded and edited ready for broadcast, and that was In All Directions.   

In All Directions was broadcast between 1952 and 1955 and although there were just nineteen episodes it still stands out as a remarkable comedy success. All the voices, and some of the sound effects, were provided by Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones. The outline for each episode was conjured up by those master script-writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden, who at the time were otherwise engaged in scripting Take It From Here. Denis Norden tells the story as to how the series came about and how it was put together:   

For us, In All Directions represented two quite separate but equally satisfying achievements. First, the preliminary lunch at the Caprice where Pat Dixon, the producer, Frank and I met Peter Ustinov to try and persuade him into taking on a radio series. It went on till half past four and racked up the largest expenses bill thus far (1952) for the BBC Light Entertainment Department.

Its second departure from the norm, one that worried the executive high-ups no end, was that it was the first ever BBC comedy series to be broadcast without a script.

During the exploratory lunch, we found that Ustinov could improvise such extravagant and wondrously complex conceits on a minimum of prompting, we were all for putting this rare gift at the programme’s centre. Pat, always the most radical of the Department’s producers – across the wall behind his desk he had nailed the rebel flag of the US Civil War – saw virtue in this and promised to shield us from the inevitable wrath the execution of this format would provoke.

The series, which took its title from a favourite Stephen Leacock line, ‘He jumped on his horse and galloped off madly in all directions’, purported to be an ongoing car journey undertaken by Ustinov and Peter Jones – every bit as equal as an improviser – in search of a mythical Copthorne Avenue, with the two of them supplying the voices of all the characters they meet on the way, as well as providing most of the sound effects. Ustinov was particularly hot on car noises and creaky doors opening.

The two Peters would come into our office at the beginning of each week and ad-lib various responses to the characters and situations we suggested they might encounter en route. (‘Why don’t we pull up and ask that debby-looking girl selling flags where we are?’; ‘Look, outside that Boy’s Club there’s a poster announcing that Field Marshall Montgomery will be opening their new table tennis room.’)

We would record all their improvisations on such themes with a primitive tape machine Pat scrounged for us. Then, after they had left, listen to the various segments, choose the most apt, then rearrange them into some kind of coherent running order. This we would issue in note form to the two Peters, who would turn up on the day of transmission and recreate them, still sans any kind of script.

My one regret about In All Directions is that, somewhere down the years, the recorded bits of Ustinov and Jones we had not selected for the programme went missing. I’m quite sure that, even today, their wit and agility of comic invention would still be something to savour.   

What was also different about In All Directions was that there wasn’t a studio audience, obviously the method of constructing the programme precluded that. It wasn’t totally unheard of for comedy shows to be without an audience, the more cerebral offerings on the Third Programme – including Third Division (1949) also written by Muir and Norden and produced by Pat Dixon - for instance or Just Fancy and Breakfast with Braden were all studio-based. 

The first series of six programmes of In All Directions aired on the BBC Home Service in September and October 1952. They had actually been recorded in July so we must assume that Denis meant that the Peters would recreate the scenes on the day of recording, not transmission. 

The BBC only retained two episodes of the show. This is the first of them, the third show from series number one, as broadcast on the Friday evening of 3 October 1952. Musical links and interludes are provided by the Aeolian Players and singing is Rose Hill who, some three decades later would be known for playing Madame Fanny Le Fan, the bed-ridden mother in ‘Allo ‘Allo. The announcer is none other than Wallace Greenslade.

The ‘star’ characters of In All Directions would be, to quote Ustinov, “two deplorable spivs, Morrie and Dudley Grosvenor ...who have never reached a point of criminal proficiency where their activities would cause Scotland Yard to lose a wink of sleep.” They were already part of Ustinov and Jones’s repertoire before the series, dropping into impromptu routines at showbiz parties. In his autobiography Peter Ustinov explained further:

Peter and I invented a couple of characters out of the folklore of London, Morris and Dudley Grosvenor, low characters with high ambitions, as their name suggests. They spoke in the lisping accent of London's East End, and had endless wife trouble with their platinum-haired companions, as they did with the wretched character called simple  'The Boy' who was sent out on dangerous and sometimes criminal errands, in which he consistently failed. These programmes were improvised within a certain framework, and often they reached satisfactory heights of comic melancholy. Foolishly asking 'How's Zelda?' on one occasion, I received the following exercise in gloom from Peter Jones.

'Zelda? I'll tell you this much, Mowwie, if every evening after work you are hit on the head with a beer bottle with monotonous wegularity mawwiage soon loses its magic.'

So successful was the first run that it was swiftly repeated on the Home Service in January and February 1953 and again on the Light Programme in July and August. A Christmas special, broadcast on 24 December was quickly commissioned.

A second series of six episodes followed in May and June of 1953. Ustinov told the Radio Times that ‘Dudley Grosvenor and his brother Maurice will continue to crop up throughout the programmes. The only difference is that we’ve given up looking for Copthorne Avenue. Instead we shall be searching for such things as Britain’s Heritage and True Love: we think this idea will give us more scope.’

To give a flavour as to what the programme offered here’s a review from the Yorkshire Evening Post from 28 July 1953:

The sketches of In All Directions written and acted by Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones, revealed a barbed and brilliant wit.

There was the amiable and oh so amenable Yorkshireman who, with unsolicited patience, put up with the irascibilities of the Italian cafe proprietor in Soho in the vain hope of being served with food of some sort; and the air charter firm whose crew parachuted to safety, leaving the lone passenger to his fate.

But the shaft that really hit the bull’s eye was the peep behind the scenes of television’s In the News, the MP contestants simulating a towering rage with each other in front of the mike as a signal from the producer and pretending that the party bickering was unscripted whereas it had been carefully gone over beforehand. Afterwards the ‘enemies’ went off to dine together, the producer’s congratulations on the (spurious) quarrel ringing in their ears.

The inebriated, but extremely polite, gentleman in the bus shelter and the historian on the street corner were refreshingly funny caricature.   

It would be nearly two years until the third and final series came to fruition, this time they were in search of ‘a guide, philosopher and friend’, i.e. the producer Pat Dixon. This is the third episode from Friday 11 February 1955. There are a number of sketches spoofing BBC radio programmes including Animal, Vegetable and Mineral and World Theatre meets Mrs Dale’s Diary.

In the week after the first episode of the third series BBC television made an outside broadcast from Ustinov’s Chelsea home prosaically titled Peter Ustinov at Home. It was contrived that Peter Jones would happen to be in the study with his friend and they would perform an impromptu sketch along the lines of In All Directions. It was great publicity for the radio show.    

It is interesting to see how Ustinov is viewed as the senior partner in the show. The BBC classed it as a ‘personality-type show’ with Ustinov as the ‘personality’ and up until the third series all the fees were paid to his agent, much to Peter Jones’s chagrin. Barry Took recounts the time Peter Jones spoke as at a Press Association dinner and told a long anecdote about a dream he’d had at the end of which he was supposedly dead and hovering  over central London when he sees a newspaper placard that reads: Peter Ustinov Bereaved.

Of course, by this time Ustinov had already been acting on stage, in film and making radio appearances for just over a decade and had appeared in his first Hollywood film, Quo Vadis, a year before the first series of In All Directions. And if being a castaway on Desert Island Discs is an indication of stardom, Peter Ustinov had already appeared on it in 1951 and would feature twice more in 1956 and 1977. Peter Jones was a guest in 1962. 

The end of the third series of In All Directions wasn’t quite the end of the Ustinov-Jones partnership, nor the last we’d see or hear of Dudley and Maurice Grosvenor. On Boxing Day 1955 the two Peters were All at Sea, an hour long special on the Light Programme. They got together again for the 10^th anniversary of the Third Programme for In Third Gear (29 September 1956) which offered ‘much the same formula as In All Directions but set within the Third Programme orbit’. (An off-air recording is on YouTube).

In April 1959 Peter Jones was playing Dudley Grosvenor once more in the series We’re in Business with the Radio Times telling us that this was ‘a reference to the fact that Dudley is taking a new partner – Harry Worth. ‘With my brains and your private income ‘Arry, we’ll do alright,’ says Dudley’. Guest appearances were made by the likes of Dick Emery, June Whitfield, Nicholas Parsons, Harry Locke ad Frank Thornton. A second series followed in 1960 this time with Barry Took and Marty Feldman (their first joint writing venture) on board to help Peter Jones write the scripts. Dudley and Harry’s business headquarters moved from Syd’s Cafe to a boarding house run by Miss Jubilee Boot, played by Irene Handl. Dick Emery Graham Stark and Hugh Paddick were also in the cast.

The Grosvenor characters provided the influence for ‘The Winsome Welshmen’, two used- car salesman by the name of Dudley and Dunstan Dorchester in the 1960 film School for Scoundrels. Played by Peter Jones and Dennis Price they manage to flog Ian Carmichael a 1924 4-litre Swiftmobile – “make the cheque out to bearer if you don’t mind. And please don’t cross it sir, it confuses our books”. The on-screen writing credits are for Patricia Moyes, who was Ustinov’s personal assistant at the time, and producer Hal E. Chester but it was actually by Ustinov himself and Frank Tarloff, an American writer who was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings, that adapted the Stephen Potter books.

In All Directions and the Grosvenors were back in 1966 when BBC2 featured them as part of the Show of the Week strand. Frank Muir takes up the story:

I went over to Paris where Peter Ustinov was editing a film, and persuaded him to do an In All Directions for television with Peter Jones. There was no scenery or costumes. In one sketch Ustinov played a fat American speed cop. He asked the props department for an armchair fitted with good castors, and in the sketch it became his motorbike. He propelled it about the stage with his legs making motorbike and siren noises, and then went into a marvellous accent, brow-beating the unfortunate Peter Jones, an English tourist he had caught speeding.

The programme was broadcast in April 1966 and repeated over on BBC1 on Christmas Day. It was the last hurrah for In All Directions.   

“Dudley. Run for it!”

Series information

Series 1: 26.9.52 to 31.10.52 6 episodes on the Home Service repeated HS Jan-Feb 1953  and on the Light Programme July-Aug 1953

Christmas Special: 24.12.52 (HS) rpt 25.12.52

Series 2: 12.5.53 to 16.6.63 6 episodes (HS) repeated LP Aug-Sept 1953

Series 3: 28.1.55 to 4.3.55 6 episodes (HS) repeated HS May-June 1955

Peter Ustinov at Home 3.2.55 BBCtv

All at Sea 26.12.55 Light Programme

In Third Gear 29.5.56 Third Programme

We’re in Business series 1: 3.4.59 to 26.5.59 13 episodes (HS) – the final episode was retained by Sound Archives

We’re in Business series 2: 19.2.60 to 13 May 1960 (HS) – Transcription Services selected 7 episodes for release

Show of the Week presenting In All Directions 26.4.66 BBC2 repeated BBC1 24.12.66

Quotes from Clips from a Life by Denis Norden, A Kentish Lad by Frank Muir, Dear Me by Peter Ustinov and Laughter in the Air by Barry Took,  

A Scrapbook of Memories

With no sound archive to draw on early radio broadcasts about recent history, whether focussing on political or social developments, simply relied on some learned person giving a talk. Eventually feature programmes were created which included interviews with those who were either there at the time or held some expertise in the subject. To add further colour some events were recreated, often with effects and music, either by the participants themselves, assuming they were still around, or by using actors.   

This essentially is what the Scrapbook series did, a now forgotten programme that ran on BBC radio for forty years. It was a programme which ‘to thousands of listeners, as well as the critics ... represented the art of sound radio at its best’ and that ‘probably gave more pleasure than any other long-running series of BBC programmes.’ (1)

The person who devised and researched nearly all these programmes, just over one hundred in total, was journalist Leslie Baily. He would describe them as ‘an historical pageant in the air, a weaving of patterns in music and speech to evoke the events and emotions of years gone by’.

The first Scrapbook was broadcast on the North Regional service on 8 November 1932. Publicity for the programme read: ‘Old –fashioned scrapbooks in which there was such an odd, yet such an attractive conglomeration of contents, seem to be dying out altogether. This evening, in the North Regional programme, the first radio scrapbook ever to be compiled by Leslie W.A. Baily, a well-known Northern journalist, and will be produced by Wyndham Godden. As the name implies, it is just a variety of items - drama, music, poetry, song and comedy - all placed side by side with no idea of sequence.’(2)

The seemingly haphazard approach of the first programme did not garner entirely favourable reviews though: ‘Perhaps the trouble with the programme lay in its being too inconsequential. Even a scrapbook must, one feels, reflect something of the taste of its owner. This radio scrapbook, made, no doubt, in a far from leisurely way, betokened a too-catholic taste. I do not think the suspicion of a theme running through it would have destroyed its charm’. (3)

Four Scrapbooks were broadcast from the North before, in November 1933, it became a production for the National Programme. From now on each programme would look at a particular year and the technique was refined as Baily and producer Charles Brewer sought to ‘bring to the microphone people who did the things, who saw the things, that the Scrapbook recalls.’ That first National edition covered 1913 (see above) and included the Volturno Disaster, the Tango Craze, the Pelissier Follies, the production of Hindle Wakes and the Suffragette Movement. Lt-Col John Moore Brabazon reminisced about aviation, cricketer Percy Fender talked about the sport and Walford Hyden, musical director to Anna Pavlova, also contributed.   

By the following year a Scrapbook for 1909 employed a number of actors to dramatise events with the cast including Dorothy Holmes-Gore, Adele Dixon and Carleton Hobbs. There was music from the BBC Theatre Orchestra and the voices of Christabel Pankhurst, Ernest Shackleton, Winston Churchill and others played from gramophone records.

Twenty-eight editions of Scrapbook aired before World War II with some years being revisited such as 1913 having a revised Scrapbook in December 1937. Further editions were broadcast in wartime including a New Year’s Eve special billed as For Auld Lang Syne featuring forty years of memories and melodies. In the summer of 1940 a different approach was attempted with a series of Everybody’s Scrapbook (36 editions of 4 series 1940-43) with Baily explaining that instead of a particular year the memories would be ‘more widely selected’.   

How the Scrapbooks are made. Radio Times 2 November 1934

Writing in 1957 Baily said that ‘the Scrapbooks are now the oldest-established feature in British Radio’. He went on to say how he and producer Charles Brewer ‘in our wildest dreams and ambitions ... did not foresee that the Scrapbooks would still be running more than twenty years later’ and how ‘the large and faithful audience which the Scrapbooks continue to attract today, despite the counter-attraction of television.’

For many of the 1930s and 1940s editions the person who regularly turned the pages of the scrapbook, i.e. the narrator, was actor Patric Curwen. Post-war the main narrator was announcer Freddy Grisewood. In My Story of the BBC (1959) he wrote: ‘One of the chief reasons for its popularity is, of course, that there is always a nostalgic memory in each broadcast for practically every listener of mature years. I always marvel at the skill with which Leslie Baily selects the salient points, never missing anything of consequence. The he ferrets out suitable characters to relate the incidents from personal experience. He manages to track down the most surprising people; and when those who should have told the tale are dead he ably weaves in contemporary recordings of their speeches. The living and the dead thus meet as though the years stood still, thereby adding considerably to the sincerity of the scenes re-enacted.’ Others who provided narration were Carleton Hobbs, Gordon Davies and David Peel, commentator Robert Hudson, Jack de Manio, Desmond Carrington and, for the final 14 editions, Michael Flanders.  

Such was the popularity of the Scrapbooks that some were issued on disc as early as 1935 (Scrapbook for 1910) and in 1963 Fontana issued LPs for 1914, 1940 and 1945. (4) Baily also wrote three Scrapbook volumes covering 1900 to 1914, 1918-39 and one just on The Twenties. The retention rate of the programmes in the BBC Sound Archives is good and they have often been plundered for other documentary series and CD collections. Some audio clips of early BBC broadcasts, especially from the first decade before recordings were regularly kept, are, in fact, re-creations from Scrapbooks such as 2LO announcements by the first director of programmes Arthur Burrows. The Scrapbook for 1924 (Home Service 1958) had Beatrice Harrison playing her cello to coax the nightingales to sing but it had, in fact,  been recorded in 1955, though the nightingales proved microphone shy that eveing. (5) 

On one notable occasion the programme itself was responsible for unearthing a rare recording, that of the first royal broadcast when King George V spoke at the opening of the British Empire Exhibition on 23 April 1924. It was known that a recording had been made but that it was missing in the Sound Archives. Leslie Baily mentioned this in Scrapbook for 1924 (Home Service 23 February 1955) which prompted listener Dorothy Jones to contact the BBC saying that her husband had recorded it at home and that she still had the metal disc. (6)

As the series progressed and more recent years were featured so a greater use was made of archive recordings. So, for example, Scrapbook for 1940 broadcast in 1960 had the recorded voices of The Queen, Churchill, Eden, Chamberlain and so on as well as contributions recorded specially for the programme and a repertory of actors.

The Scrapbook team in 1960 of (l-r) producer Vernon Harris,
narrator Freddy Grisewood and Leslie Baily. Far right is
Sydney Moseley who'd worked for the Baird Television 
Company in 1932

By 1960 the 70^th Scrapbook was broadcast and the team had ticked off 40 years with Baily adding: ‘Sometimes we make a new version, and when we do this the old script is discarded’. (7) ‘Each show has a theme determined by the mood of the year under review’. New editions continued to be added in the 1960s, interspersed with repeats but there had been an interval of over two years when the programme re-appeared in April 1967 with Scrapbook for 1952. From then on the programmes were written and compiled by John Bridges as Leslie Baily, suffering from ill-health following a stroke in 1964, was stepping back from work, though he still advised the production team.

The final two Scrapbooks aired on Radio 4 in 1974 with Michal Flanders turning the pages for 1963 – JFK, Profumo, The Beatles etc. - the most recent year that the series alighted on, and a final wartime visit, a first time review of 1943. And that was it, apart a repeat of the final edition the following year the Scrapbooks have not been heard of again on BBC radio for over half a century. 

Leslie Baily illustration Daily Express
31 December 1949

What about the creator of the Scrapbooks? Leslie Baily was born in 1906 in St Albans and educated at the Quaker boarding school in Sibford, Oxfordshire, and Cheltenham Grammar School. He joined the staff of the Yorkshire Evening Post as a junior reporter, later becoming their radio correspondent, and then radio editor for the Sunday Referee.    

He started writing for the BBC in 1924, his first broadcast being an adaptation of A Christmas Carol for Belfast station 2BE. By his own admission his “knowledge of radio dramatic technique was nil” and that he adapted it “more or less as you would arrange him for stage”. The following year he was writing for the Leeds station including their first birthday programme The Spirit of 2LS. He continued to adapt and write works for both the Leeds and Manchester stations including Hello Yorkshire in 1926 featuring cricketer George Hirst and novelist Willie Riley which provided the germ of an idea for the Scrapbook series. Other works of note were The Trial of William Penn (8) that reconstructed the 1670 Old Bailey trail in which Penn was charged with ‘causing a tumult’; this was also broadcast by NBC in America. There was also The Fantastic Battle (9) based on a story by C.R. Burns about ‘a nation whose idealistic chief discovers a method by which war will be made an impossibility’; this was also broadcast in New Zealand, Canada and Ceylon. In 1937 he joined the staff of the BBC as a writer-producer in the Variety department working on shows such as The Story Behind the Show (‘the story of famous stage successes’), a series of ‘radiobiographies’ called Star-Gazing as well as the Scrapbooks.    

Baily left the BBC in 1946 to become a freelance writer for radio and television and also penning radio columns for the Evening News in London, Yorkshire Evening News and Lancashire Evening Post. As well as radio plays and features in 1947 he wrote and researched a six-part profile of Gilbert and Sullivan (10) and in 1950-51 edited and introduced Dear Sir... a ‘correspondence column of the air.’ This was followed by Leslie Baily’s Log Book (Light Programme 1953-4) billed as ‘a journey through Britain with a recording machine’. In one programme, for instance, he interviewed a sewerman in a Manchester sewer, a diver on the bed of the Clyde and met exiles from Lancashire on a Cornish flower farm. Baily made brief forays into television such as a weekly inert of scrapbooks on South Coast holiday resorts for Southern TV’s Day by Day programme (1962). 

During the 1950s he lived in Sibford where he was active on the Village Hall Committee and his wife Margaret in the local WI. In 1960 they moved to Saffron Walden but by the Spring of 1975 they were back in Yorkshire, at Shipton-by-Beningbrough, to live with family members. He died just under a year later, in February 1976. The obituary in The Times described him as ‘a pioneer of British radio broadcasting’ who will be ‘remembered with affection by more than one generation of listeners for the BBC Scrapbooks’.   

The idea of annual scrapbooks did not disappear completely from the airwaves. There was, for instance, the Radio 2 series A Year to Remember in which Cliff Michelmore ‘opens his scrapbook to capture the songs that made a particular year special’. Radio 1 had 25 Years of Rock (later 30 Years of Rock) and reworked as Radio 2’s Sounds of the 20^th Century ‘an audio journey through five decades of triumph, tragedy and trivia’. And, with a title refering directly back to the Scrapbook programmes, Chris Kelly played ‘soundtrack memories of a year in film’ in Radio 2’s Cinema Scrapbook. (11)

There was also another Scrapbook-related series, and I have some audio for this, and that was the 13-part series Time to Remember. Written and presented by Leslie Baily and produced by Scrapbook producer at the time, Vernon Harris, it took a more thematic approach rather than concentrating on a particular year, though it inevitably plundered the archive recordings from the Scrapbooks. Made for the BBC’s Transcription Service (so primarily aimed at overseas radio) it was also broadcast on the Home Service in 1962. Time to Remember was billed as follows: ‘ Leslie Baily, journalist and broadcaster, looks back on some of the events of our lives and introduces the recorded voices of famous personalities, past and present’.        

In the fourth edition titles Strange things are coming the theme is one of technological developments, especially radio. The story starts in 1896 with Guglielmo Marconi and moves to 1910 and the role of wireless in the arrest of Dr Crippen complete with recollections from Captain of the SS Montrose, Henry Kendall. Moving on to 1913 the importance of wireless signals in saving passengers and crew of the SS Volturno. Marconi engineers W.T. Ditcham and W.J. Pickett recall their experiments in trans-Atlantic transmissions from Ballybunion to Nova Scotia in 1919. Next we hear the voice of Robert Watson-Watt and his 1935 experiments that led to the invention of radar. The programme concludes with Bernard Lovell and the work at Jodrell Bank.

This edition of Time to Remember was broadcast on the Home Service on 25 July 1962, though it’s likely that the recording was made from a broadcast on another station as the continuity announcer says that another edition follows tomorrow at 5 pm, which doesn’t match the Home Service schedules of the time.  The recording was kindly donated to me by Duncan Lockhart.

(1) Quoted in The Golden Age of Wireless by Asa Briggs

(2) Report in the Hull Daily Mail 8 November 1923 p.8

(3) Review in the Yorkshire Post 12 November 1923 p.8

(4) The Scrapbook for 1940 is on Mixcloud – uploaded by Fred Bunzi – as is 1938 which comes from an off-air recording of the repeat on 10 July 1964

(5) The first programme retained in full is Scrapbook for 1901 (Regional Programme 1936) which includes author John Foster-Fraser who was an eye-witness to Queen Victoria’s funeral. The earliest surviving clips are of Scrapbook for 1921 (National Programme 1935) with actor Davy Burnaby on the Co-Optimists concert party, Marconi engineer Noel Ashbridge on early broadcasting and Harry Bateman talking about the R.38 airship disaster. Only clips remain of the wartime Everybody’s Scrapbook series.  

(6) For more on this seek out Paul Kerensa’s British Broadcasting Century podcast episode 85. Baily mentions this in his 1964 appearance on Desert Island Discs, available on BBC Sounds

(7) Surprisingly, despite scouring the pages of the BBC Programme Index it’s difficult to say precisely how many programmes were made. In 1959 when Scrapbook for 1936 was broadcast Baily wrote in the Radio Times that “there have been well over a hundred Scrapbooks” and that it was the 38^th year to have been covered. Yet a year later when Scrapbook for 1910 was transmitted he wrote that it was “our 70^th new production since the series began in 1933”. 

(8) First broadcast by the BBC on 7 May 1935 the cast included David Tennant, no, not that one. This David Tennant had been a 2LO announcer at Savoy Hill until 1929 when he married actress Hermione Baddeley. He was the son of Lord Glenconner and one of the original members of the Bohemian ‘Bright Young Things’. At the BBC’s HQ in Savoy Hill he was nicknamed the ‘£90,000 announcer’.  

(9) First broadcast on the Regional Programme on 11 September 1933 and repeated the following day on the National Programme. It was presented by Francis Worsley who would go on to produce ITMA as well as the wartime Scrapbooks and Everybody’s Scrapbook. The Fantastic Battle was revived in July 1934, this time produced by head of drama Val Gielgud. The story had originally appeared in the Radio Times for 3 August 1928.  

(10) This was remade in 1949 and again in 1955 and reworked as a 6-part series in 1965. In 1952 Baily’s The Gilbert and Sullivan Book was published by Cassell which formed the basis of the screen play he co-wrote with Sidney Gilliat for the 1953 film The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan starring Robert Morley and Maurice Evans.

(11) A Year to Remember ran on BBC Radio 2 for five series 1996-2001 with some editions presented by Cliff Morgan. 25 Years of Rock first aired on BBC Radio 1 in and five years later was extended as 30 Years of Rock. Those editions were then used as the basis for Sounds of the 20^th Century broadcast on Radio 2 in 2011-12. Cinema Scrapbook with Chris Kelly ran for six series between 1983 and 1988. There was also an earlier 1957 Light Programme music series titled  A Year to Remember with ‘melodious memories’ of a particular year’ scripted by Roy Plomley.

Time to Remember episode guide

1: The Changing World

2: Glamorous Nights

3 The Airship Men

4 Strange things are coming

5 The End of the War 1918-1945

6 The Edwardian Musical Stage

7 Science unlocks the secrets

8 History is People

9 Because It’s There

10 The Musical Stage Between the Wars

11 Adventures if Flight

12 Votes for Women

13 The War to End Wars

Scrapbook episode guide

RP=Regional Programme NP=National Programme FP=Forces Programme HS=Home Service R4=Radio 4

Most of the pre-war editions were first broadcast on either the National or Regional Programme and then repeated the same week on the other service. All are titled Scrapbook for ... whichever year unless otherwise indicated

1 RP (North) 8 November 1932

2 RP (North) 7 January 1933

3 RP (North) 3 February 1933

4 RP (North) 6 March 1933

1913 NP 11 December 1933

1909 RP 19 February 1934

1914 NP 7 May 1934

1910 RP 24 September 1934

1918 RP 9 November 1934

1921 NP 12 February 1935

1905 NP 5 June 1935

1911 NP 21 November 1935

1914 NP 23 March 1936

1924 RP 27 May 1936

1901 RP 24 September 1936

1908 RP 10 November 1936

1922 RP 21 January 1937

1912 NP 9 March 1937

1902 NP 7 May 1937

1907 RP 25 October 1937

1913 NP 17 December 1937 ‘reissued with new episodes and new personalities’

1900 Victorian 24 February 1938

1928 NP 26 April 1938

1914 4 August 1938 ‘a revival of the original production in May 1934’

1923 NP 11 October 1938

1903 NP 6 December 1938

1909 NP 7 February 1939 ‘revised version with new features and songs’

1929 NP 2 May 1939

1906 HS 29 October 1939

1929 HS 12 November 1939

1910 HS 3 December 1939

For Auld Lang Syne 1900-1940 Forty years of memories and melodies 31 December 1939

1930 HS 11 February 1940

1923 HS 31 March 1940

1903 HS 28 April 1940

Songs from the Scrapbooks FP 23 May 1943

1929 HS 23 December 1945

1919 HS 3 February 1946

1910 HS 3 March 1946

1937 HS 31 March 1946

1901 HS 5 May 1946 ‘revised edition’

1906 HS 27 October 1946

1925 HS 24 November 1946

Victorian Scrapbook HS 22 December 1946

1912 HS 21 December 1947

1927 HS 18 January 1948

1933 HS 15 February 1948

1939 HS 16 October 1949

1899 HS 25 December 1949

1929 HS 15 March 1950

1904 HS 11 June 1950

1902 HS 21 December 1952

1935 HS 18 January 1953

1937 HS 8 March 1953

1903 HS 22 November 1953

1914 HS 28 December 1954

1924 HS 23 February 1955

1930 HS 20 March 1955

1905 HS 1 November 1955

1945 HS 29 December 1955

1920 HS 31 January 1956

1934 HS 27 June 1956

1922 HS 31 October 1956

1896 Victorian HS 26 December 1956

1939 HS 30 January 1957

1947 HS 17 March 1957

1911 HS 21 April 1957

1928 HS 2 June 1957

1951 HS 10 October 1957

The Story of Scrapbook HS 19 November 1957

1908 HS 1 January 1958

1951 HS 8 March 1958

1918 HS 8 November 1958

1936 HS 25 February 1959

1919 30 September 1959

1949 25 November 1959

The BBC’s Christmas Scrapbook HS 24 December 1959

1932 HS 24 January 1960

1946 HS 20 March 1960

1910 HS 15 May 1960

1940 HS 5 October 1960

1931 HS 15 January 1961

1926 HS 7 March 1961

1921 HS 2 October 1961

1938 HS 7 September 1962

1922 HS 14 November 1962 40^th anniversary of the BBC

1902 HS 23 January 1963

1953 HS 26 June 1963

1907 An Edwardian Scrapbook HS 15 October 1964

1914 HS 11 November 1964

1952 HS 19 April 1967

1917 R4 7 December 1967

1930 R4 6 August 1968

1918 Armistice Scrapbook R4 10 November 1968

1948 R4 9 April 1969

1911 R4 25 June 1969

1923 R4 13 November 1969

1950 R4 5 March 1970

1945 R4 7 May 1970

1933 R4 25 August 1970

1900 R4 1 December 1970

1948 R4 23 April 1971

1926 R4 12 October 1971

1935 R4 13 March 1973

1941 R4 4 September 1973

1963 R4 5 March 1974

1943 R4 14 May 1974

 

Everybody’s Scrapbook episode guide

The narrator was Patric Curwen and producer Francis Worsley. All broadcast on the Home Service except some series 4 episodes that aired on the Forces Programme.

Series 1: Weekly then fortnightly with 12 episodes 25 July – 13 December 1940

Series 2: Monthly with 6 episodes 23 March – 10 August 1941

Series 3: Monthly with 7 episodes 28 December 1941 – 7 June 1942

Series 4: Mostly fortnightly with 11 episodes 27 September 1942 – 31 March 1943

70 Years of Correspondence

“To be a foreign correspondent is to inhabit a world in which abroad is home, in which communications are lifeblood and in which ‘the story’ is elevated to the status of a god that must, at whatever cost, be treated with reverence and with constant attention to its capricious changes of mood or substance.” 

From Our Own Correspondent, always known in BBC-speak as FOOC, has been a fixture of the radio schedules for seven decades. It was first broadcast on the BBC Home Service on Sunday 25 September 1955 when announcer Colin Doran introduced as follows: "This is the BBC Home Service. From our own correspondent. We are broadcasting now the first of a new series of programmes in which BBC correspondents will deal with current affairs as seen from their own posts in various parts of the world," There followed reports from six BBC correspondents, three based in the States and three European-based. This actually represented nearly 50% of all the overseas correspondents the BBC employed at that time as there were only 13 of them. (1)

For many years the programme was introduced by staff announcers but since 1998 former foreign correspondent Kate Adie has been the regular presenter. FOOC is also heard on the World Service (2) and since 1990 has been produced separately from the domestic version with its own presenters. Again it was World Service announcers that introduced each edition, until about 2006 when broadcast journalists started to present it. More recent presenters have included Alan Johnston, Owen Bennett-Jones and, since 2012, Pascale Harter.   

Here’s a Radio 4 example of FOOC with announcer Laurie Macmillan presenting. This edition dates from Saturday 27 December and includes reports from Tim Sebastian in Warsaw, Philip Short in Peking (now Beijing), John Thorne in Johannesburg, David Willey (who would become the BBC’s longest-serving correspondent with over 40 years based in Italy) in Rome and Bob Jobbins (later the Head of the Arabic Service) in Cairo.

     

In my last blog post on FOOC, back in September 2015, I included a recording from 1985 when the programme marked its 30th anniversary. Now, ten years on I’m going back another five years to the 25th anniversary in 1980. This programme titled Foreign Correspondent was introduced by Ian McDougall. Ian had been a BBC foreign correspondent since 1949 initially posted to Paris but eventually filing more than 10,000 reports from 40 countries. From 1979 until his retirement in 1988 he was the editor and presenter of Radio 3’s current affairs programme Six Continents.   

In Foreign Correspondent Ian talks to, as the Radio Times billing reads, “some of those who were ‘in at the beginning’ about the excitements, the frustrations and the challenges of being a foreign correspondent for the BBC”. 

In an accompanying article (above) by Vivien Lipschitz there is mention of the early difficulties of filing reports, the changing nature of foreign reporting and the increasing demands for more and more reports – at this time most correspondents tended to work in either radio or television with bi-media reporting coming back in from the mid-90s.

Contributing to Foreign Correspondent are: Angus McDermid on communication problems, Ivor Jones recalls the Hungarian revolution, Christopher Serpell with tales of Cuba, Gerald Priestland recalls one of his dispatches been sent off in a beer bottle, Charles Wheeler who had a report tapped out in Morse code, Erik de Mauny on censorship in Russia, Anthony Lawrence, the first editor of FOOC when he was Foreign Duty Editor, on finally getting into China, Douglas Stuart on the aftermath of the JFK assassination and Kenneth Matthews, the BBC’s first ever foreign correspondent, on the start of FOOC. 

If this all sounds rather like a gentlemen’s club that’s because the BBC was still six years away from appointing Diana Goodman as their first female foreign correspondent who was based in Bonn. She would be joined just a few weeks later by Elizabeth Blunt to cover West Africa and in 1989 by Bridget Kendall who was posted to Moscow.

Foreign Correspondent was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 29 September 1980 and repeated on Saturday 4 October 1980.

 

To mark the 70^th anniversary of FOOC the BBC is recording a special programme at the Radio Theatre on 1 October for broadcast in December. Hosted by former BBC Middle East correspondent and Today presenter Anna Foster, the event will feature a panel of special guests including From Our Own Correspondent presenter Kate Adie and current senior BBC foreign correspondents.

Further listening

Here are a number of Radio 4 and World Service programmes that mark the 50th and 60th anniversaries of FOOC. 

The Archive Hour: Celebrating 50 Years of From Our Own Correspondent

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001kh3y

Fifty Years of FOOC – The Americas with Bridget Kendall

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03js6p7

Fifty Years of FOOC – Middle East with Lyse Doucett

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03js6ps

Fifty Years of FOOC – Europe with Caroline Wyatt

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03js6q1

Fifty Years of FOOC – Asia with Mark Tully

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03js6pw

Fifty Years of FOOC – Africa with Mark Doyle

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03js6q6

From Our Own Correspondent: 60th Anniversary Special with Owen Bennett-Jones

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b069xbmd

Archive on 4: From Our Rome Correspondent (on David Willey)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01fhlqd

There are over 1,000 editions of FOOC on BBC Sounds on BBC Radio 4 and 2,000 on the BBC World Service page.

(1) This was the number of correspondents posted abroad for fixed terms and included a resident correspondent at the UN headquarters in New York. If a major foreign news story broke the BBC could also send other home based correspondents to the area.

(2) I can’t trace exactly when the World Service also started to carry the programme other than some time in the 1960s. When FOOC started in the 50s the General Overseas Service equivalent was called Special Despatch. 

Questions of Sport

Questions on sport are always a part of any general knowledge quiz but radio has, with just a couple of minor exceptions, pretty much stayed away sports-based quiz shows for the last 30 years. Meanwhile, on the telly you could watch, at least until recently, A Question of Sport or A League of their Own, though the BBC offering had long since strayed from anything approaching a serious quiz and Sky’s show was likened to A Question of Sport without sports questions. 

From the 1960s through to the 1990s radio regularly posed sports questions in Sporting Chance, Brain of Sport, Games People Play and a pre-tv version of They Thinks It’s All Over. Of more recent vintage, and those minor exceptions I mentioned above, are a talkSPORT Sports Quiz and even some radio editions of A Question of Sport, both broadcast during the Covid pandemic.

In the 1940s and 50s there were occasional sports quizzes on BBC radio such as the wartime Captain Cuttle’s Sports Quiz during Ack-Ack, Beer-Beer (the magazine for the Anti-Aircraft, Balloon Barrage and Searchlight Units), youngsters competing in Children’s Hour quizzes or The Younger Generation Under 20 Parade, this with Rex Alston as question master. The Welsh Home Service put sporting questions to teams in Sports Forum (1953-54) and although the Scottish Home Service also broadcast what was billed as Sport Quiz (1950-52) this turns out to be a “weekly feature in which experts answer questions on sport put to them by members of a studio audience”.

Some serious sports quizzing starts to appear in the autumn of 1957 when Sports Report (Light Programme) broadcasts an Inter-Regional Quiz; this pits a team of BBC national sports commentators against regional sports reporter colleagues. But it was Welsh broadcasting legend and producer Alun Williams who developed the idea of sports clubs competing in a knockout quiz. Going out on the Welsh Home Service in late 1957/early 1958 was Top of the League. This saw football supporters clubs talking part in a Top of the Form fashion, with the recording made at two venues and the team and a quizmaster at each. Posing the questions were Alun himself and Ifor Rees. This was followed by another Welsh Home Service series, again devised by Alun, called Make Your Mark. For the first series in 1958 the slant was towards the game of rugby with members of rugby clubs answering questions ‘on the laws of the game, its personalities, their own club and general sport.’ For the second 1959-60 series both rugby and football clubs competed, this time dealing with ‘questions of a general sporting nature’. Joining Alun as question master for Make Your Mark was Cliff Morgan.  Cliff also hosted a TV version of the quiz in 1959/60 as part of the weekly Welsh Sports Parade.   

Sporting Chance 24 June 1968

On national radio the first regular sports quiz was the Light Programme show Sporting Chance (1960-74). The original chairperson was Brian Johnston and it was devised by Michael Tuke-Hastings (who later would also come up with the Treble Chance quiz). Initially an inter-town quiz, later series were also inter-services and from 1963 invited teams played against a resident team made up of commentators and sports journalists.  Setting the questions was cricketer and scorer Roy Webber who, following his death in 1962, was succeeded in the role by two more Test Match Special statisticians:  Arthur Wrigley and, from 1967, Bill Frindall.

The 1964 series of Sporting Chance had the resident team of Maurice Edelston, Peter West and Alun Williams playing against a team of four boys representing a school (with the supposition, no doubt, that no girls would be interested in sport). Rounds included ‘I’ll Always Remember’ in which well-known sports persons recalls a highlight of their career, a ‘Guess the Year Round’ and a ‘Spot the Mistake’ in which a commentator makes one deliberate mistake. The questions were in the main confined to ‘Rugger, Soccer, Cricket, Athletics, Swimming, Boxing and Lawn Tennis’ but apparently, according to Frindall, horse racing was ‘‘for some unfathomable reason considered unsuitable”.   

Both Sporting Chance, and Brain of Sport that followed, took their quizzing seriously probably because both were produced by the Sport and OB department. Michael Tuke-Hastings was, from 1957 to 1972, the producer of Test Match Special which may explain the reason he approached cricket scorers to set the questions. Other producers of Sporting Chance included Geoff Dobson and John Fenton who both directed the Sports Service on Network Three (later Radio 3) and Sport on 2.   

A question from the Brain of Sport 1980 quiz book 

Sporting Chance was followed by Brain of Sport (1975-89) with heats and a grand final and questions split between general and specialist rounds. The programmes were recorded at sports clubs and social clubs around the country. Again devised by Michael Tuke-Hastings it was chaired by Peter Jones and this time writing the questions was Chris Rhys. Chris was a rugby player turned freelance journalist who wrote over 20 books on sport, including some Brain of Sport quiz books, and also researched ITV’s response to A Question of Sport, Sporting Triangles. After Tuke-Hastings stepped aside from production duties it fell to Paul Garside, Patricia Ewing, Richard Maddock, Caroline Elliott, Joanne Watson, Pat Thornton and Gill Pulsford.  

The 13 champions of Brain of Sport are listed on the UK Game Shows website and there’s a rare recording of a 1984 edition on the Ye Olde Sports Videos channel on YouTube. There were also occasional Brain of Sport Challenge specials were, much like the Sporting Chance days, finalists would take on three sports commentators

Games People Play (Radio 2 1975-78) was a more light-hearted affair, produced by Richard Willcox of the Light Entertainment department, It was billed as testing the knowledge of ‘well-known stars of entertainment and sport’. So, for instance, on the first show it was Mike and Bernie Winters, Graham Hill and Bob Wilson. Other appearing in the first series included Eric Morecambe, Bernard Cribbins, David Hamilton, Pete Murray, Chris Brasher, Henry Cooper, Graham Hill, Fred Trueman and Barry John. Asking the questions this time was Peter West.  

Before its went over to BBC1 They Think It’s All Over enjoyed a short life on BBC Radio 5 (1992-4). It was created by comedy writers Bill Matthews and Simon Bullivant, both of whom had started writing for Week Ending. Chairing proceedings was Des Lynam and as team captains were Rory McGrath, who went on to be a regular on the TV version, and, getting the opportunity to try out his commentator impressions, Rory Bremner.   

From the second series comes this edition that was broadcast on Radio 5 on 21 February 1993, though my recording is of the Radio 4 repeat on 17 July. Des gets the first big laugh of the show with “Meet a man whose rich vocal talents are adored by millions. (short pause) Good evening”. The guest players in this edition are Steve Davis and Roger Black.  

Which brings me to Game, Set and Match and yet another series with Chris Rhys setting the questions. If this one usually slips under the sports quiz radar that’s because it aired on the BBC World Service. Chairing this was World Service sports stalwart Paddy Feeny (so I find myself writing about Paddy for the second time this year). I’ve little information about the programme other than it ran for 20 editions over three series in 1993, 1994 and 1995. This recording comes from the third series (I can’t date it precisely) and facing the questions are hurdler Kriss Akabusi (you’ll recognise the laugh), hockey player Simon Mason, rower Steve Redgrave and squash player Peter Nicol. Keeping the score is Louise Friend, extracts are read by announcer John Stone and the producer is Gillian Grey.     

Game, Set and Match

Series 1: 7 episodes August and September 1993

Series 2: 6 episodes August and September 1994 

Series 3: 7 episodes in April and May 1995.

Sporting Chance with Brian Johnston, then John Snagge, John Arlott , Alun Williams, Max Robertson and Peter Jones . BBC Light Programme (with repeats on the Sports Service of Network Three) and BBC Radio2 from 16 January 1960 to 16 June 1969 over 10 series. It returned as Quiz on 2 as part of Sport on 2 November 1973 to January 1974 with Peter Jones as questionmaster. Reverted back to Sporting Chance November to December 1974 again with Peter Jones and again during Saturday afternoon’s Sport on 2.

Brain of Sport with Peter Jones. BBC Radio 2 November 1975 to December 1989 over 13 series. The first series was broadcast as part of Sport on 2. 

Games People Play chaired by Peter West. 39 programmes over four series on BBC Radio 2 between 4 September 1975 and 22 September 1978.

The Matchplay Quiz was a junior sports quiz chaired by Paul McDowell. BBC Radio 2 for one series 8 August to 26 September 1987.

They Think It’s All Over with Desmond Lynam and team captains Rory Bremner and Rory McGrath. BBC Radio 5 6 episodes 21 February to 27 March 1992 then 8 episodes 14 February to 4 April 1993 plus two Christmas specials with guests Brian Johnston and John Motson December 1993/January 1994.

 talkSPORT Sports Quiz March to September 2020 with Darren Bent and Laura Woods or Faye Carruthers or Lynsay Hipgrave

A Question of Sport with Mark Chapman, Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell 4 April to 13 June 2020 plus 24 December 2020.

If you have any recordings of the other quizzes I’ve mentioned that you’d like to donate I’d love to hear from you. Also if you happen to have any copies of London Calling or BBC Worldwide from the mid-90s please do get in touch.  

And the answers to the Brain of Sport 'Who are they?' questions are: Sebastian Coe, Hallamshire Harriers, Alberto Jantuorena (Cuba) and Zurich