Pure Radio – Featuring Nesta Pain

This post was originally going to be called Flies and Greenflies but I thought that might lead you to think I was writing about an edition of Gardeners’ Question Time rather than a radio feature from a series that looked at the world of insects and other creepy-crawlies. You’ll find out why later. The creator of the programme was the writer and producer Nesta Pain.

Nesta Pain was on the staff of the BBC from 1942 until 1963 but continued to work for the Corporation on a freelance basis until the 1980s. She is principally remembered for her work on ‘Features’ and her radio adaptations of novels and plays. Despite having no formal scientific training she would become a leading writer and producer of science-based programmes, so much so that the BBC Handbook for 1950 picks her out for her ‘continued indefatigably to interpret the mysteries of science to the lay listener’.

The Features Department has started life in 1928 as a small Programme Research Section attached to the Drama Department. It was especially concerned with new dramatic techniques and the new possibilities offered by the mixing and controlling unit, later known as the Dramatic Control Panel.

The eventual head of Features, Laurence Gilliam, attempted a definition and described it as ‘a group of writers and producers...exploring the possibilities of the radio medium itself. Because what they produced fitted no known formula, and for that reason stood out from the run of programmes stemming from existing forms, they were grouped under the generic title of features programmes.’

A feature programme, Gilliam explained, ‘should be an expression of one mind, whatever technique it uses’ and that it is ‘pure radio, a new instrument for the creative writer and producer.’ The features programmes were researched and scripted, though they might include unscripted interviews and reality recorded on location. They usually involved actors, music and sound effects. It was into this environment that Nesta Pain started to flourish following her appointment to the team as a producer and writer in June 1943. In particular she was championed by the Assistant Controller of Programmes, Lindsay Wellington, who was keen to see more scientific programmes being commissioned. 

The 1950 book on BBC Features offered this glowing introduction to her work so far: 

Nesta Pain ... has steadily won an increasing public for her programmes on scientific subject, among them So This is Man, The Silent Areas, the series War Against Disease, and the Light Programme science magazine Searchlight. Educated at Liverpool University, where she read classics, and at Oxford, Nesta Pain claims no scientific training. This is probably one secret of her success with leading scientists in many fields, who have been generous with their co-operation with one so expert in her own field of exposition. 

Nesta Pain was born Florence Nesta Kathleen Taylor in Liverpool in 1905, the daughter of a ship-owner. From the age of ten she attended a boarding school, West Heath at Ham Common in Richmond upon Thames, and in the Sixth Form she discovered she had a passion for classics but was discouraged from attempting a scholarship at Oxford because she had started to learn Latin and Greek too late. Instead she went to Liverpool University to read classics. “In my first year I got engaged and married. In my second I produced my daughter Angela, and in my third I got a First.” A few years later she did eventually get to Oxford to read comparative philology. She began to write magazine articles, made a start at writing a novel and did a correspondence course in journalism. An involvement with the Liverpool Playhouse gave her the impetus to write a play, The Jews of York, which was performed at London’s Duchess Theatre in 1939. Her next effort was a farce that was produced by a repertory company in 1941. It was her plays that brought her to the attention of the BBC by way of the husband of an old school friend, Scottish Regional Programme Director Andrew Stewart (at the time seconded to the Ministry of Information). By 1942 she had separated from her architect and surveyor husband, Coard Henry Pain, was living down in London with her 15-year old daughter and in April that year she joined the BBC, initially on a temporary contract working for the Overseas Service at Bush House.    

A picture of domesticity whisking up another production.
Reynolds Newspaper 2 August 1959  

One of her first notable early features was on sleeping sickness for the series War Against Disease (Home Service, 26 February 1944). Nesta was doing some research at the Colonial Office which led her to interview a leading authority at the School of Tropical medicine. ‘I got it all up in three days and began to talk to him hopefully. He said:”Would you like to see a trypanosome – that’s the organism which causes sleeping sickness?” He pricked the tail of an infected mouse, slipped a drop of blood on to a slide. There was this astonishing sight, the corpuscles being pushed by hundreds of dragon-like monsters. That, for the first time, made me really interested in science.’   

Tenacious and thorough in her research, on at least one occasion a broadcast irked officialdom, as was the case with Focus on Milk (Light Programme, 25 February 1947). Stephen Potter, another writer/producer in Features, made this diary entry:

Laurence very excited about what really is an extraordinary affair about today’s Milk feature. Nesta Pain was absolutely third degreed by the Milk Marketing  Board and Sir Donald van de Peer, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, tried to get Haley [the Director-General Sir William Haley] to stop the broadcast. In other words, vested interests (farmers), represented in both Board and Ministry, attempt to stop this broadcast, approved by doctors and by Ministry of Health. 2000 children die yearly from non-pasteurisation of milk.     

Nesta fostered working relationships with a number of scientists to help inform her programmes. This included Professor Alexander Fleming who helped with War Against Microbes (Home Service 1944) - he also wrote an introductory piece for the Radio Times – and Louis Pasteur (Home Service 1945). She favoured dramatic reconstructions with a cast of actors rather than interviews and location recordings. One of her staff reviews by Laurence Gilliam observed that ‘Mrs. Pain is devoted to the dramatized style of documentary and allergic to actuality.’ For instance in The Atom Explodes (Home Service 1945 and retained by Sound Archives) included some familiar names in the cast: Laidman Browne, Valentine Dyall, Norman Shelley and Carleton Hobbs.

Her first feature on the world of insects was in 1951 (Home Service 23 October 1951) on the subject of ants - ‘their agricultural and pastoral pursuits, their mating flights, their slave raids, and their life in the nest together.’  From the off she engaged Antony Hopkins to compose the music. Hopkins would later became well-known for his long-running series (1954-1992) Talking About Music.  She had become interested in insects after reading Social Life of the Insect World by French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. Of Fabre she said: “No naturalist has ever carried out such detailed and imaginative experiments as Fabre did, or observed the lives and habits of insects with such devoted care, or recorded them with such charm.“

Further insect-related programmes followed at intervals between 1952 and 1958 covering Beetles, Spiders, Scorpions, Honey Bees, White Ants, Grasshoppers and so on. She authored a couple of related books on the subject: Lesser Worlds in 1953 and Grassblade Jungle in 1957.

In 1962, and again in 1963, the insect series was revived on the Home Service with either new programmes, new productions of the originals or repeats from the 1950s broadcasts. Introducing them for the Radio Times (23 August 1962) Nesta Pain attempted to explain what they were all about, though when she says the first one was on the subject of spiders this seems to contradict the listings which show it was ants (see above):

The insect series began with a single programme on spiders (which are not, of course, insects). It was not intended to have a successor, but Antony Hopkins, who composed the music, and I became so attached to the type of programme that we kept on doing ‘just one more’ until in the end we had broadcast a dozen. It is difficult to say what these programmes are. They are certainly not straight natural history, and they are not intended to inform. They are not really allegorical and they are not, strictly speaking, satire. Nor are they altogether comedy. Perhaps they are ’Horror Comics’. Certainly they were once described in the Press as ‘suavely shocking,’ and an eminent critic, who was to discuss one of them on air, exclaimed to his wife, ‘I will not listen to this – no, not for money!’ But he did.

Five of them are to be broadcast in this present series – Grasshoppers, Beetles, The Praying Mantis, White Ants and Spiders. Michael Hordern will once again be the narrator. David King-Wood is flying back from America especially to play his old parts. Lionel Harris will once more be heard as Dr Muffet, Heron Cavic as the more sinister entomologist who snips off wings in the interests of science, and Duncan Carse as the more kindly observer who sees poetry in insect life.

Antony Hopkins’s music was incomparable – witty, gay, heartrending, or macabre as the occasion required. I am looking forward to hearing it again.

The BBC Transcription Service issued ten programmes on five discs for overseas sale under the title Grass Blade Jungle. The editions were: White Ants, The Praying Mantis, Beetles, Grasshoppers, Spiders, Flies and Greenflies, The Solitary Wasp, Scorpions, Cicadas and Ants and Wasps. It was one of these Transcription Service versions, on Flies and Greenflies, that you can now hear.  

The recording was made in about 1980 from a Radio New Zealand broadcast by Duncan Lockhart who kindly sent me a copy earlier this year. The programme was retained in the BBC Sound Archives but to my knowledge it hasn’t been repeated on BBC radio since its first broadcast on the Home Service on Friday 27 September 1963.  

The opening announcement tells to what we can hear about: ‘The courtship of gnats and their need for blood. The anthrax fly and the sinister requirements of its young. The mild-mannered greenfly and its numerous persecutors’. 

The other significant part of Nesta’s output was producing, and in some cases adapting novels, for radio, some of which went on to be filmed. These included: Richard Gordon’s Doctor at Sea (Home Service 1953) with David King-Wood as the Doctor (filmed in 1955 with Dirk Bogarde in the main role), the tales of a newly qualified barrister in Henry Cecil’s Brothers in Law (Home Service 1955) with Donald Sinden as Roger Thursby (filmed by the Boulting Brothers in 1957 with Ian Carmichael as Thursby) and Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Third Programme 1961) with Barry Foster (a Tony Richardson directed film with Tom Courtenay in 1962).

Doctor at Sea first broadcast on the Home Service 27 August 1953.
Cast included David Kossoff, Norman Shelley and John Laurie 

But her most significant partnership, lasting for a decade, was with John Mortimer. It was in about 1955 that Nesta first approached him to write a play for her though he ‘put it off for a considerable time’, but eventually a lunch and persistent phone calls spurred him on to write The Dock Brief (Third Programme 1957), a two-hander with Michael Hordern as the inept defence barrister and David Kossoff  as the wily criminal. The production won the Drama Prix Italia that year, was adapted for BBC television with the same cast later that year, was staged in London the following year (with Maurice Denham replacing Kossoff) and was made into a 1962 MGM film in 1962 starring Peter Sellers and Richard Attenborough. The Dock Brief also partly provided the inspiration for Rumpole of the Bailey, indeed Mortimer was initially keen for Hordern to be cast as Rumpole, the role eventually going to Leo McKern. Hordern would get the starring role in Paradise Postponed (ITV 1986).

John Mortimer described Nesta Pain as "a remarkable woman who talked precisely but with a slight stammer and seemed like an enlightened headmistress, a marked contrast to the expansive grey-haired men in knitted ties and the hard-drinking poets who stood around her in the bar of the George.” [Pub on Great Portland Street frequented by BBC staff]

Further collaborations with Mortimer were I Spy (Third Programme 1957), A Voyage Around My Father (Third Programme 1963 plus the tv adaptation for BBC2 1969), Education of an Englishman (Third Programme 1964), Personality Split (Third Programme 1964), The Rare Device (Home Service 1965), What Shall We Tell Caroline? (Third Programme 1966) and Hampton Court (Home Service 1967).   

In 1964 the Features Department was closed, squeezed out by the growing importance of current affairs, at the time attached to Talks. By November that year the producers had been reallocated with Nesta Pain transferred to Drama. Her productions included portraits of various royal and historical figures (William I, Mary Tudor, Cromwell, Nelson, Wellington, Palmerston etc.), the serials Stay of Execution (Light Programme 1965) with another one of her favoured actors, Barry Foster,  Host Planet Earth (Light Programme 1967) and Games Without Rules (Radio 2 1968). Another actor often employed by Pain was Joan Miller, BBC tv’s switchboard operator on the pre-war programme Picture Page. Amongst Miller’s credits were Richard’s Gordon’s Women in Medicine (Home Service 1954), Philip Levine’s story of a store detective Light Fingers (Home Service 1956), an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains (Third Programme 1962) and Angus Wilson’s Crazy Crowd (Radio 3 1967).

In 1970 Nesta directed the mammoth 20-part dramatisation of War and Peace. In 1973 she was the producer of the story of Queen Victoria starring Peggy Ashcroft in the 13-part Dear and Honoured Lady. 

Her final radio credits included Letters from a Governess (Radio 4 1980) and Smallbone Deceased based on Michael Gilbert’s novel. This was originally broadcast on Radio 4 in 1971 with Nesta producing and then reworked in 1987 from her adaptation with Glyn Dearman directing.

In her later years Nesta had problems with her sight but surgery did help restore it. She continued writing for the press, wrote tapes for the Science Museum and completed her (unpublished) autobiography On First Sighting. She died in London in 1995.

Further reading:

The book BBC Features (1950, Evans Bothers Ltd) edited by Laurence Gilliam is available to borrow on the Internet Archive. You’ll also find Nesta Pain’s books Grassblade Jungle, The King and Becket, Science and Slimming and Louis Pasteur.

I’ve concentrated on Nesta Pain’s radio work but she was also involved in television production. For more on this search for Translating Radio Productions into Television Programmes: The Post-War Career of BBC Writer/Producer Nesta Pain by Kate Terkanian in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (October 2024)  

Further listening:

I reckon that under 10% of Nesta Pain’s work has been retained in the BBC Sound Archives; many of the early programmes would’ve been broadcast live. Sadly few have been repeated but the major exceptions are, of course, The Dock Brief, most recently repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra in 2017, Host Planet Earth, last heard in 2022 (a copy is on YouTube), and There Will Come Soft Rains, last repeated in 2025 (a copy is on Internet Archive). The drama Smallbone Deceased is on YouTube and Internet Archive, as is the Transcription Service issue of A Tune on the Old Tax Fiddle (Home Service 1960) with Michael Hordern and John Slater. Also on Internet Archive is another Michael Gilbert collaboration, The Last Chapter (Radio 4 1970) and the 1977 revised repeat of Beetles.  

So Long, Long Wave

After 102 years of broadcasting on the long wave and after forty-eight years of Radio 4’s presence on long wave the service closes on 27 June 2026. This now leaves just five countries in the world still broadcasting on long wave, that’s Romania, Poland, Morocco, Algeria and Mongolia. Other major broadcasters who have recently shut down their long wave transmitters include Europe 1 (December 2019) and RTÉ Radio 1 (April 2023). 

The closure of Radio 4 long wave has been a long time coming. In 2011 the then Director-General  Mark Thompson suggested it may end as part of  yet another round of cuts citing that it was only used by about 90,000 homes. The transmitter equipment was reaching the end of its life and the stock of valves dwindling as they are no longer manufactured. There were a couple of stumbling blocks. Firstly, what to do with the programmes that went out on long wave only. These were Yesterday in Parliament, the Daily Service and some of the Shipping Forecast bulletins. The answer was to shift the first two over to Radio 4 Extra. As for the Shipping Forecast the number of readings was cut down from four to two (three on weekends) and the final long wave only forecast was read at noon on 31 March 2024.

The second issue is that of RTS, the radio teleswitching system that piggy-backs on the radio signal and controls electricity meters, switching on Economy 7 storage heating and the like. As of this time last year over 300,000 homes still had RTS meters waiting to be converted to smart meters but I’ve not seen anything more recent that suggests how this rollout programme is progressing and what happens after June if households haven’t been switched over. For the technically minded RTS, which started in 1985, uses something called Phase Shift Keying to send messages over the airwaves via a Central Teleswitching Control Unit in Edinburgh onto the BBC Message Assembler at Crystal Palace and then on to the three long wave transmitters.

There will be a knock-on impact outside the UK as well where the long wave signal reaches a large expanse of northern Europe. For anyone still relying on old tech, or like myself still able to pick up Radio 4 on their car radio here in France, albeit with some interference everytime I pass a telegraph pole or pylon, it will be a sad loss, coming as it does a year after the lockdown of BBC Sounds for international listeners. I first remember hearing the BBC on long wave on a school trip to the Brittany coast in 1973. On a rainy day at Cancale our coach driver switched on the radio and picked up Radio 2. It was the Jimmy Young show in case you’re wondering.

Let’s also hope that Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet don’t rely on long wave broadcasts. There is the oft-repeated story that one of the signs that the UK still ‘exists’ is the monitoring of the broadcast of the Today programme on Radio 4, though quite what they do on Sunday when Today is not on air remains a mystery.          

Long wave transmissions haven’t gone down without a fight. In the summer of 2023 the Campaign to Keep Longwave and a online petition was set-up, though it has only reached about 7,600 signatures. In October 2025 an Early Day Motion was tabled in Parliament stating that ‘the House notes with concern the BBC’s intentions to cease broadcasting BBC Radio 4 on long wave’ and that it ‘remains a vital part of the UK’s broadcasting infrastructure, providing reliable analogue coverage during emergencies and in remote parts’. This was all to no avail and this year that the BBC announced that it would be closing ‘later this year’ and that ‘listeners will receive at least two months notice’. On-air announcements were broadcast at intervals during the day on long wave advising of the planned switch-off but on 11 May a date was finally given, that of 27 June.

I opened this post by saying that long wave broadcasting has been in existence for 102 years, at least in the UK. The Dutch had started using it in 1919 and Radio Eiffel Tower started in 1922. This is my timeline of long wave broadcasts from the BBC. For a far more detailed history can I point you in the direction of this excellent blog post by Chris Greenway.

I've condensed the UK long wave history into just under four minutes in this video:

Some more detail: 

July 1924 - long wave broadcasts start on 187.5kHz from a transmitter at the Marconi works in Chelmsford. Using the callsign 5XX it is also known as the High-Power Station. It mainly broadcasts London’s 2LO programmes.

27 July 1925 – a new 25kW transmitter opens at Daventry in Northamptonshire also using the callsign 5XX.

9 March 1930 - station callsigns are no longer used and the BBC offers the Regional Programme or the National Programme which comes from Daventry on 193kHz. The signal is supplemented by a number of medium wave transmitters.

6 September 1934 – a new 150kW long wave transmitter opens at Droitwich in Worcestershire carrying the National Programme on 200kHz. This 1500m wavelength will become familiar to listeners for the next half century. Daventry remained is use by the BBC until it closed on 29 March 1992. The Droitwich transmitters are replaced in 1962 and again in 1987.

1 September 1939 – ahead of the declaration of World War II the National Programme closes and is replaced by the Home Service on medium wave. The Regional Programme also closes. Droitwich is converted to medium wave and the power upped to 200kW.

16 November 1941 - long wave broadcasts resume from Droitwich carrying the BBC expanding European Service.

12 February 1943 -  regular broadcast start from a new high-power station built at Ottringham (station OSE5) near Hull. It’s east coast site means its ideally placed to carry broadcasts on behalf by the exiled Dutch government as Radio Oranje. It also carries BBC foreign language services including Dutch and Danish. After the war it continues to b broadcast European Services and eventually closes in 1953. 

29 July 1945 – the BBC Light Programme launches on 200kHz (1500m)

22 April 1956 – from this date the Shipping Forecast moves from the Home Service medium wave to the Light Programme long wave.

30 September 1967 - BBC Radio 2 replaces the Light Programme

23 November 1978 - Radio 2 moves from long wave to medium wave (plus VHF/FM) with Radio 4 UK taking over on long wave. The final Radio 2 long wave shipping forecast is read at 17.55 by chief announcer Jimmy Kinsgbury. At midnight Brian Matthew, on Radio 2, hands over to Radio 4 where announcer David Symonds is on air. To help provide coverage for what was now called Radio 4 UK the transmitters at Westerglen and Burghead in Scotland also carried the long wave signal on 200kHz. Westerglen had been in use since 1932 and Burghead since 1936 both carrying medium wave signals for the Regional Programme and later the Home Service and Light Programme.

1 February 1988 – the long wave frequency changes from 200kHzto 198kHz or 1500m to  1515m.

31 March 2024 - separate Radio 4 long wave programmes end.  The last long wave only Shipping Forecast is read by Ron Brown. From the following week the Daily Service and Yesterday in Parliament move to Radio 4 Extra. As of 24 March 2025 Yesterday in Parliament moved back to Radio 4, this time at 5.04am when the broadcasting hours were extended slightly.

May 2026 - announcement made about the closure of long wave transmissions.

27 June 2026 - Radio 4 long wave is due to close at 00.00 GMT (01.00 BST).

BBC on long wave 1924-2026 

With thanks to Chris Greenway. Droitwich site image credit (c) David Martyn Hughes 

Radio Lives - Judith Chalmers

‘You take more holidays than Judith Chalmers’ or a sarcastic ‘does Judith Chalmers have a passport?’ was a reflection as to just how hard wired Judith was into the public consciousness through her globe-trotting reports for Wish You Were Here...? When she started to front the new ITV show in 1974 Judith had already been broadcasting for over twenty years. Starting as a child actor on radio in the 1950s by the following decade she was a ubiquitous presence on radio and television switching from announcing, presenting, commentating and interviewing with consummate ease. She would enjoy a broadcasting career that spanned seven decades but sadly her death, at the age of 90, was announced last month.    

Judith’s break into radio came about thanks to her elocution teacher who suggested that her parents write in for an audition with the BBC.  “I had been to speech training classes to iron out my accent and had appeared in school plays but I never had any burning desire to be an actress.” Her audition in front of the Children’s Hour organiser in Manchester, Nan Macdonald, was on 1 April 1949. She passed it with one panel member noting her ‘excellent quality of voice, with a firm, responsive range, rather elocuted.’  

So it was that, at a mere 13-years of age, young Judith started to be cast in Children’s Hour plays. Her first appearance was in June 1949 in an adaptation of one of the Brydon family books written by Kathleen Fidler. Judith played the daughter Susan, a character name she’d get used to as she also played Susan in the 1951 stories about the Small family and in 1957 was cast as Jimmy’s sister Susan in the first series of The Clitheroe Kid. Mind you, just to confuse things she also played Jimmy’s sister Judith Clitheroe in Call Boy, another radio series with the diminutive star.  

Many of the Children’s Hour plays from Manchester were directed by Trevor Hill and it was Trevor that was instrumental in spotting Judith’s potential and offering her presenting roles on radio and eventually on television. In 1956 Judith was involved with the new BBC tv venture Children’s Television Club, seen as a forerunner to Blue Peter. Presented by Wilfred Pickles and Trevor Hill the first edition featured the Royal Iris steamer at Wallasey. Judith was on hand to greet viewers from the foot of the gangway and later introduced musical items played by the Merseyside Youth Orchestra. That same year she was posing questions to youth club teams competing for Brainiest Club in the North for the Home Service teenage magazine show Out of School.  In November she was in the cast for Collision by Vernon Sproxton. Other young actors in that production included Alan Rothwell, who also died last month, and Bryan Martin, who would go on to be a Radio 4 announcer and newsreader.  Rothwell would appear as David Barlow in Coronation Street and he was one of a number of future stars of the soap that Judith worked with. At the amateur dramatic group The Unnamed Society she met Doris Speed and for many Children’s Hour productions the resident pianist in Manchester was Violet Carson.  

1956 was also a significant year for Judith as she became a television continuity announcer. Again it was Trevor Hill’s doing and involved the children’s television programme Let’s Get Weaving. At that time all children’s programmes were introduced by announcers based in London but it was proposed that Judith perform this role from Manchester. The only problem was that a vision circuit couldn’t be booked with the Post Office to allow for an audition with the head of TV Presentation Rex Moorefoot, so her first live link became her audition. The Presentation Department liked her style and she became the first regional television announcer. The only problem they had with her was that her dress and set of pearls ‘made her look as if she had left her teens years ago.’ 1956 was also the year that Judith married salesman Arthur Lea but by June 1962 they were divorced, “I was far too young” she said in 1998.

l-r Kenneth Kendall, Judith Chalmers, 
Nan Winton and Michael; Aspel

Eventually the Manchester-based gig led to national television appearances between the programmes, she was the announcer on duty for Boxing Day in 1959 for example. The BBC had decided to re-introduce in-vision announcers and Judith was amongst a small group of woman employed for this role but Polly Elwes, Pauline Tooth, Vera McKechnie and Judith were usually only seen in the afternoons. However, from October 1960 Judith was promoted to be one of the evening announcers alongside Nan Winton, Kenneth Kendall and Michael Aspel. At the same time she was also occasionally presenting the regional news magazine for south-east England Town and Around.

BBC in-vision women announcers 'the charm team' 
Daily Mirror 7 July 1961

Although Judith was working freelance she was pretty much associated with the BBC until Thames signed her up in the early 1970s. However, in 1958 she had appeared for three months as one of the interviewers on Granada’s People and Places working with that broadcasting titan Bill Grundy. That had happened after Judith had been interviewed for the programme about being selected as one of the duty announcers for the Earls Court Radio Show. They liked her that much that she was invited back to join the presenting team. She would also appear on Tyne-Tees with Don Spencer in Gangway (1966) and was David Hamilton’s co-host on the quiz Pop the Question (1968). Also for Tyne-Tees she co-presented the programme aimed at under-sevens called Play with a Purpose with Jimmy Hanley and later Don Spencer (1969-70 & 74).  

Meanwhile back on the radio Judith was working with Morecambe and Wise in their return to BBC radio after three years in the series Laughter Incorporated (1958) and with ex-Goon Michael Bentine for series two and three of Round the Bend (1959-60). She would also start what would be nearly a decade long association with Ken Dodd appearing first in It’s Great to Be Young (1958-60) and then returning in The Ken Dodd Show (1963-67).   

In The Ken Dodd Show there was much fun at Judith’s expense as in this example from the start of the fourth series on 12 June 1966.

Scriptwriter Eddie Braden, or perhaps it was Doddy himself, concocted some increasingly fiendish tongue-twisting opening announcements for Judith to read. Here are a selection from the second and third series. 

Judith wasn’t the only broadcaster in the family. Her younger sister Sandra (together they were known as ‘a couple of Chalmers’) also started on Children’s Hour and would also go on to be an announcer, radio presenter, station manager, programme editor and executive.  Her second husband, they’d married in 1964, was Neil Durden-Smith a radio producer (they met in September 1963 while he was compiling Pick of the Week) who would commentate on cricket on the radio and for both the BBC and ITV, provide hockey commentary for both networks and was one of the resident team on music and general knowledge quiz Treble Chance (BBC Radio 1967-75). Their son Mark is also a television presenter.

Jean Metcalfe and Judith Chalmers in May 1965

In the 1960s Judith really was everywhere, no wonder on Round the Horne J. Peasemold Gruntfuttock wanted to “go up the BBC and get your ‘ands on Judith Chalmers”. She was a DJ on Light Programme shows with titles like Anything Goes, Put Out the Lights and After Midnight plus a rather longer stint co-hosting Records Around the World with Paddy Feeny, a joint World Service/Light Programme request show. On the subject of worldwide hook-ups she took over Jean Metcalfe’s chair, when Jean was on holiday, at the London end of Family Favourites, radio’s most-listened to show, between 1964 and 1967. She was one of the regular presenters of Woman’s Hour and later Weekend Woman’s Hour from 1967 to 1974. She’s first appeared on the programme as early as 1957.

Over on BBC television Judith was the host of Come Dancing plus a few other dance-related shows (1961-65) and commentated on the ladies’ fashions at Royal Ascot (1963-69) as well as providing ‘the women’s viewpoint’ on Henley Royal Regatta coverage (1964-68). As for her own fashion tastes, if you are to believe the press adverts that she lent her face to in 1968, she had a preference for Clarks Casuals. ‘I’m for the soft life in shoes. I’m sure you’re the same.’      

In the 1970s Judith became a familiar face for ITV viewers. In September 1972 she joined the team of presenters for the daytime magazine show Good Afternoon (later re-titled Afternoon Plus). Clips of her on the programme surfaced recently (you can find some on YouTube) as part of the 90^th birthday celebrations for Dame Mary Berry as Mary was the resident cook on the show.

A little over a year, in January 1974, Judith launched a new series to ITV, Wish You Were Here... ? for which she is best remembered as the perma-tanned presenter reporting from exotic locations or maybe just a Butlin’s holiday camp. Filming would take up between six and nine months of the year though that didn’t necessarily mean she saw much of the places she reported from. “The trouble was it was very hard work. Only four days in a place at a time. Arriving in Britain from San Francisco one night and flying to St Tropez the next. The schedule was exhausting. I really needed a holiday afterwards.”  The programme was seen as a competitor to the well-established BBC series Holiday that had already been running for five years. Its main presenter was Cliff Michelmore who was, of course, married to Jean Metcalfe whose career had crossed with Judith’s at the BBC. Judith presented over 500 editions by the time she was replaced (by Anthea Turner) in 1996, though she continued to film reports for the programme until its demise in 2003.      

Also for ITV Judith was part of the commentary team for the wedding of Princess Anne (1973) and Charles and Diana (1981) as well as hosting the Miss World Contests (from 1980) after the BBC dropped their coverage.     

Radio 4's Weekend programme with
Norman Tozer 4 October 1975

Meanwhile, back on BBC radio Judith was still regularly employed by Radio 4 as presenter of the phone-in Tuesday Call (1973-86) and the Saturday afternoon magazine show Weekend which she co-hosted with Norman Tozer. Both programmes were produced by the Woman’s Hour Unit which, by 1983, would be headed by Judith’s sister Sandra.

On Radio 2 Judith made dozens of appearances before getting her own show in 1990. She was on hand to ‘mingle with the personalities’ for the Boat Race, the Grand National and the Derby and co-hosted OBs from race meetings with John Dunn and David Hamilton. She covered for the holidaying Gloria Hunniford and John Dunn and worked with Ken Bruce on a number of specials: Ken and Judith at the Paris Air Show, Ken and Judith’s Geordie Day (from Beamish) and Ken and Judith’s Worcester Sauce (from Worcester Cathedral).     

Part of a number of BBC Radio 2 schedule
changes in April 1990

A schedule re-shuffle in April 1990 meant that Ken Bruce was moved from his mid-morning show to a late-night slot. Coming in now at 9.30am was Judith Chalmers in a one and half show, between Derek Jameson and Jimmy Young, offering ‘requests and dedications with your choice of music for that special occasion.’ I can only assume that it was due to Wish You Were Here...? filming commitments that she wasn’t on Radio 2 every week. By October 1990 Katie Boyle was presenting the show before Judith returned again from April to September 1991.

Here’s a clip of Judith on her Radio 2 show from 2 July 1991 and it’s a world form today’s Radio 2 with “oh, jolly good indeed” and “here’s a good old song from the mid-60s” and special 90^th birthday messages for veteran commentator Rex Alston. And who should be singing the song from the mid-60s but the very same Dave Berry and the Cruisers that she introduces in the Ken Dodd show.

In September 2017 Judith returned to Radio 2 for a special week of Tracks of My Years to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the station. Here she is taking to Ken Bruce about her start in radio, her admission that’s she not great at banter, her time on Radio 2, Radio Goes to Town and excitement at sitting next to Ken on her sofa.   

Judith Chalmers 1935-2026

Professor Unwin’s Jazz Lecture

For the first of this year’s Christmas posts I’m taking you back over six decades to Boxing Day 1959. On the BBC Light Programme that evening, between Ken Sykora’s Guitar Club and Radio Newsreel was the regular Saturday evening show Just Jazz with Steve Race. For this holiday edition Steve’s guest was Professor Stanley Unwin, ‘Professor of Jazz Studies at Brewflade University’. Deep joy.

An article in that week’s Radio Times told us what we could expect:

We have often wondered from what university Stanley Unwin got his title of Professor – we have learnt to be cautious from past experience with such other luminaries as Jimmy Edwards. The answer, it seems, is Brewflade University, where he holds the Chair of Jazz Studies. Well, well. Anyway, you can hear his Inaugural Lecture on this subject in today’s Just Jazz (Light), which will be introduced as usual by Steve Race. 

Professor Unwin has apparently undertaken to supply a critical commentary to the discs that Steve will put on the turn-table. The result will be some surprising new insights into jazz.  

By a stroke of luck a recording of that show has survived, or at least part of it has, and was recovered in New Zealand by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I pass on my thanks for forwarding it on.  

Just Jazz was broadcast on Saturday evenings on the Light from Saturday 5 October 1957 to 15 July 1961. The regular presenters were Steve Race, Charles Melville, Sim Copans and Frank Dixon.

The Story of the Light

On Saturday 28 July 1945 the BBC closed the Allied Expeditionary Forces Programme (AEF) and, at least for domestic listeners, the General Forces Programme (GFP). The following day Sunday 29 July, as the BBC week at that time began on a Sunday, regional broadcasting returned to the Home Service and a new station came on air, the BBC Light Programme.

The Light Programme was carried on 1500m (200 kHz) long wave from Droitwich (with some filling-in on 261m MW), the first time long wave transmitters had been used for domestic broadcasts since before the war. Immediately before the Light came on air 1500m had been used by the European Service. 

A number of GFP entertainment shows were carried over to the Light: from Variety Bandbox and Music While You Work to Grand Hotel and ITMA. By the following year programmes such as Family Favourites, Housewives Choice and Woman’s Hour had been commissioned, programmes which helped to define the Light and give it some of radio’s largest audiences

It would be lovely to bring you some of the highlights of that first day of broadcasting on the Light but sadly the BBC kept just 50 seconds. That recording features the voice of Chief Assistant Tom Chalmers (he’d become the Controller of the network three years later) followed by the start of a news bulletin read by Alvar Lidell. In Tom’s opening announcement there was the word ‘entertainment’ right from the off:

Good morning everyone, this is the BBC Light Programme on wavelengths of 1500 and 261 metres. It’s the first time we’ve said those words, BBC Light Programme, which we hope are going to mean for you now, and in the days to come, all that is best in radio entertainment from nine o’clock in the morning till midnight.

  

By way of contrast the BBC did retain the last programmes transmitted on the AEF including the hour long Farewell AEF and the final moments with the news read by Guy Belmont, prayers from the Rev V Russell and announcer Margaret Hubble. A minute or so of Marjorie Anderson closing the General Forces Programme has also survived. In case you’re wondering, over on the Home Service the only surviving archive is that of Regional Director Melville Dinwiddie welcoming listeners to the Scottish Home Service.  

This year marks the 80^th anniversary of the launch of the Light in 1945, a network that would broadcast for the next 22 years until its demise in September 1967 and the arrival of Radios 1 and 2. The BBC are not marking the anniversary, though Boom Radio are when David Hamilton recalls listening to the Light and appearing on it in a programme airing at 9pm on Tuesday 29 July. However, in 2017 on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of BBC Radio 2 did tell The Story of the Light in a two-part programme presented by Paul O’Grady.  

The first episode of The Story of the Light was broadcast on 18 September 2017. You’ll hear reminiscences from (in order of appearance) Nicholas Parsons, Petula Clark, Denis Norden, Esther Rantzen, Tony Blackburn, Ken Bruce, Pete Murray, June Whitfield, Paul Hollingdale, Barry Cryer,  Owen Money, Johnny Beerling, Angela Rippon, Ray Galton, Alan Simpson and Judith Chalmers. 

In this first show a number of contributors refer the BBC‘s ‘forces programme’. The term seems to be used interchangeably for two distinct services. The history gets a bit complicated here so this is my attempt to summarise it. 

There was the Allied Expeditionary Service, an Anglo-American station (half British and Canadian and half American in content) aimed at troops in north-west Europe that ran from 7 June 1944 to 28 July 1945 (see my June 2014 post Oranges and Lemons). This service had been inspired by the American Forces Network which had started on 4 July 1943 and used several low-power transmitters to provide entertainment for US troops based in the UK. The AFN featured mainly American programmes, many of them shipped in from the States, as well as relaying some BBC programmes. The BBC would start to re-broadcast the AFN on its shortwave transmitters.     

The other more home-grown service was the General Forces Programme. This had started on Sunday 27 February 1944 and was an amalgam of what had been the Forces Programme plus programmes from the General Overseas Service (what would eventually become the World Service).  The Forces Programme itself had started on Sunday 7 January 1940 initially offering some evening alternatives to the Home Service but broadcasting all day later that year.  The General Forces Programme didn’t end when the Light Programme launched and continued on short-wave for members of the forces overseas. It shared programmes and resources with the General Overseas Service as well as taking some programmes from the Home and Light. The title General Forces Programme was dropped after 31 December 1946.   

The second episode of The Story of the Light was broadcast on 25 September 2017. Adding their memories are Ken Bruce, Esther Rantzen, David Hamilton, Russell Davies, Pete Murray, Angela Rippon, Paul Hollingdale, Judith Chalmers, Johnnie Walker, Barry Cryer, Tony Blackburn, Petula Clark, Brian Reynolds, Gerald Jackson, Brian Matthew and Johnny Beerling.

The Story of the Light was produced by Derek Webster and Ashley Byrne and was a Made in Manchester Production for BBC Radio 2.     

The passage of time does, of course, mean that some memories can get a little muddled. In case you’re taking notes In Town Tonight was never on the Light Programme but on the Home Service.

For more on the Light Programme head back to my blog posts On the Light published in July and August 2015 plus more recent posts Back in Time on the Light and this year on the subject of The Robinson Family, Go Man Go, Mrs Dale’s Diary and Make Way for Music.

Announcer and presenter Roger Moffat, on duty for the last programme on the Light, read the news bulletin at 2am on Saturday 30 September 1967 to close down the station for final time. “There we end broadcasting in the Light Programme, not just for today but, as it seems, forever.”

Make Way for Music

One of the mainstays of the BBC Light Programme were the shows featuring the in-house orchestras, whether it was the Concert Orchestra on Friday Night is Music Night or the Midland Light Orchestra with a medley of Morning Music. But by far one of the most popular, even making the transition to television, was Make Way for Music. Featuring the talented musicians of the Northern Dance Orchestra, the conductor Alyn Ainsworth, singer Sheila Buxton and, most of all, the announcer Roger Moffat, became household names in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is the story of that show. 

When Make Way for Music premiered on the Light Programme in 1955 the music was provided by the BBC Northern Variety Orchestra. After the string section was disbanded in 1956 it became the Northern Dance Orchestra, a title it retained until 1974. The Northern Variety Orchestra had been formed in 1951 and started broadcasting from April that year. It had been brought together under the direction of composer, arranger and conductor Ray Martin. As Ray was London-based, he was also working for EMI at the time, he handed over the baton to Vilem Tausky, with Alyn Ainsworth (pictured below) as his deputy.  When Tausky was appointed associate conductor of the Northern Orchestra in October 1952 his place as principal conductor of the NVO went to Ainsworth.

There was, in fact, another short-lived Northern Variety Orchestra formed in 1948 with conductor Toni Script (always billed simply as ‘Toni’) who’d been music al director of Blackpool’s North Pier Orchestra. It was wound up in the spring of 1949.  

Alyn Ainsworth’s first taste of show business was in the late 1930s as a boy soprano (‘the boy with the wonder voice’) with the Herman Darewski and his Band. Post-war he was an arranger for the Oscar Rabin Band (see my blog post Go Man Go) and Geraldo and led the big band The Falcons. His first radio broadcast was with The Falcons in the North Home Service in June 1950. By the following year he was conducting the Northern Variety Orchestra on programmes such as Melody Highway and the popular Blackpool Night (on the Light) and the variety show The Spice of Life (Home Service).  He also conducted for BBC TV’s The Good Old Days and Top Town, both produced by Barney Colehan, and Morecambe and Wise’s first radio series You’re Only Young Once.

In 1954 Ainsworth started to work with announcer Roger Moffat and singer Les Howard on the Light Programme early evening entertainment The Night is Young, the forerunner to Make Way for Music. His arrangements for the NVO and NDO were described as “impressive, often spectacular and always original”. (The Stage) He resigned from the NDO in 1960 due to ill health (chronic neuritis) but later that year signed up with Granada TV as musical director on Spot the Tune. This was the start of a long association with TV shows, as musical director for BBC Light Entertainment in the 60s and at LWT in the 80s. He was the regular conductor of the BBC Radio Orchestra between 1974 and 1978.   

A billing from 26 March 1960

Make Way for Music first appears on the Light on Friday 13 May 1955 with Roger Moffat making the announcements and with singers Les Howard and Barbara Law, both regular singers with the NDO. Les and would continue to appear with the Orchestra into the early 1970s. The show aired on Friday teatimes, usually 5 o’clock, until December 1957 when it moved to Friday lunchtimes. The shows were recorded in the BBC studios at the Playhouse Theatre in Hulme, Manchester.  

The singer most associated with Make Way for Music was Manchester-born Sheila Buxton. She’d already broadcast for BBC radio on Worker’s Playtime, Midday Music Hall and with Jimmy Clitheroe in Call Boy, as well as dozens of TV appearances for both the BBC and ITV before joining the show in January 1957. In 1958 she signed to Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goddwin’s agency and shortly after with the Top Rank record label.

But what set aside Make Way for Music from the other BBC music shows were the humorous announcements and banter with musicians and singers from staff announcer Roger Moffat, “spelt with one T – I’m fussy about that”. As he told the press in 1959 “I have a warped sense of humour. I enjoy sticking my neck out. I find it fun”. He opened each show with the announcement “Wherever you are, whoever you are, make way for music.”

Roger Moffat illustration by Jan Parker for
the Sunday Mirror 5 March 1973

Moffat had joined the BBC’s announcing team in Manchester in July 1951(after a spell at Radio Luxembourg) doing the usual mix of continuity announcing, news reading and programme introductions. He first worked with Alyn Ainsworth and the NVO on the aforementioned The Night is Young and continued to appear with Alyn and the NDO on shows such as This is You Saturday Date, Melody Matinee, Star Train and Saturday Night on the Light. In the 50s and 60s Roger made hundreds of appearances introducing  programmes on both the Light and Home Service too numerous to list but they included Laughter Incorprated, another forgotten Morecambe and Wise show, Music-Hall, Music on the Menu, Northern editions of Worker’s Playtime, Music on the Move, Stay Late and Midday Spin. He made the introductions on dozens of episodes of The Clitheroe Kid. In 1960 Roger appeared in the first TV series for Pinky and Perky called Pop Parade with Roger playing the announcer at Station P.O.P. who is constantly interrupted by the porcine puppets.

By the mid-60s Roger was now London-based covering the usual mix of continuity work, reading bulletins and taking turns hosting regular music shows like Music Through Midnight and Double Spin. He was on duty for the last night of the Light Programme and made the closing announcement in the early hours of Saturday 30 September 1967. He continued to work for Radio 1 and Radio 2 on Night Ride, The Joe Loss Show and Things are Swingin’. But the ad-libs and on-air buffoonery all came to an end in July 1971 when he was given the sack after some joking with colleague Keith Skues about the shipping forecast. Apparently jokes about Gale Force 28½ were beyond the pale. He spent the next two years on the dole before Keith Skues, now Programme Director at ILR station Radio Hallam, offered him a job on the breakfast show. He quit Hallam in December 1981 but worked briefly for BBC Radio Sheffield two years later. A notoriously heavy drinker, he died in impecunious circumstances in 1986.        

Radio Times billing for the first TV broadcast of
Make Way for Music 14 January 1959

I’ve leapt ahead of the story of Make Way for Music. Such was its popularity on the radio that in October 1958 a television pilot was filmed which was given the green-light for a series by light entertainment executive Eric Maschwitz. The first TV version aired on the BBC on 14 January 1959 in an initial run of four fortnightly shows. That run kept getting extended and it was broadcast through to December, with a further short series following in the summer of 1960, clocking up 26 programmes in total.

Ahead of the first show the Manchester Evening News set the scene for the TV version which ‘aims to show the orchestra in its working clothes-the players grouped as they would be for a radio show in a shirt-sleeves-and-sweaters atmosphere. Cameras will move round picking up unexpected expressions and odd angles. The music-crisp, clean and often witty-speaks volumes for the group’s cheerful teamwork. And it fits the mood of the feature which gives the show its special flavour – the unscripted, off-beat and often insulting comments of announcer Roger Moffat in between the numbers’.    

Sheila Buxton featured in Picturegoer 5 April 1958

The TV version featuring the vocal talents of Sheila Buxton plus Roberto Cardinali. Tenor Cardinali (who also performed under the name Vincent Roberto) had first appeared in the North Region’s Time to Celebrate programme in January 1959 and flew over from Zurich, where he was in cabaret, for the recordings. The producer was Barney Colehan.

Following the first TV broadcast of Make Way for Music 800 letters poured in and there were thousands later. Moffat told the press: “I don’t earn any more money. I’ve reached the salary limit for my job as a BBC announcer.” He got offers from ITV and also American TV companies. “These were short-term contracts and if I did not come up to their expectations I should find myself out of a job eventually. But the main reason is that I don’t want to break away from the NDO. I have worked with them for years, and I know them and their families as friends. My life is bound up with them. I don’t like working from a script. Usually I have no idea what I am going to say until the show starts,”

Check out Richard Cawson’s 1960 documentary This is the BBC on YouTube and you’ll spot Alyn Ainsworth and the NDO starting at 26 minutes in with their rendition of On Ilkley Moor bar t'at accompanying shots of Judith Chalmers, David Coleman and others in the BBC restaurant. Roger Moffat appears about two minutes later.

The final radio edition of the original run of Make Way for Music aired on the Light on 29 April 1960. It did, however, return for eight shows in 1970/71 on Radio 2, each one recorded at a different venue in the north of England.  The NDO was now conducted by Bernard Herrmann and the guest singers included Sheila Buxton and Les Howard. The shows were introduced by Stuart Hall, Gay Byrne and, back for four of them, by Roger Moffat.

Little exists of Make Way for Music in the BBC’s archives but some shows were issued by the Transcription Services for overseas stations, though this means they were cut down by about 15 minutes to under 28 minutes duration. It’s one of these shorter versions that was repeated as part of The Golden Days of Radio on Radio 2 in May 1994. Appearing are Sheila Buxton, vocal group The Zodiacs, organist Jimmy Leach and violinist Norman George, who’d led the NDO from the start and would retain this position until 1971 when he joined the Northern Concert Orchestra. This edition is undated other than it was first broadcast in 1960.

The NDO continued to broadcast for the next 14 years featuring in their own programmes such as The N.D.O. Melody Show, contributing to Breakfast Special, Music Through Midnight, Night Ride, Late Night Extra and Top Tunes, as well as providing the music for Ken Dodd and Roy Castle’s comedy shows. In 1974 it was renamed the BBC Northern Radio Orchestra but was disbanded six years later as part of a number of BBC cuts. There’ll be more about the NDO and the NRO in a future post.