Weather
forecasts have been part of the radio furniture for just over a century, with reports
dedicated weather presenters delivering reports on the BBC since 1959. However,
much of this has been dismantled in the last few weeks as the drive towards
digital continues apace, a move which is, of course, primarily driven by cuts
to contribute towards the BBC’s £500m savings target. In July the BBC announced
that ‘routine radio forecasts will be read by presenters and announcers’ and
that s number of posts would go. For those of us who remember the era of the
likes of Vick Walters at the London Weather Centre it’s yet another diminution
in service. Whilst weather forecast are readily available online and via apps,
this overlooks the fact that part of the audience won’t have internet access or
just likes to get the service from the radio station they’re listening to. Additionally,
the familiar voices of dedicated weather presenters often serve as comforting
and reliable companions to listeners.
As far as
BBC national radio is concerned the cuts have affected Radio 4 and 5 Live. The
last reports from dedicated weather presenters on 5 Live Breakfast ended on Friday 16 October, when Helen Willetts
was on duty. Regular weather presenter Simon King’s last day was 6
October.
On Radio 4
the cuts took effect this week with a reduction in fixed weather bulletins and,
aside from during Today, the loss of
reports read by the weather team. Weekday forecasts at 5.32 am, 12.57 pm, 5.57
pm, 9.59 pm and 12.30 am have all gone. The last forecasts at those times were
read on Friday 30 October by Stav Danaos and Darren Bett. Here’s Darren’s last
forecast during PM, presented by Katie Razzall.
Whilst we were promised that presenters would read the weather, listeners to PM must feel short-changed: instead of a
minute and a half or so they now get 9 seconds, at least on the evidence of
Evan Davis’s reading the following Monday.
Anyway,
speaking of Vick Walters, here he is on 20 May 1981 reading the weather
forecast during Today with presenter Libby Purves.
Television weather forecasts have also been affected. On the News channel the half-hourly forecasts now have automated graphics and the post-Newsnight forecast has also been dropped, the last one on Friday 30 October was presented by Chris Fawkes.
It is now
just over a month since BBC Radio 4 stopped broadcasting on long wave. In this
post I’ll be picking up on one or two pieces about what happened at the end of
June.
Firstly I want
to thank all those folk that commented on my social media posts about this
news, I don’t think I’ve had some an overwhelming response for some years. It
amply demonstrated that there’s a sense of nostalgia not only about what we
listen to but about how we listen. It was also clear that some people still
listened on long wave, both at home and abroad. In the case of UK listeners it
was usually because of the patchy FM or internet coverage and in some cases
just because they preferred the rich sound of long wave.
As to the
last Radio 4 long wave closedown, that fell to continuity announcer Al Ryan to
give it a lovely send-off just before 0100 BST on Saturday 27 June 2026. Al
marked “the end of an era”. He went on say “for almost a century the long wave
transmitters have carried the BBC across the airwaves, from the iconic
Droitwich transmitting station in Worcestershire to Westerglen and Burghead in
Scotland. Although the long wave signal is fading into history this morning the
memories and the connection it created will endure forever. We shall miss your
warmth and crackle”.
I was away from
home when all this happened so I’m grateful to Peter Cunningham for this
recording. The looped announcement that followed, cutting off the end of the
last long pip, was voiced by Ron Brown and continued until Tuesday 30 June when
it was abruptly stopped mid sentence at 1203 BST. I’ve tagged that audio onto
the end of this recording.
There was
some media coverage of the closure including television and radio reports by
the BBC’s Media Correspondent David Sillito and features on BBC One’s Breakfast and Midlands Today which you can find online. On the Friday Malcolm
Boyden was sitting in on the BBC Hereford and Worcester breakfast show and he
talked about the ‘Wychbold Masts’, as the Droitwich transmitting station is
also known. Here’s a report from Lindsay Alder who interview Alastair Moseley
of the Bromsgrove Society. Malcolm then talks to Nick Todderhill of the Radio
Society of Great Britain.
That day’s
edition of PM also had a report about
the end of long wave. I had been alerted to this some time before as I’d
provided audio I’d recorded at the time Radio 4 switched over to long wave on
23 November 1978. In the final edit the clip of David Symonds welcoming
listeners to Radio 4 UK was included. This is the extended version of Gabriel O’Regan’s
report.
And finally
a recording of a Jingle Time sequence from Jon Wolfert’s Rewound Radio show on
21 June 2026. Jon is the man behind JAM Creative Productions. I’d mentioned the
long wave closure which gave rise to this part of the show. Jon continued to
then talk about some of the international shortwave stations that are no longer
on air, though I’ve not included that here.
The sound of
Roger Cook confronting yet another cowboy builder who lunges towards him to
grab his microphone and stop the recording seems to be the abiding memory of Checkpoint. I’m not sure just how many
cowboy builders the intrepid Cook did encounter but his pioneering
investigative programme exposing con-men, injustice and cock-ups was a BBC
Radio 4 fixture for twelve years. Roger Cook's death was announced today.
The genesis
of Checkpoint was a report that Cook had
made for The World this Weekend about
the activities of a loan-sharking company. It was the story that set him on
‘the uninsurable path’ that he subsequently followed. But first, how did Roger
Cook come to be working for the BBC?
Roger Cook
was born in 1943 in New Zealand but raised in Sydney, Australia, his father
reckoning that “we’ll be safer in Australia because their armed forces are much
bigger than ours”. He had ambitions to be a vet and enrolled at the
agricultural college in Wagga Wagga followed by veterinary medicine at Sydney
University. To help pay for his studies he answered an advert for a job as a
cadet announcer at the commercial radio station 2GB. Within weeks he’d
abandoned university and was working full-time for the station. He briefly left
radio to work at an animation studio for a couple of years before taking up a
reporting job with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Australia’s version
of the BBC. In time he was shipped out to the ABC outpost in Perth where he
worked on both the radio and television service as a newsreader and continuity
announcer. Feeling stifled by the work he was given at ABC, and being something
of a self-confessed loose cannon, Roger saved-up to make the journey back to
‘the old country’ and, in May 1968, was working for the BBC at Broadcasting
House. He’d been given the name of Andrew Boyle, the editor of The World at One(known within the BBC
as WATO), and he joined the team of
reporters that included Nick Ross, Jonathan Dimbleby and David Jessel. Also on the
team with Cook was Sue McGregor, who’d worked in South Africa, and New
Zealand-born Nancy Wise, leading to Boyle nick-naming them the Colonial
Contingent. He loved the ‘brisk, challenging style of The World at One’ which at the time was presented by the formidable
William Hardcastle.
Bill Hardcastle and WATO producer Andrew Boyle
Cook
recalled the WATO production
meetings: ‘Every morning we reporters would sit around that big, untidy
editorial table, which was usually covered in a layer of newspapers, scripts,
coffee cups and overflowing Bakelite ashtrays. We would tentatively offer out
own story ideas or compete for those already decided upon if what we proposed
wasn’t considered interesting enough. If the latter was the verdict, Bill
(Hardcastle) would usually announce it by muttering WGAS. I later leant that
WGAS was an acronym ... it was short for who give a shit?’
As well as
reporting for WATO he worked on The World this Weekend and PM and, throughout 1971, was a regular
co-presenter on PM.
The World this Weekend enabled reporters to prepare longer,
more in-depth reports and one story that came his way were the activities of
the Turret Mortgage Company in Bristol. Cook decided to challenge the boss of
the company, taking along his Uher tape recorder. Questioning his
qualifications to run a finance company, apart from being a former heavyweight
wrestler, did not go down well and Cook was thrown down the stairs. Retrieving
his battered recorder and tape spool the whole encounter went out on air. The
public response was very favourable and listeners started to send in letters
about other crooked businesses and inefficient government departments which led
to a number of WATO reports.
Together
with Andrew Boyle, Cook put together a pilot programme examining ‘injustice,
criminality and bureaucratic bungling’. Eventually Radio 4 Controller Tony
Whitby gave it the go-ahead, though it was to be produced by the Current
Affairs Magazines Programme unit, also responsible for You and Yours, rather than News. They chose the title Checkpoint and, at first, the meagre
budget didn’t provide for a researcher or secretary. Cook recalls he wasn’t
given an office, “just the corner of someone else’s desk.”
In the first
series the programme tackled exploited au pairs, cowboy estate agents, toxic
waste, fairground safety, pyramid selling, computer crime and, in the first
edition, opticians over-pricing spectacles. He would also continue to work for The World at One for another five years
and in 1973 and 1974 was a regular presenter on You and Yours.
The Radio Times heralds the start of Checkpoint on Friday 6 July 1973
The first
edition of Checkpoint was broadcast
on Radio 4 on 6 July 1973 and it continued pretty much every week until March
1980 apart from small breaks in the summer and over Christmas. From May 1980
onwards there were more distinct series which eventually settled down to blocks
of nine programmes. Cook presented virtually every edition but in the early
days Nigel Murphy (in 1974), Dick Tracey (1975) and Gordon Clough (1976)
occasionally took the reins. Between May 1979 and December 1980 Vincent Kane
would present a monthly ‘Action Desk Edition’ with the team taking on
‘bureaucracy and business to solve listeners’ problem.’
Programme
ideas were usually sparked by listener’s letters; there was a weekly postbag of
400, of which 40% might offer potential stories. Cook and the team saw the
broad aims of the programme as illustrating ‘how a system fails to provide
redress’ and a way of ‘teaching how people are caught in traps or unpleasant
situations of various kinds...to bring out reasons why the problems have arisen
and warn the public at large of the dangers.’ They were, to quote one of the
producers “the department of last resort.”
Of course
this kind of campaigning journalism was not without its risks. Cook was
assaulted 16 times during the run suffering broken ribs, concussion, fractures,
lacerations and bruises. On one occasion, in August 1975, whilst investigating
property shark Robert Miller, he was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver in
Frome, Somerset and ended up in hospital. Cook remembers an Australian doctor
who attended to him remarking that “Jeez mate, put it this way, if you weren’t
built like a brick privy, you’d probably be dead.”
Added to these
physical dangers were the internal battles within the BBC as nervous managers
and governors feared legal reprisals and lawsuits. The production team
developed new practices to ensure they were fire-proof such as retaining
unedited master tapes of interviews and offering the accused to make written
statements before door-stepping them. Scripts and interviews were vetted by BBC
lawyers prior to transmission. In the first ten years there were just three
successful challenges, two settled out of court and one going to the
Broadcasting Complaints Committee (this was not upheld, see BBC Handbook 1984).
Checkpoint returns for its ninth series on 14 May 1980
Over the
years the Checkpoint team included
producer John Smithson, an award-winning reporter from Piccadilly Radio who
went on to producer BBC tv’s Rough
Justice series, John Stoneborough, who then became Head of Features at
Capital Radio and presented their Checkpoint-like
show PDQ,and ex-Sunday Times
Insight team member Andrew Jennings who would later work for World in Action and Panorama. There was also Dina Gold, who’d come from Investors’ Chronicle, former press
journalist Malcolm Stacey who’d also worked at Radio Leeds, BBC tv in Bristol
and the Today programme as well as Paul
Calverley and Tim Tate who joined Cook when he moved to Central TV. The
programme won a Broadcasting Press Guild award in 1979 whilst the same year
Cook won the Radio Personality of the Year Award at the Pye Radio Awards.
Of course Checkpoint wasn’t the only programme
fighting the consumer’s corner. That’s
Life with Esther and her boys and its bizarre mix of journalism and light entertainment
had started just a couple of months before, in May 1973. That had been born out
of Braden’s Week (1968-72) which
launched the careers of Esther Rantzen and John Pitman. Channel 4 offered 4 What’s It’s Worth (1982-89) fronted by
Penny Junor with a team that included John Stoneborough, ex-You and Yours presenter Bill Breckon and
David Stafford.
Checkpoint artwork by Bill Prosser for Radio Times 12 November 1980
Here’s a
typical example of Checkpoint from 27
August 1980 with the “continuing saga of the brothers Hedmanski, kings of the
cowboy plumbers”. After the usual litany of missed appointments, shoddy work and
general fobbing-off Cook introduces a segment in which a hidden microphone
records a plumber over-charging for a job that anyone could fix for themselves
for a matter of a few pence. He then returns to Brixton to confront the Leon
Hedmanski about the business. “Mr Hedmanski my name is Roger Cook from the BBC Checkpoint programme. I am here to
record an interview with you now about your plumbing activities. Ah, ah, leave
the microphone alone...there are a lot of unanswered questions about people who
have had really appalling service...leave the microphone alone”. Hedmanski
proceeds to hit the microphone with Cook responding “technically that was an
assault”. The face-off ends with twin brother Stanley and office manager Mike
approaching with “a length of four by two timber and a cosh”.
Despite the
impression given, Cook wasn’t alone during these encounters. As Dina Gold
explained “one of us must always be there to bear witness when Roger accosts a
villain, to be able to swear on oath, if need be, what actually happened. “
Aside from Checkpoint, Roger Cook presented some
other programme for Radio 4 such as Time
for Action (1977-78) in which Cook and Nick Ross would champion opposite
sides of an issue on behalf of those involved. A second series followed in
1978-79 co-presented with Moyra Bremner and Bill Breckon. A series of eight
programmes called Roger Cook Reports
aired in 1979, one episode of which, Rock
Bottom, investigated the so-called Al Capone of Pop, Don Arden. This expose
of exploitation in the pop world was repeated on Radio 1 and the transcript of
the programme reprinted in the New
Musical Express. In 1980 there was Reel
Evidence which took a deeper look at national and international matters
such as the collapsing sewage system, immigration controls and the holding of
personal data by government and commercial institutions.
In January
1984 Checkpoint finally made it to
the cover of the Radio Times. But
what listeners didn’t know is that the programme had only just over a year to
run. Roger Cook was wooed by commercial television companies who wanted to put
a version of Checkpoint on screen for
about a year before he quit Radio 4. In fact he’d already been making some
appearances on the BBC television including reports on Nationwide in the mid-70s as part of what they called the ‘Cause
for Concern Unit’ and later making investigative reports for Newsnight. Eventually, in the autumn of
1984, BBC1 did offer him and his team a four-week trial run of Checkpoint. With audiences of 8 million
it was judged a success but not extended to a full series. The reason was
probably that BBC1 already had the Watchdog Unit which had been part of Nationwide and then Sixty Minutes since 1980. Sure enough the following July, just a
couple of months after the final radio edition of Checkpoint, Watchdog
became a stand-alone programme with Nick Ross, and later, of course, with Lynn
Faulds Wood and John Stapleton.
Cook's style was spoofed in the Radio 4 comedy series Delve Special (1984-87, all available on BBC Sounds) with Stephen Fry as the investigative reporter David Lander. These led to a couple of follow-up television versions: This is David Lander (1988) with Stephen Fry and This is David Harper (1990) with Tony Slattery, both on Channel 4.
The last
edition of Checkpoint went out on 29
May 1985. Roger was leaving the BBC to join Central Television to present the
live Friday night debate show Central
Weekend. But the plan had been to put together a Checkpoint-inspired show and this became The Cook Report, which started in July 1987 and would run for 12
years.Roger at least acknowledges his
move to Central in the opening of the programme. He also says it’s not the last
you’ll hear of him on Radio 4, which was true as he was back for a one-off
investigation into drug companies, Kill
or Cure?, that September, but after that he didn’t return. He also says
that another investigative programme will be along later. That actually was a
year away when Face the Facts started
in June 1986, initially presented by Margo MacDonald but mostly associated with
John Waite who presented it from 1987 until it was axed in 2015.
When The Cook Report ended Roger pretty much
bowed out of regular broadcasting. In 2007 he returned for a one-off Roger Cook’s Greatest Hits on ITV1 and
in 2011 he revisted a case he’d first investigated some 30 years earlier, that
of serial child abuser Derek Slade, in BBC One’s An Abuse of Trust. Finally in 2016 he was on the case of the murder
of notorious gangster, John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, for the regional documentary
strand Inside Out West. Palmer, who
was part of the Brink’s-Mat robbery operation that inspired the BBC drama
series The Gold, had previously been
investigated by Cook in a 1994 edition of The
Cook Report.
When a leaving
party was thrown for Roger as he left The
World at One he was presented with a T-shirt with the legend ‘Stand clear.
I’m an accident waiting to happen. The engineers, who had repaired many a piece
of recording equipment gave him a Uher microphone bent in half and mounted on a
mahogany presentation plinth.
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
In the
second festive offering I bring you not one, not two but three traditional
fairy tales. These comedy pantomime retellings are from December 1985 and are
packed with names familiar to Radio 4 audiences of the time.
Once Upon a Time... was written by Paul Shearer and Nick
Symons. Both were ex-Cambridge Footlights with Paul going on to be a comedy
performer and Nick mostly on the comedy production side. They had worked together
earlier in 1985 on the Radio 4 series Nineteen
Ninety-four. Paul’s comedy career was on both TV and radio in shows such as
The Russ Abbot Show (BBC1), Gorham and Swift (Radio 2) and as
co-writer on If You’re So Clever, Why
Aren’t You Rich?(Radio 4). He is
now a property journalist. Nick Symons went on to produce A Bit of Fry and Laurie (BBCtv), became Controller of Comedy for Carlton
TV and, from 2002, a freelance producer working on TV shows like TV Burp and Al Murray’s Happy Hour. He died in 2023.
Once Upon a Time ... Cinderella was broadcast at 2330 on Saturday 21
December 1985, the usual late-night comedy slot. In One Ear had just finished its second series the week before, indeed
one of the stars of that show, Nick Wilton, played Buttons in this production.
Nick regularly appears in panto as the ‘dame’ and this year is in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Festival Theatre
in Malvern. Appearing as Cinderella is Helen Atkinson-Wood, from the cast of Radio Active. Chair of Just a Minute, Nicholas Parsons adopts a
Noel Cowardesque voice to play a suave Prince Charming. Sounding as if they’ve
just stepped out of an I’m Sorry I’ll
Read That Again sketch as the Ugly Sisters are Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme
Garden, with Tim occasionally dropping into his Lady Constance de Coverlet
voice. In a nod to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a
Clue there’s a quick game of Mornington Crescent and Late Arrivals. Midweek’s Libby Purves is the Fairy
Godmother and Nick Maloney (Son of Cliche
and The Fosdyke Saga) is Beamish.
Providing other voices, in this case Ted Lowe, Denis Norden and Robin Day, is
Rory Bremner, pretty new to the comedy scene at the time and heard that year on
Radio 4’s The Colour Supplement.
Once Upon a Time...Jack and the
Beanstalk was broadcast
at 2215 on Sunday 22 December 1985. The Today
presenters were more than willing to drop their serious image and in this show
its Sue MacGregor’s turn as Jack. Peter Jones, one of the regulars on Just a Minute, plays Jack’s Mother, and
there’s an impromptu round of the game. Barry Took, of The News Quiz, is Sir Norbert and the Giant. Helen Lederer, another
star of In One Ear, is Jill and Rory
Bremner is again on hand to play sundry characters and impersonate Johnners,
Parky and Prince Charles. Also credited as playing ‘traders, villagers, serfs,
kettles etc.’ are the Incredible Bending Bodger Brothers. I assume this is the
act usually known just as The Bodgers, who were John Docherty, Gordon Kennedy,
Moray Hunter and Pete Baikie, who four years later would be part of Channel 4’s
sketch show Absolutely. Fans of the
shipping forecast should pay attention about half way through. In this
particular show some of the jokes seem to fall flat with the Paris Theatre
audience, or maybe they’re just not that funny.
Once Upon a Time...Rumpelstiltskin was broadcast at 1530 on Thursday 26
December 1985. This time the cast features Margaret Howard who has great fun as
the Queen, for some reason adopting a t’Yorkshire accent. I wonder if this show
made that week’s Pick of the Week? Today presenters John Timpson and, complete
with a Geordie accent, Brian Redhead, play the King and Dad respectively. Putting
in an appearance as the Pardon the Butler , plus some other roles, is Richard
Baker, presenter of Radio 4’s Start the
Week and Baker’s Dozen. Hale and
Pace, recent stars of Don’t Stop Now – It’s
Fundation play DI Broker and DS Bailiff. Sally Grace, a Week Ending regular, is The Storyteller,
and very briefly Mrs T, whilst Nigel Rees, another voice from Week Ending and The Burkiss Way and at the time the chairman of Quote...Unquote, hams it up as a very Orish
Rumpelstiltskin and other parts.
Music in all
three shows is provided by I’m Sorry’s
Colin Sell. The producer is Alan Nixon who at one time or another had already
worked with many of the performers on shows such as The News Quiz, The News
Huddlines, Quote...Unquote, In One Ear, Stop the World, Don’t Stop
Now –It’s Fundation, Son of Cliche,
In Other Words...The Bodgers and The
Fosdyke Saga.
“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
70th 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
(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.
Tomorrow
morning BBC Radio 4 will, for the last time, broadcast the early morning News Briefing. A fixture of Radio 4’s
schedule for nearly half a century it’s yet another victim of financial cuts.
News Briefing is a 13 minute round-up of
international and national news, a full weather forecast, sports news, review
of the newspapers, business news, sports news and ending with a on this day in
history feature.
The cuts in
the news division means not only the end of News
Briefing but also, from next month, that World Service bulletins will be
carried overnight on Radio 2, Radio 5 Live and BBC local stations.
Radio Times billing 3 July 1978
News Briefing, read by Eugene Fraser, was first broadcast as a 10-minute
bulletin at 6 am on Monday 3 July 1978 as part of a refresh which saw Today start at 6.30 am and the dropping
of the two editions of the notorious Up
to the Hour sequences.
The weekday
edition was dropped from 3 April 1998 leaving just the Saturday and Sunday
briefings. From that date on weekdays Radio 4 opened at 5.30 am with a World News bulletin followed by the Shipping Forecast. The World News is dropped at the end of
April 2000 and Radio 4 starts the day at 5.35 with the Shipping and Inshore Forecast. Meanwhile, from March 2003, the
Sunday edition, now reduced to 5 minutes, is just described as a news summary.
Radio Times billing 2 May 2006
On 2 May
2006 News Briefing returned as a
seven days a week programme of 13 minutes with a 5.30 start, after the Shipping Forecast, where it has, until
this week, remained. There was a brief hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic when
it was dropped from 30 March 2020 and Radio 4 started to leave the World
Service at the slightly later time of 5.32 for the Shipping Forecast. News
Briefing returned on Monday 13 July 2020.
The last News Briefing airs tomorrow at 5.30 am.
From Monday (24th) Radio 4 will leave the World Service at 5.00 am
for a news bulletin followed by Yesterday
in Parliament which moves back over from Radio 4 Extra where it has been
for the last year. There’ll be repeats at times when Parliament isn’t in
session. The Shipping Forecast moves
to 5.34 am followed by, as usual on weekdays, Prayer for the Day and Farming
Today.
Some audio
now, and the earliest News Briefing I
can lay my hands on comes from Tuesday 3 February 1998 where the lead story
centres on the libel suit by Richard Branson against GTech in the bid to run
the National Lottery. The reader is Andrew Crawford and there are correspondent
reports from Torin Douglas, Jon Silverman and Paul Reynolds. The weather
forecast is delivered by Sarah Wilmshurst and with the sports news it’s Garry
Richardson.
The second
edition dates from Saturday 29 September 2012 and is read by Corrie Corfield.
The weather forecaster is Chris Fawkes and the sports news read by Seth Bennett
with a report from golf correspondent Ian Carter.
After News Briefing was dropped during the
2020 lockdown it was, in the world of announcer Jane Steel an “auspicious date”
when it returned on 13 July. Here’s how the full morning sequence panned out
with the World Service handover, the Shipping Forecast read by Ben Rich and
then Jane with News Briefing. The business
report is by Andrew Wood and the sports report by Paul Sarahs.
The final News Briefing on 23 March 2025 was read by Jane Steel.
While playing ‘ground-breakers, obscurities and session
tracks’ on BBC Radio 1 by night, John Peel was taking a ‘wry look at the
foibles of family life’ on BBC Radio 4 by day. That Radio 4 programme was Home Truths which Peel was to present each
Saturday morning for six years.
Home Truths was,
in fact, the offspring of an earlier series called Offspring that Peel had hosted for four series between 1995 and
1997. It had, according to Radio 4 controller Michael Green, been “an unlikely
booking”. Perhaps what swayed him was that John had already been writing, since
September 1993, about family life, his work, whatever was on the tv or radio or
indeed anything however inconsequential, in a weekly column for the Radio Times titled John Peel’s Family Album; a column initially dismissed as
“toe-curlingly folksy” by the Daily Telegraph.
Offspring was first broadcast on Saturday 7 October 1995 with a
promise that John Peel would drag listeners on to “the wreckage strewn
battlefield of family life” in a new exploration of families of every size,
type and background.
Writing in that week’s Family
Album column, John gave us an idea about what he might hear:
Essentially it’s all about the family, but, as almost
everyone at some time or other, has been part of something that could be
described as a family, this gives us considerable licence.
So far I have travelled to Lancaster to talk and walk along
the beach with two widowed women who chose, for a range of sound reasons, to
buy a house together; driven to Sowerby Bridge to sample the wares of a father
and mother, son and daughter who run a brewery and pub, and sped through
torrential rain to the southern tip of the area covered by the Birmingham A-Z to watch triplets being put to bed
by their parents. Not very rock ‘n’ roll but, in each case, strangely
uplifting.
When Michael Green left the BBC in 1996 his replacement in
the top job, James Boyle, would introduce his revamped schedule in April 1998.
On Saturday mornings between 9 and 10 am out went Sport on 4 and Breakawayand
in came a new vehicle for John Peel, Home
Truths.
Ahead of the new schedule Peel wrote: “We haven’t quite
worked out what’s going to be in Home
Truths; there’ll be a sports element, definitely, but for the rest it’ll be
family-orientated without being too sentimental. I always viewed Radio 4 as the
senior service, and I used to get very excited when I was the only Radio 1 DJ
to get invited to Radio 4 parties – though I think that was more to do with my
having been to public school than anything else”.(Radio
Times 4 April 1998)
The first Home Truths
aired on Saturday 11 April 1998. Writing, again in the Radio Times (see above), Peel explained something of the programme’s ethos, and
again there was that mention of ‘sentiment’.
The programme’s producers decided on this name only when it
became an administrative imperative that it was called something. I could fill
this page with a list of the suggestions that were made. One of these was
Scouse...no, I mustn’t go on. So Home
Truths it is and I lurch towards the first programme with a certain
trepidation. The things is, as with the hard-hitting, rigorously unsentimental Offspring, the precursor of Home Truths, we need listeners to phone,
fax and e-mail their responses to the things they hear, and you can’t really
engineer that entirely successfully for a first programme.
John opened the show like this:
“Hello, and welcome to Home
Truths, a name chosen only when it became an administrative impossibility
for programme planning to continue without a name. We're still getting to know
each other in the Home Truths office: shy glances, apologetic dances like
courtship rituals of some endangered species, that sort of thing. But we think
that we've got a pretty neat programme for you nevertheless. Saturdays mean
doing it yourself, or getting out into the country and maybe killing something,
or going to work, or lying in bed, or going to the match (it's Ipswich versus
Tranmere Rovers for us this afternoon). Until this morning, Saturdays to me
would involve my getting up ahead of Sheila, and feeling insanely virtuous,
walking the dogs, feeding the cats, and emptying the dishwasher. I once made
the mistake of saying to her later, with insufferable smugness, 'Well, darling,
I've done your jobs for you.' 'My jobs?', she started. 'My jobs???' Well, you
can imagine." (As quoted on the
John Peel Wiki site)
Despite this early trepidation the programme would,
eventually, prove to be an enormous success. At first it met with some
criticism: “inconsequential”, “infantile rubbish” or “droning nonsense”. But in
time it would secure one and a half million listeners, garner four Sony Awards
(three gold and one silver) and landed a Broadcaster of the Year award for John.
His “predilection for a kind of gently self-mocking world view” ensured it
remained a Radio 4 fixture until Peel’s death in 2004 (and then continuing on
for a further couple of years until 2006).
There are a number of editions of Home Truths from 2003-2006 available via the John Peel wiki site
but here’s an earlier edition, or at least part of one, from 22 July 2000. The
recording was kindly sent to me by Richard Tucker and is the first 45 minutes
of what was a 57 minute programme.
John is back after two weeks away during which he was part
of a Radio Times sponsored
trans-Atlantic cruise in the company of Alan Hansen, Delia Smith, Barry Norman
and about 100 of the magazine’s lucky readers. As usual it strikes the balance
between “absurdity and weightiness” from ‘what colour is John Peel?’ to cerebral
palsy. John would become adept at ‘the handbrake turns in tone and pace’ the
format demanded.
In this Family Album
column John writes about that cruise and the trip to New York that he and
Sheila made the week before.
John’s last Home
Truths turned out to be the one on 16 October 2004 just before taking a two
week break to “recharge the batteries, getting on with the book, that sort of
thing”. Covering for John was David Stafford. Just over a week later came the
shocking news that John had died on a working holiday in Peru.
On Saturday 30 October BBC Radio 4 broadcast this tribute to
John and his time on Home Truths.
It’s presented by Roger McGough (who had previously deputised for John). As
well as clips from the programme there’s a tribute from regular contributor Bryan
Gallagher and an update on Tom Ray. A 30-minute version also aired at 11 pm
that day.
Offspring
Series 1: 7 October to 25 November 1995 (8 episodes)
Series 2: 10 August to 28 September 1996 (8)
Special: 24 December 1996 Offspring Christmas Special
Series 3: 26 April to 14 June 1997 (8)
Series 4: 4 October to 22 November 1997 (8)
Special: 25 December 1997 Offspring Christmas Morning
The first series won a Sony Award in the Magazine category
Home Truths
Presented by John Peel from 11 April 1998 to 16 October 2004
on Saturdays at 9 am
Christmas Specials on 25 December 2000, 25 December 2001 and
25 December 2002
Providing holiday cover for John were Roger McGough (1999,
2000 & 2002), David Stafford (2001-04), Maureen Lipman (2002) and Benjamin
Zephaniah (2004).
The series continued from 23 October 2004 to 24 June 2006
with presenters David Stafford (who presented the majority of the programmes),
Tom Robinson, Paul Heiney, Linda Smith, Michael Rosen, Jo Brand and Jenny
Eclair
Some quotes come from And
now on Radio 4 by Simon Elmes, Life
on Air by David Hendy andMargrave of the Marshes by John Peel
& Sheila Ravesnscroft
If you watching what is sure to be an exciting night of
election results coverage this week and you opt for BBC One, then you might
like to know that Arthur is back. I am at this point obliged to say that other
election night programmes are available on television and radio (see note).
So who or what is Arthur? It’s the track that’s been used as
the opening theme for the Beeb’s election results programmes since 1979.
Written by Rick Wakeman it’s the first track on his 1975 album The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table.
The BBC first used Arthur
for their Decision 79 programme
with David Dimbleby on 3 May 1979. It cropped up again in 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997
and 2005 but was dropped in 2001, 2010, 2015 and 2017. Arthur was back in 2019 with a David Lowe make-over and David has
arranged it again for the 2024 version.
Needless to say, as this is a radio blog, there is also a
radio connection and that’s because Arthur
falls into that rare category of theme tune, one that has done double duty and
been used for more than one programme. In the case of Arthur it was also the theme for the four-part radio comedy Hordes of the Things, a 1980 parody of
Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings written
by Andrew Marshall and John Lloyd.
Here’s how it started:
There are some other notable pieces of music that fall into
this category. Off the top of my head I came up with these:
The Alan Hawkshaw library track Chicken Man for both Grange
Hill and Give Us a Clue
John Dankworth’s Beefeaters
for Rediffusion TV’s 1964series Search for a Star was later appropriated
by Tony Blackburn
More library music, this time Bell Hop which has done double sitcom duty for both Terry and June (BBC1) and Never Too Late (Radio 4)
The wonderful The Hell Raisers by Syd Dale was originally used for Rediffusion’s Orlando (1965-68) and, in the 1970s for
the World Service news programme Outlook
Note
The radio election night coverage includes:
BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live with Rachel Burden and Nick
Robinson
LBC with Andrew Marr, Shelagh Fogarty, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall
Times Radio with Matt Chorley, Andrew Neil, Kate McCann,
William Hague, Ayesha Hazarika, Ed Vaizey and Calum Macdonald
Radio News Hub with Jonathan Charles via NewsRadioUK.com
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