Aside from the news bulletins you can pretty much escape the
General Election ballyhoo on BBC Radio 3. But that wasn’t always the case.
One of the now forgotten pieces of radio broadcasting is, I
suspect, the full reading of all the election results, aside from a few
stragglers or recounts, on the Third Programme and Radio 3. Over two or three
hours a couple or so continuity announcers would read out the results in
alphabetic order of constituency. This service was a feature of BBC radio
election coverage in the 1960s and 1970s. It ended with the 1979 election after
which time if you wanted to know the full list of results you could check out
CEEFAX. (1)
In the 1950s any BBC radio election programmes were shared
between the Home Service and Light Programme. But for the 1959 election the BBC
also used the daytime wavelengths of the Third Programme, known as Network
Three, from 10 am on the Friday to carry “results as they become available with
summaries of the state of the parties every fifteen minutes”.
For the October 1964 election all three national networks
offered something different overnight. On the Home Service How the Nation Polled presented by Hardiman Scott, on the Light Election Night Music Till Dawn with Tim
Gudgin and on the Third Programme from 11.10 pm to about 3.30 am the Election Results in Full. This was just
a straight reporting service read by announcers David Broomfield, Andrew
Gemmill and John Spurling.
The March 1966 election saw the same arrangement with the same
presenters and this time David Broomfield, Andrew Gemmill and Roy Williamson
reading the full results. As the Radio
Times described it the Home was ‘fastest’, the Light ‘gayest’ and the Third
‘fullest’.
June 1970 and Hardiman Scott, now promoted to be the BBC’s
first Political Editor, was back on Radio 4 but with Ray Moore and Peter
Donaldson doing the honours on Radio 2 with Night
Ride to Westminster. Meanwhile over on Radio 3 the overnight service had
been dropped in favour of a full reading of the results between 7 and 9 am the
following morning, this time read by Peter Latham and Peter Barker. This made
it a little easier for listeners to know when their own constituency was coming
up. The Radio Times explained: ‘for
easy reference, Radio 3 offers this special service of all the overnight
election results, broadcast in alphabetical order, and divided into approximate
time-sequences. Listeners wishing to know particular results can thus tell
roughly when they will be coming up. While unavoidably a particular sequence
may run beyond its time allotment, for listeners' convenience none will start
before the times given.’
In February 1974 it was yet again Hardiman Scott on Radio 4
whilst Radio 2’s Night Ride was
hosted by Len Jackson, Eugene Fraser and Jimmy Kingsbury. Reading the results
on Radio 3 on Friday morning were Peter Barker and Patricia Hughes.
1974 was the year of two elections so in October it was, for
the final time, Hardiman Scott and then Len Jackson and Don Durbridge doing the
Radio2 honours. The task of reading the
Radio 3 results fell to Peter Barker, Patricia Hughes and John Holmstrom.
And finally in May 1979 it was all change. Radio 4’s Countdown to Number Ten was presented by
Brian Redhead and Radio 2’s by Jimmy Young.(2) Meanwhile the morning results
service was now extended to three hours and on Radio 3 medium wave only. The Radio Times doesn’t bill the announcers but
my notes list Peter Barker, Patricia Hughes and John Holmstrom. That 10 am end
time was something of an approximation as the broadcast didn’t actually end
until 11.10 am. (3)
(1) CEEFAX was available in 1979 but only for an estimated
50,000 viewers. For many sets it was still necessary to buy a decoder costing
over £200. From 1974 the results started to be shown on BBC2 on the Friday
morning. From 1987 BBC2 showed the CEEFAX results service.
(2) Brian Redhead would present the Radio 4 overnight
coverage again in 1983, 1987 and 1992 before James Naughtie assumed the role in
1997. Jimmy Young, often paired with Brian Curtois, was in charge of Radio 2’s
service until his final election duty in June 2001.
(3) I didn’t record any of this final results reading though
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a clip from either it or one of the earlier
programmes so I’m guessing some of it must exist in Sound Archives.
On Monday the BBC celebrates 100 years since its first radio
broadcast on 14 November 1922.
Making the opening announcement on station 2LO was Director
of Programmes Arthur Burrows who wrote: “November 14, 1922, was the day chosen
to commence British broadcasting in the official sense. It was the day of the
declaration of polls in connection with the General Election, and the news for
that evening consisted in the main of election results. The next day the
Birmingham station, 5IT, began to operate, and within a week 2ZY had also
joined in the work. The London station continued in my charge (Mr Jeffries
arranging the musical programmes and sharing in the pleasures of the children’s
hour). Birmingham fortunately secured the direction of Mr Percy Edgar, already
well known in the Midlands, and Metropolitan Vickers appointed to the
Manchester station Mr K.A. Wright, a young graduate of Sheffield, who, since
his earliest days with the firm, had shown a keen interest in music and its
propagation by wireless. One cannot look back upon those early days without a
smile.”
To mark the BBC’s centenary I’ve produced this sound montage
100 Years of BBC Radio in 100 History.
Roughly chronological in order it’s my selection of some memorable voices and
programmes designed to show something of the breadth of the radio services. I
hope you enjoy it.
You’ll hear some broadcasters who make more than one
appearance but see if you can spot who appears most often, on seven different
clips throughout the sequence.
Here’s the version with accompanying pictures.
The selection of early clips was, of course, limited by
what’s survived from that period. Most of my audio for the first half century
comes from compilation records issued by the BBC (for their 50th and
75th), documentary programmes about BBC history I’ve recorded over
the last 40+ years and repeats, often on Radio 4 Extra. Those 1920s clips you
here were all recreated for the May 1932 programme The End of Savoy Hill produced by Lance Sieveking. Much of what you
hear from the mid-70s onwards was recorded by me at the time or may come from
recordings kindly donated since starting this blog.
Inevitably as soon as I’d edited the ‘final’ final version I
remembered all the stuff I’d missed out. No “I’m rather worried about Jim” or “Give
‘em the money Barney”, no Noel’s funny phone calls, no reports from foreign
correspondents (other than wartime), the role of the European Service during the Cold War. I could
go on. Summarising local radio or what the BBC calls ‘the Nations’ was
impossible; they all just get seven minutes. The wonderful World Service has
been reduced to two minutes.
I first started work on this project after completing my
BBC90 montage, saving clips away in a separate folder. Most made the cut, some
just didn’t fit or no longer felt appropriate or interesting. Serious editing,
sequence by sequence, started in February and altogether I’ve used nearly 700
different bits of audio (including jingles). I reckon about 20% of material was
also in the BBC90 celebration. Thanks go again to Andy Howells who helped with
some BBC90 material in 2012 and to Aircheck Downloads who tracked down a couple
of DJ jingles for me that appear in one of the Radio 1 sequences.
When the Third Network - the umbrella title for the Music
Programme, the Third Programme, the Sports Service and the Study Session -
became Radio 3 on 30 September 1967, listeners won't have noticed any
difference. It was very much business as usual. All the component parts
retained their own names, controllership of the Third remained under Howard
Newby and the Music Programme continued to be the responsibility of the
Controller of the Home Service, which became Radio 4 of course, Gerard Mansell.
Here's the final Saturday schedule for the Third Network for
23 September 1967, the start of the 21st anniversary week for the Third Programme.
And here's the Radio
Times listings a week later under the Radio 3 banner for 30 September 1967.
Daytime on the Third Network was given over to the Music
Programme that had been introduced in August 1964; prior to that the
channel was mostly silent during the day. About 99% of the daytime music was
classical, but during the week there was the odd programme devoted to light
music, brass bands and jazz. On weekdays the service ran from 7.00 am to 6.30
pm with an hour's Study Session
acting as a buffer before the evening's listening on the Third Programme.
You'll no doubt spot a couple of programmes that still crop
up on Radio 3's Saturday schedule. Jazz
Record Requests dates from 1964 when Humphrey Lyttelton was the first
presenter, from April 1967 Steve Race took over the role. The other is Record Review which had first appeared
back in 1957.
Occupying the afternoon slot between 12.30 pm and 6.00 pm
was the Sports Service. This had originally
started as a summer fixture in 1961 but became an all year programme from, yes
you've guessed it 1964. It incorporated Sports Report that had started out on the Light Programme. Note that the presenter
for both afternoons is staff announcer Michael de Morgan. This is typical of
that period; sports journalists didn't really take over the role until Peter Jones joined the team in 1968.
The evening was given over to the Third Programme offering
its mix of classical music, drama and talks. For the opening night under the
new network the prime offering was a concert from the Berlin Festival
featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez.
The network didn't fully shift over to its new name for
another two and a half years when the policies of the internal review Broadcasting in the Seventies were
formally adopted. By 1969 an internal working party had already concluded:
"We recommend dropping the names 'Third Programme' and 'Music Programme'
and uniting the whole network and programme service under the single title
'Radio 3'. The Third Programme in particular has made a great name for itself
and the loss of this title will be depreciated by some but it undoubtedly has
connotations which discourage a large number who might have enjoyed many of its
programmes from tuning into it. A new title will help to emphasise that we are
making changes and that we intend to be free from past commitments".
D-Day for the first phase of the network realignment was
Saturday 4 April 1970. Here's the Radio 3 line-up, and it's now music all the
way from 8.00 am to 11.30 pm with three evening talks, one on Bertrand Russell,
the second from economics historian Robert Skidelsky and the third on Frank
Lloyd Wright. There's no drama, that's
over on Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre,
but on Sunday there's Marva from
Russian playwright Isaac Babel with a cast that includes Paul Eddington and
Fenella Fielding. As for the sport that had now shifted over to Radio 2 as Sport on 2.
On Radio 3's 40th anniversary Tom Service traced the changes
in the station's sound and its cultural impact. This edition of Music Matters was heard on Saturday 6
October 2007 and includes contributions from Lord Asa Briggs, Georgina Born,
Robert Ponsonby, Harrison Birtwistle, Ned Chaillet, Paul Gambaccini, Nicholas
Kenyon and Roger Wright.
Tributes following the death last month of actor Andrew
Sachs understandably lauded his masterful comic portrayal of the dim-witted
Manuel. Surely there's no-one who can't verbatim quote lines from Fawlty Towers.
Although Andrew had a considerably lengthy television career
spanning just over fifty years there was an even greater body of work on the
stage and on radio. In this post I review his radio career.
Andrew's first professional acting engagement was in 1947 in
a repertory theatre production at Bexhill-on-Sea of Ronald Millar's Frieda. For most of the 1950s he
was in rep and then in the West End in a number of Whitehall farces (he appeared in a number of BBC
televised Brian Rix farces 1958-62 and 1967-69). Andrew also joined the BBC Drama Repertory
Company, his audition report reading: " Very much like the voice,
remarkable range as accents, direction, good voice control, very versatile,
nice to see such a range, vitality, would be useful to have but his real
resting place is with variety and features." Initially he was cast in a number of minor
roles in dozens of plays and Saturday
Night Theatre productions as well as the 1957 radiophonic soundscape Private Dreams and Public Nightmares
where Andrew played one of the ethereal voices alongside Frederick Treves and
Joan Sanderson (decades later making a guest appearance as the hard-of-hearing
Mrs Richards in an episode of Fawlty
Towers).
Private Dreams and
Public Nightmares was first heard on the BBC Third Programme on 7 October
1957.
German-born Sachs was an obvious choice to act out some of
the scenes in the Network Three adult learning series Talking Germanand Improve
Your German (1959-63). Occasionally he broadcast for the BBC's German
Service. Meanwhile he continued to make almost weekly appearances for the BBC
Drama Repertory Company in plays and serials on the Home, Light and Third, more
often than not some way down the billing, though he did co-star with John
Baddeley in the Afternoon Theatre
comedy Slightly Off Key and with
Barbara Leigh-Hunt in My Dearest Angel.
He also appeared in, and for a while directed, episodes of the daily serial The Dales.
In 1962 Andrew started to write for radio. His first broadcast
piece was One Man and his Dog, heard
on the BBC Home Service. In 1964 he followed that with the black comedy Till Death Do Us Join in which Lance
Percival's character Mr Ernest Wire is intent of bumping off his wife. Other
productions that some year were Fearful
Adversaries about a 'down-at-heel Soho busker' played by Sachs himself and Flat to Let for Midweek Theatre. The following year he co-wrote with Jill Hyem a
daily serial broadcast over a month called Dear
Girls about a group "who come to London to find their fortune but had
to share a house in Belsize Park." The cast of Dear Girls included Melody Lang, who Andrew had married in 1960. Dear Girls was the forerunner to Waggoner's Walk as four years later Jill
Hyem, now writing with Alan Downer, continued with the idea of a group
characters in a bedsit in Belsize Park in the
Saturday Night-Theatre play The
Ropewalk, this in turn became the long-running Radio 2 daily serial. Andrew himself appeared in a number of
editions of Waggoner's Walk.
Other plays written by Andrew include Afternoon Theatre productions Pie
and Pea Supper (1966), Decline
and Fall of the Empire (1969), Made
in Heaven with Timothy West and future Fawlty
Towers co-star Prunella Scales (1971), Home
from Home starring Martin Jarvis (1972) and Cash Me a Portrait (1972). For Midweek Theatre there was Philately Will Get You Nowhere (1971)
which has had a number of repeats. In 1985 he wrote The Art Lovers trilogy.
But perhaps Andrew's best-known original work is The Revenge, to date radio's only play
without words. Recorded on location in binaural stereo it's a thriller telling
the story of a man on the run. First heard on BBC Radio 3 on 1 June 1978 it
gained a swift repeat a month later, twice in the same evening.
The original broadcast was preceded by a discussion with
producer Glyn Dearman, head of drama Ronald Mason and Andrew Sachs. In this
version you'll also hear Andrew talking to Peter Reed about the play taken from
the Radio 7/4 Extra programme I Did It MyWay.
Andrew was appearing on stage in No Sex Please, We're British in early 1975 when John Cleese and BBC
producer John Howard Davies came to see a performance. Impressed by what they
saw they offered him the part of Manuel in the sitcom that Cleese and Connie
Booth were in the middle of writing. No doubt they recognised how well Andrew
played farce, an element that would feature throughout Fawlty Towers. The rest, as they say, is history.
Andrew's non-Fawlty Towers RT cover for BBC1's The History of Mr Polly (March 1980)
During the 1970s and 80s Andrew continued to work regularly
on radio. He was a superb narrator and reader, what he termed "sitting
down acting", cropping up on A Book
at Bedtime, Story Time, Poetry Please! and Time for Verse. Now a star name he was a panellist on The Law Game, The Name's the Game, Give Us
a Conch and others and was in the comedy shows Delve Special, Sloe Coaches,
Week Ending, Going for Broke and Little
Blighty on the Down. In 1987 he was also back helping listeners to learn a
new language, this time Spanish in When
in Spain,working on the premise
that Manuel would step in and prompt Andrew on what to say.
In this the first episode of Sloe Coaches Andrew Sachs plays the part of Gerhardt "a former
Luftwaffe pilot who crash-landed his Heinkel and has been trying to repair it
ever since". In the starring role is Roy Kinnear playing the scheming boss
of a ramshackle Sussex coach company. Gerhardt is one of his drivers. The Radio
2 series was written by Charlie Adams and John
Lea. There was only one series of Sloe
Coaches. It's not hard to see why.
Following in the footsteps of Alec Guinness and Kenneth
More, Andrew took on the role of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown in a couple of
series heard on Radio 4 between 1984 and 1986. On playing Father Brown he told
the Radio Times "I've always
thought of him as essentially English and I never think of myself as a very
English actor, nor indeed a very English person. But he's a lovely man to play
and, on radio, the stories stand on the style of the writing. The adapter, John
Scotney, has caught Chesterton's style beautifully -and that's not easy when
you have only dialogue to rely on."
Radio Times illustration by Robin Jacques for the radio adaptations
of the Father Brown Stories
This is the first story from the second series of the Father Brown Stories titled The Perishing of the Pendragons.
In the early nineties Andrew would become a familiar voice
to a whole new younger generation reading the daily stories in Wiggly Park on Radio 5. Here's an
example of his story-telling.
Andrew was also cast in another Radio 5 children's serial The Adventures of Tintin as Snowy but by
now the majority of his radio work was as a reader on Poetry Please! and With Great
Pleasure. There was also a reading of the French comic masterpiece Clochemerle and a role in the
'"rock 'n' roll sitcom" Love 40
- New Balls Please, both on Radio 2. Over on Radio 4 he was in the comedy
series Man of Soup (1999) and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
(2007). His last starring role on radio was as Dr John Watson opposite Clive
Merriman's Holmes in The Further Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes (2002-04 & 2010).
In 2002 Andrew was featured on the Radio 4 series That Reminds Me in which actors and
comedians reminisced about their life and career in front of a live audience.
The BBC Third Programme offered listeners a rich diet of
drama, classical music, concerts and talks but there was little in the way of a
light repast. "Is it too much to hope," asked Alan Pryce-Jones
writing for the BBC Quarterly in
1951, "that to all the other pleasures of the intelligence may be added
during the next five years a more frequent experience of the intelligent
chuckle?"
Comedy on the Third offered nothing in the way of belly
laughs and recordings with a live audience. Indeed, as the then Controller,
John Morris, observed in 1956 "it has been known for a listener to
complain of the introduction of humour into the Programme".
But humour there was, mostly of the "intelligent
chuckle" kind. Trawling through the BBC Genome site it is possible to pick
out a number of comedy programmes that graced the schedules of the Third
Programme and Radio 3.
How to Listen
I've already written about the programme that launched the
Third Programme on 29 September 1946 and the occasional series of How to programmes that followed.
Hilda Tablet
The Private Life of
Hilda Tablet (1954) was a supposed investigation into the life of composeress
Hilda Tablet from the pen of Henry Reed. Hilda had first appeared in Reed's
1953 play A Very Great Man Indeed billed
as a mock-solemn account of a critic's research into the life of an imaginary
novelist named Richard Sherwin.
The part of Henry Reeve, the critic whose voice is central
to each of Reed's plays, was taken by Hugh Burden. Other characters were played
by members of the BBC Rep including Carleton Hobbs, Norman Shelly and Deryck
Guyler. Subsequent plays were: Emily
Butter - An Occasion Recalled (1954), the occasion being the first
performance of Hilda Tablet's opera; Through
a Hedge - Backwards (1956); The
Primal Scene, as it were (1958); Not
a Drum was Heard (1959), being the war memories of General Gland as played
by Guyler; and finally Musique Discrete
(1959).
Recordings of all the Henry Reed plays are on YouTube.
The Third Division
This is one of the great missing radio series as sadly no
recordings exist. This 1949 comedy, a follow-up to the 1948 Home Service comedy
Listen My Children, had a pre-Goons
line-up that included Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine as well
as Benny Hill, Robert Beatty, Benny Lee, Patricia Hayes and Carole Carr. The
scripts were by Frank Muir and Denis Norden.
Interviewed recently about The Third Division Norden said: "We weren't given much guidance what
the BBC wanted except that it shouldn't be like the Light Programme or the Home
Service. It was a revue, to use a slightly old-fashioned term: we had two bands
to provide the music."
Frank Muir, writing in his autobiography A Kentish Lad, recalls that he and Denis
Norden "wrote a spot for Peter in Third
Division; he played all the street traders in what we called Sellers' Market. We also used his
extraordinary gift for character voices in sketches, one of which was a parody
of those Fitzpatrick Traveltalks which seemed to be a part of every cinema
programme in those days ('...and as the sun sinks slowly in the west we bid farewell
to Bali, Isle of Enchantment...'). We called our version Bal-ham, Gateway to the South.
Peter was very quickly taken famous and was persuaded by
George Martin (whom later produced the Beatles' records) to record a comedy LP.
Peter asked us if he could include three of our sketches which he had enjoyed
performing: the mad headteacher of a progressive school talking to a timid
potential parent, an interview with a moronic pop star and his gaoler/manager
('Come back here! I've told you repeatedly, where the carpet starts, you
stop!'), and Bal'ham, Gateway to the
South".
Muir goes on to say how some forty years later a group of
Balham businessmen decide to spruce up the centre of the neighbourhood and, in
the belief that the sketch had put Balham on the map, decided to erect a statue
in the likeness of Peter Sellers. Anxious to affirm their copyright Muir and
Norden wrote a light-hearted letter of retort staking their claim and
suggesting that the group would now "involve itself in the expense of
putting up two statues". Offering a compromise they said that "for a
trifling sum, we would be prepared to go along to the new shopping centre and
stand there personally".
In Third Gear
This was a one-off programme on the Third Programme's tenth
anniversary in which Peter Jones and Peter Ustinov "pay homage to their
betters". Based on the successful Home Service series In All Directions.
Hardluck Hall
This is the other Third Programme comedy that has failed to
survive. Tantalisingly it's a 1964 collaboration between David Nobbs and Peter
Tinniswood - at the time both submitting scripts to That Was the Week That Was - set in a "somewhat stately home
somewhere in England" called Hardluck
Hall.
Nobb's, writing in his autobiography I Didn't Get Where I Am Today, has only a little to offer in the
way of enlightenment about the series: "Peter and I achieved two other
distinctions. We wrote the first comedy ever to be on BBC Radio's Third Programme.
We also wrote the last comedy series ever to be on BBC Radio's Third Programme.
You've guessed it. It was the same one.
Hardluck Hall -
shades of my beloved Thomas Love Peacock - was satirical. The names of the
characters - Priscilla Houseproud, Sir Sidney Servall, Tom Ology, Robin Robot,
Doreen Nylon - fill me with dismay now, but it was better than it sounds,
expolited radio techniques inventively, and was great fun to do. A splendid
cast, including Valentine Dyall, Hugh Burden and Stephen Moore, seemed to enjoy
it hugely. Peter, of course, went on to do a lot of marvellous radio work. The
producer, Richard Thomas, emigrated to new Zealand, but I don't think it was as
a direct result of the series".
David Nobbs may have been wrong on one account but he did,
to my knowledge, write the last comedy for the Third as Radio 3 came along in
1967, though the label for the evening's listening still stuck until April
1970.
Tribute to Greatness
The Third/Radio 3 seemed to relish the cod biography, see
Hilda Tablet above and The Atkinson
People below. This three part series, tucked away on Monday nights in
November 1969, was written by Myles Rudge and starred Kenneth Williams, Joan
Sims and John Moffatt. The script for the second programme, a tribute to that
fine thespian Plantagenet Runciman, is available online.
For once Kenneth Williams was not too scathing about this
show. In his diary entry for 11 September 1968 he records: "To the Gratfon
for this radio production. John Simmonds directing. It is called A Bannister Called Freda and again Myles
has written a brilliant script and Ted Dicks two marvellous songs. Joan Sims
& me playing all the parts & John Moffatt doing the Narrator -
superbly. Of course this is a pilot show & we've yet to see if the powers
approve it".
The Half-Open University
More send-ups, this time of the Open University, in these
two comedy shows that were the precursor to The
Burkiss Way. Airing in August and November 1975 it was written by Andrew
Marshall, David Renwick and John Mason. Burkiss
cast members Chris Emmett and Nigel Rees appeared alongside Timothy Davies and
Christine Ozanne. According to Rees "Burkiss
derived some of its half-academic, half-popular tone from the Radio 3
series".
The Atkinson People
This 4-part 1979 series saw the pre-Blackadder pairing of
Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis as they took
"satirical
and wry investigations into the lives of fictional great men". Unlike most
of the programmes in this list this series is available to buy and gets
repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra.
Patterson
There'll
be more on one of my all-time favourite comedies - this an 8-part tale of a
university lecturer in English Literature struggling with his students and his
marriage - in a future post.
Broomhouse Reach
This
'suite in six parts' detailed "the adventures of a hapless young
musicologist, who discovers some lost music by a composer 40 years dead but
still living on as a malign influence, a sardonic witness to our hero's
scholastic endeavours."
The
series was written by Colin McLaren, at the time the Archivist and Keeper of
Manuscripts to the Special Collections department at Aberdeen University, as
well as the author of a number of novels, radio monologues and short plays -
including the series 39 and Counting
(1981) with Michael Hordern, Dinsdale Landen and Hannah Gordon.
This
is the first part of Broomhouse Reach
as heard on Radio 3 on 23 November 1984. It stars David de Keyser as the
composer Martin Mendl with Timothy Davies as Timothy Liripet, Cyril Luckham as
Sir Hubert Fiske, Fanny Carby as Mrs Wix and Mark Jones as Nigel Scrote. The
series was directed by Piers Plowright. This is my recording of that programme,
not heard since its first outing.
A Selection of
Plays
I
won't attempt to list all the comedy plays that appeared on the Third and Radio
3 and I can't vouch for the comedic value of most of these productions; the
only one I've heard recently is Outpatient.
Amongst
the works of Rhys Adrian are: No Charge
for Extra Service (1979) with Elizabeth Spriggs and Nigel Stock, Watching the Plays Together (1982) with
Rosemary Leach and James Grout, Outpatient
(1985) with Michael Aldridge and Andrew Sachs, Toytown (1987) with Peter Vaughan, Upended (1988) with Norman Bird and Eva Stuart and Why Leo? (1988) with Richard Briers.
Cartoonist Mel Calman wrote The Big Novel (1986) with Richard Griffiths and Peter Woodthorpe.
Griffiths was also in the surreal Sweet
Tooth (1987) in which Calman "wrote parts for a collection of cakes
and pastries" and then in 1989 Rabbit
Man with Jim Broadbent playing a taxi driver who grows rabbit's ears.
One of Wally K Daly's earliest plays was also on Radio 3: Priest and Confessor (1975) starred
Richard Briers and the priest and Tony Haygarth as the man making his first confession
for many years.
Why Bother?
This
1994 series of five programmes was Peter Cook's swansong in which he again
donned the persona of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, "the complacent
aristocrat who'd wasted his whole life trying to teach ravens to fly underwater".
Like the BBC2 series A Life in Pieces
(1990/91) the premise was that Sir Arthur was reminiscing in a two-way
interview; on TV it was Ludovic Kennedy but for the radio series he was more
evenly matched with Chris Morris. According to William Cook, editor of a Peter
Cook anthology, Morris "left Cook enough space to land his punchlines, but
Morris also created a proper character of his own". All five editions are
on YouTube.
References:
BBC
Genome website
Various
editions of Radio Times
The Envy of the World
by Humphrey Carpenter (Phoenix 1997)
A Kentish Lad by Frank Muir (Bantam Press
1997)
I Didn't Get Where I Am Today by David Nobbs (William
Heinemann 2003)
Tragically I was an Only Twin:
The Complete Peter Cook edited by William Cook (Arrow Books 2003)
The introduction of the BBC's Third Programme in 1946 can be
seen as part of a movement in post-war British society to expand the range of
'culture' available to the masses. Rationing might mean that people would still
go hungry but they could at least seek intellectual nourishment. The culture on
offer was 'high culture' and the tone was decidedly highbrow. The Third
demanded of its listeners that they actively listen as if attending an evening
concert. This was not background noise.
Writing the introduction to the tenth anniversary anthology
John Morris, the then network controller, hammered home the fact that the Third
was not easy listening:
"It was decided from the beginning that the Third
Programme should not compromise; it should make no concessions to popular
taste. Sir William Haley, who was at the time the Director-General of the BBC,
was asked if the Third Programme were to live up to such ambitious motives,
might it not often become dull? 'Yes', he answered, 'let it often become dull.
Let it often make mistakes. Let if often under-run and over-run. Let it always
remember that it is an experiment, even an adventure, and not a piece of
routine. Let it arouse controversy and not seek to muffle controversy. Let it
enable the intelligent public to hear the best that has been thought or said or
composed in all the world. Let it demonstrate that we are not afraid to express
our own culture or to give our people access to the culture of others. Let it
set a standard, and furnish an example, which will not only raise the level of
our own broadcasting but in the end affect the level of broadcasting in other
lands. Let it be something which has never been attempted hitherto in any country.'
During its ten year of existence the Third Programme has
done all of these things; in its early days the timing of programmes was
frequently erratic, and many of our talks are still not only dull but difficult
to comprehend without considerable knowledge of the subject under review. This
has been a deliberate policy, and I am sure a right one: any attempt to
'brighten-up' by 'talking down' to our listeners would inevitably have led to a
lowering of intellectual standards. besides, we should cease to obtain the
services as speakers of some of the best minds in our own and other countries".
This edition of BBC Four's Time Shift documentary strand examined the early years of the
station. The Third Programme: High
Culture for all in Post-War Britain was broadcast on 25 October 2005.
Reference:
From the Third
Programme: A Ten Years' anthology edited by John Morris (Nonsuch Press,
1956)
The Third Programme "will devote to the great works the
time they require. It will seek every evening to do something that is
culturally satisfying and significant. It will devote occasional series of evenings
to some related masterpieces, a Shakespeare historical cycle, all the Beethoven
quartets, or a series of Mozart operas. It will, so far as circumstances
permit, be international. Concerts, operas, plays will be taken from abroad as
landline conditions improve. Its talks will include contributions from the
great European thinkers. Its whole content will be directed to an audience that
is not of one class but that is perceptive and intelligent".
So ran the introduction from the BBC's Director-General Sir
William Haley on the opening night of the Third Programme on 29 September
1946. But the first programme chosen to
open the new service wasn't a concert, an opera, a drama or a talk but a comedy
from Stephen Potter and Joyce Grenfel.
"This is the BBC Third Programme," said announcer
Patrick Butler. "How to Listen.
Including how not to, how you ought to, and how you won't." The idea of
launching with a send-up of highbrow listening was that of Leslie Stokes, the
station's Assistant (Presentation and Publicity), who thought that "we
ought to have a laugh at ourselves."
Stephen Potter had been writing and producing for BBC radio
since the mid-30s. He'd already appeared in a few How to ... programmes on the Home Service: How to talk to Children, How
to Argue, How to Give a Party, How to Woo and so on. Turning freelance
after the war he wrote comic books on Gamesmanship
and One-Upmanship that would
later form the basis for the delightfully funny film School for Scoundrels with Alistair Sim and Ian Carmichael.
Recounting the events of that opening night Humphrey
Carpenter, in his book, The Envy of the
World, takes up the commentary:
Narrator (in a hushed tone): the programme is about to
begin. We are rehearsing the opening announcement. The last details are being
added. In the studio, last directions from the producer ... One minute to go
...
Amyot [Etienne Amyot, the Third Programme's Assistant
(Planning)] says there was indeed such a mood as six o'clock approached that
evening: 'We were terrified that something might go wrong. I remember George [George
Barnes the Controller of the Third] saying to me, before we went on air,
"Well, it'll succeed or it won't."'
In its opening moments, How
to Listen exposed everyone's anxiety that no one would tune in to the Third.
A radio producer, waiting eagerly for his live programme to go on the air, is
suddenly granted a dispiriting vision of what is going on in listeners' homes:
Narrator: Are they ready? Are they listening? Here, the
house is empty - there, the set is switched off - but here, Licence number
865432, Mrs Moss, is she listening?Old Lady: Turn up the wireless, Mrs Moss.Mrs Moss: Yes, dear, it is chilly tonight, let's turn up the
wireless a bit ...Producer (anxiously): Yes, but is she really going to
listen?Narrator: On to another radio set. Where are we now? Let's
look in at the window of Baltimore Gardens.Man: It's your call.Woman: I said four clubs.Man: Four clubs...I say, could we have the radio down a
little, please? Woman: Yes, let's have it down a little. It's a bit difficult
to concentrate on bridge.
This was all too realistic. A survey conducted by the Daily Telegraph during the third evening
of the Third gathered these, among other responses:Housewife: Bottling apples when the play started and could
not listen. Now playing bridge.Business Man: Not the time. I play bridge.
How to Listen went
on to poke fun at every kind of BBC cliche, from the inanities of Workers' Playtime on the Light Programme
to 'poetic drama' at its worst. Then, in the final few minutes, it suddenly
turned serious, quoting from The Anatomy
of Melancholy and Robert Graves on the listening ear, and offering some
mock-Shakespearean verse (spoken by Deryck Guyler) which was presumably thought
appropriate to the opening of the Third: '...Admit me Chorus to this History, /
Who, Prologue-like you humble patience pray / Gently to hear, kindly to judge
our play.'
The genesis of the Third Programme can be traced back to a
1943 memo from Senior Controller Basil Nicolls who proposed a general 'Home
Service'. a 'light' programme, 'popular', but not 'rubbishy', and an 'Arts
Programme', which would be devoted to high-quality performances of masterpieces
'in all the arts amenable to broadcasting'.
Controller of the Home Service, Sir Richard Maconachie, also
attempted to carve up the radio networks to fit the available wavelengths. Programme
A would be "cultural, for want of a better word" that would be
directed to a "highly intelligent minority audience", Programme B
would be 'Educational and Youth', Programme C would draw on regional material,
Programme D would be like the wartime Forces Programme and Programme E would be
'light'. This proved too ambitious and all peacetime audiences got was just the
Home, Light and Third, and they had to wait for over a year for the latter.
The Third Programme was at pains to emphasise that the
schedule would have no fixed points, if a concert overran then so be it.
"The Third Programme avoids annotation" explained the BBC Year Book
for 1947. "Comment on a work about to be performed is avoided, and silence
- a full ten-seconds' pause - is regarded as the best cushion for a
masterpiece. This leisured presentation in which silent pauses of up to four
minutes have been allowed is one reason why the Programme has been described as
unexpected and different from what is customary".
Back to that opening night. How to Listen was billed as running from 6 pm to 6.45 pm but it
under ran by seven minutes. "The timing was slipshod to say the
least" said one newspaper. To fill the gap announcer Christopher Pemberton
read some Henry James. A later four
minute gap just before 8 pm remained just silent, save for twelve words from
Pemberton.
Bach's Goldberg
Variations followed at 6.45 pm. Played by Lucille Wallace at the harpsichord
they were introduced by yet another announcer on duty that evening, Marjorie
Anderson.
At 7.30 pm came a talk: Reflections
on World Affairs by Field-Marshal J.C. Smuts. They had wanted Churchill for
the opening talk but he was ill.
The first concert on the station commenced at 8 pm with the
BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Chorus performing
live at the Maida Vale studios with announcer Alvar Liddell introducing. The
concert featured a specially commissioned Festival
Overture by Benjamin Britten. The concert interval was Director-General
William Haley's introductory talk referred to above.
Following the concert at 10.10 pm was Living Opinion, a heavily-scripted discussion between
"ex-Servicemen and others". The Star
was not impressed: "The handful of woolly-minded men discussing ... were
obviously reading it all out and despite careful producing it did not sound
real."
The rest of the evening consisted of Monteverdi madrigals on
record, a repeat of a 1935 talk by Sir Max Beerbohm on London Revisited and, to close, the Epilogue.
There were bouquets and brickbats from the press and
listeners. "Haley's Third Symphony for orchestra and two listeners"
jibed the Daily Mirror. The Evening Standard liked "the look of
it" whilst the Daily Mail though
"it demanded no greater feat of endurance than two hours of choral and
orchestral music ... and the fragments of talk and music which made up the rest
of the evening were easy enough on the ear". One listener thought it left
"no time to do anything else except listen and I can see a succession of
evenings in which meals will be prepared in ten minutes' time and eaten in five
minutes". Another exclaimed "Today is the high spot of my listening
life."
So here is that opening programme, How to Listen. With Joyce Grenfel are Gladys Young, Betty Hardy,
Louise Hutton, Carleton Hobbs, Geoffrey Wincott, Roy Plomley, Ivor Barnard,
Deryck Guyler and Ronald Simpson. My recording comes from the Radio 3 repeat on
29 September 1986, hence the voice of
announcer John Holmstom.
As a bonus this is How
to Broadcast that aired on the evening of the Third's fifth anniversary on
29 September 1951. The cast is Joyce Grenfel, Betty Hardy, Ronald Simpson, Deryck
Guyler, Geoffrey Wincott, Alan Reed, Elwyn Brook-Jones, Carleton Hobbs and Roy
Plomley. This recording is of the Christmas Day 1987 repeat on Radio 4 and
includes an introduction from Laurie MacMillan.
References:
The Envy of the World
by Humphrey Carpenter (Phoenix 1997)
The History of Broadcasting
in the United Kingdom: Volume IV Sound & Vision by Asa Briggs (OUP
1979)
“Standby for switching. Get tuned to Radio 1 or 2. 5, 4, 3,
Radio 2, Radio 1, go!” Surely one of the most played pieces of radio archive:
Robin Scott’s countdown to the launch of Radio 1 at 7 a.m. on Saturday 30
September 1967.But what was happening
over on Radios 2, 3 and 4? Was there an exciting new range of programmes as
part of the biggest shake-up of the radio networks since the immediate post-war
period? Or was it just business as usual?
The relabeling of the old Home, Light and Third had been
prompted by the BBC’s promise to fund a new pop service to replace the offshore
pirate stations. This had first been mooted in 1966 and work started in earnest
in January 1967 when, Johnny Beerling recalls, producers in the Popular Music
and Gramophone Departments were asked whether they wanted to work on Radio 1 or
2. Beerling would then work alongside Derek Chinnery, Teddy Warwick and Angela
Bond in thrashing out ideas for the pop station, reporting to Robin Scott who
was appointed controller a month later.
In fact at that time the new station still didn’t have a
name, that decision was made later that summer. Amongst the names considered by
the BBC’s Sound Broadcasting Committee were “Popular Music Service”, “Radio
247”, “Radio 67” (which would surely be out-of-date come January 1968!), “Radio
Elizabeth”, “Radio Skylark”, and “Radio Pam”. By May 1967 the use of numbers
was first suggested such as “Radio One” and “Light One”.The numbering of the networks led Home
Service controller Gerald Mansell to express concern that the new Radio Four
could “imply demotion”.
So what about Radio 1? As ever funds were short so to make
the new service look like it had a full schedule there was loads of
simulcasting with Radio 2. There was also the trick of billing former Light
Programme shows as being on Radio 1, even when also going out on Radio 2.
Confusing! This happened for Saturday
Club (but dropping Brian Matthew in favour of Keith Skues), Family Favourites with Michael Aspel, Country Meets Folk with Wally Whyton and
The Jazz Scene with Humphrey
Lyttelton. Even that old warhorse Housewives’
Choice became a Radio 1 show re-titled Family
Choice. Some Radio 1 shows such as Late Night
Extra and Night Ride would later
become long-running Radio 2 programmes.
This was the line-up on Radio 1’s launch day:
0700 Tony Blackburn with a Daily Disc Delivery
0832 Leslie Crowther with Junior Choice (renamed from Children’s
Favourites that had ended the previous weekend with presenter John Ellison)
0855Crack the Clue
with Duncan Johnson 1000 Keith Skues with Saturday
Club
1200 Emperor Rosko with Midday
Spin (Midday Spin being an old
Light Programme title)
1300The Jack Jackson
Show
1355Crack the Clue
1400 Chris Denning with Where
It’s At (a Light Programme transfer)
1500 Pete Murray
1600 Pete Brady
1730Country Meets
Folk 1832 Scene and Heard
with Johnny Moran 1930 as Radio 2 2200 Pete Murray with Pete’s
Party (another Light Programme refugee) 0000 Midnight Newsroom 0005 Night Ride
with Sean Kelly 0200 News and closedown
You’ll find audio of Tony’s first show online so I’ll not
post it again here. But imagine the shock of any Light Programme listeners who
stumbled across Midday Spin – the previous
Saturday it had been a special Holiday
Spin with Michael Aspel - and heard
the whoops and shouts from Emperor Rosko. Here’s a scoped version of part of
that show:
In 1967 the Light Programme was allowed to stay up late and
didn’t close down until 2 a.m. It fell to announcer Roget Moffat to have the
last word. He was that night’s presenter of It’s
One Clock, a hour-long music show with a different host each weekday – in
that final week you’d also have heard Jon Curle, Sean Kelly, Wally Whyton and
Adrian Love.
In contrast to Radio 1’s full Saturday schedule, Radio 2’s
was a little light. It was continuity announcer Paul Hollingdale who was the
first voice on the new networks when Radio 2 opened at 0530. He’d been chosen
by controller Robin Scott to host that morning’s edition of Breakfast Special in place of the
regular Saturday presenter Bruce Wyndham. In fact Bruce was working that
morning anyway, but over on Radio 4 reading the early morning news, such was
the swapping between networks of continuity announcers at that time. So the timings
were:
0533 Breakfast Special
with Paul Hollingdale 0832 as Radio 1
0955 Five to Ten
with Paul Simon and Colin Semper 1000 Max Jaffa and Sandy MacPherson with Melody Time 1200 Marching and
Waltzing introduced by Jimmy Kingsbury 1300 as Radio 1 1832 Those Were the
Days introduced by Bill Crozier 1935 Million Dollar
Bill with Joe Brown as that week’s guest speaking to Robin Boyle 2015 Spotlight 1 and 2
in which Kenneth Horne previews some of the shows and voices on the new
stations 2115 Caterina Valente
Sings 2200 as Radio 1
This is the intro to Spotlight
1 and 2:
In 2007 Paul Hollingdale recalled that first Radio 2 edition
of Breakfast Special. And if you want to know the first record played on the
station here’s the answer:
Listeners to the new Radio 3 will have noticed absolutely no
difference to their daily programmes. Saturday under the old regime was broken
down into different strands: 0700-1230 Music Programme, 1230-1800 Sports
Service and then 1800-2315 Third Programme. This continued on 30 September and
remained the general format of the station until April 1970 when it became more
of a cohesive network.
Friday 29 September had been The Third Programme’s
twenty-first birthday and the whole evening was dedicated to a performance of The Tragedy of King Lear with John
Gielgud in the title role. Closing down proceedings after the Market Trends report (an odd piece of
scheduling with financial news on the Third whilst over on the Home Service
they had a music programme) was announcer Cormac Rigby. He was also on duty the
following morning to usher in Radio 3, whose schedule for the day was as
follows:
0800 News and weather
0804Record Review
with John Lade
0900 News and weather
0904La Clemenza di
Tito, a performance of Mozart’s opera in two acts
1014Ravel’s Piano
Music played by Colin Horsley
1040La Clemenza di
Tito – Act Two
1200Jazz Record
Requests with Steve Race
1230Sports Service
introduced by Michael de Morgan with golf, swimming, racing from Ascot,second-half football commentary and Sports Report 1800Bach – four
piano pieces played by Charles Rosen
1855 An Idea and Its
Icon – a talk by Geoffrey Webb on theology and iconography in the Middle
Ages
1910Folk Music of
Czechoslovakia compiled and introduced by A.L. Lloyd and produced by
Douglas Cleverdon
2000BBC Symphony
Orchestra – a concert from the Berlin Festival with the Orchestra conducted
by Pierre Boulez
2105Personal View
– John Maddox with a talk on current affairs
2125Concert -
Part 2
2205Abraham Cowley
– selections of his poetry introduced by Anthony Thwaite
2235 Mozart –
String Quartet in F major played by The Weller Quartet
2300 News
2315 Closedown
Closing the Home Service “for today, and for all days” on
the Friday evening was David Dunhill, who’d obviously taken some care in
preparing his final announcement.
The last programme on the Home Service was Jazz at Night with records played by
John Dunn. Jazz at Night became the
only show to move from the Home Service to Radio 1, finding a home just after
midnight on Friday nights. John Dunn, of course, would then pop up during
Saturday reading the news on Radio 1 and 2 and making that now infamous “here
is the news, in English” intro to the bulletin during Rosko’s show (see above).
It was David Dunhill who opened up proceedings on Radio 4
the following morning welcoming listeners to “Radio 4, the Home Service”, a
billing that remained for many months to ease the transition. The schedule was
exactly the same as the previous Saturday with the sole exception of the
renaming of Lightening Our Darkness as
At the Close of the Day. Reviewing
the line-up I’m struck by the sheer volume of, necessarily, short programmes.
There must have been nearly fifty continuity junctions. This is the schedule
for the London area, there were regional variations in the Midlands, North,
Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and South & West.
0635 Farming Today 0650 Ten to Seven
– prayers and meditation 0655 Weather and Programme News 0700 News 0715 On Your Farm 0745 Today’s Papers 0750 Outlook – a
Christian angle on the news 0755 Weather and Programme News 0800 News 0815 From Our Own
Correspondent 0845 Today’s Papers 0850 Voices –
archive material introduced by Leslie Perowne 0900 News 0915 The Weekly World
– a review of the weekly news magazine by Geoffrey Howe 0920 A Choice of
Paperbacks chaired by Cliff Michelmore 0945 In Your Garden
– introduced by John Hay 1015 Daily Service 1030 Science Survey
with a talk on Protection Against Disease 1045 Study Session
with programmes on The Artist at Work,
Music Questions and Divertissement Francais 1200 Motoring and the
Motorist – chaired by Bill Hartley 1225 All the Best from
Today – clips from the week’s Today
programme linked by Jack de Manio 1255 Weather and Programme News 1300 News 1310 Round the Horne
– repeat of an April edition on the Light Programme 1340 Desert Island
Discs – Roy Plomley talks to castaway Roy Castle 1415 Afternoon Theatre
– with Floral Tribute written by
David Bartlett 1515 Home for the Day
– a Saturday supplement to Woman’s Hour
with Marjorie Anderson 1600 Music at Four
– with music by Haydn, Mozart and Stravinsky played by the BBC Welsh Orchestra
and a Ravel quartet played by the LaSalle String Quartet 1755 Weather and Programme News 1800 News and Radio
Newsreel, followed by Regional News 1830 Sports Session
(other regions had their own sports programmes) 1900 Steptoe and Son
– a repeat of Crossed Swords from the
Light Programme in July 1930 Gala Night at the
Opera – Sandra Chalmers introducing a programme of music recorded at the
Huddersfield Town Hall played by the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra and the
BBC Northern Singers 2030 Saturday Night
Theatre with Paul Daneman and Maragret Rawlings in Adventure Story by Terrence Rattigan 2158 Weather Forecast 2200 News 2210 A Word in
Edgeways presented by Brian Redhead 2255 At the Close of
the Day – a meditation by Stanley Pritchard 2310 Music at Night
– Scarlatti sonatas played by Alan Cuckston 2342 Weather forecast, news summary and coastal waters
forecast 2348 Closedown
