Fun at One – Radio in a Blender

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

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

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

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

Radio Lives – Tom Vernon

There are two indisputable facts about Tom Vernon. One, he was a fat man. Two, he rode a bicycle. That combination gave Tom a number of hugely popular series on radio and on television as he explored the highways and byways across France and around the world.

It all started with the Radio 4 series that first aired in late 1979, Fat Man on a Bicycle, billed as “Being the ponderous peddling of Tom Vernon from Muswell Hill to the Mediterranean and what befell him in the land of the French” His broadcasting style was, according to radio historian David Hendy, “humorous, gentle and idiosyncratic in a way that seemed perfectly natural to most Radio Four listeners”.

Fat Man on a Bicycle, Radio Times 13 December 1979

Tom Vernon was born in London in 1939 and would go first into teaching and then PR. At the same time he was performing, apparently “moonlighting as a period-costumed minstrel” and writing music.  The song-writing somehow led to occasional appearances on the Today programme where overnight he’d write a song about a current news story for broadcast the next day.

He was the first presenter on BBC Radio London’s breakfast show Rush Hour when the station launched in 1970. Indeed he was inadvertently the first voice on air when the engineers accidently put out his rehearsals during test transmissions.  As you’ll hear in the audio clips below Tom also found time to write the Radio London Song. He also presented In Concert alongside Michael Oliver in a programme that offered classical music, comment and criticism and a look at London life in A Better Place to Live.

At Radio London he would also read entire Victorian novels on the air, presumably they had plenty of time to fill. This included the whole of Pickwick Papers which he delivered in 50 episodes and acting 150 different voices, mixing in his own music and sound effects. “I was a one-man epic,” he recalled. That same rich voice would later go on to record Dial-a-Santa for the GPO.

The first edition of Feedback 1 April 1979.
Regular hosts after Tom have been Colin Semper,
Chris Dunkley, Roger Bolton and Andrea Catherwood

Joining Radio 4 he was a producer and presenter for the nightly arts strand Kaleidoscope and a contributor to the review of weekly magazines programme News Stand. From April 1979 he became the first presenter of Feedback, the “bouquets and brickbats” programme that took over from the short-lived Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells.  Tom remained with Feedback for four years.

Here’s Tom Vernon with an edition of Feedback from 10 April 1981 where the burning topic is local and regional radio.

The idea for a cycle journey across France had its genesis many months before when he’d bought a second-hand bike at his local Oxfam shop for a fiver. Nicknamed The Black Pudding – “it was exceedingly heavy and acted as a vehicle for a great deal of fat” – it remained little used until one day when he was carless he hopped on it to go shopping, pretty soon he was cycling into the BBC and back.

It was in July 1979, now on a slimline Evans bicycle, that he set out set off from London across the Channel and down to La Grande Motte.“Le gros type à vélo”, his T-shirt proclaimed. Amongst his possession was a mini-Nagra tape recorder whilst his producer Joy Hatwood followed by car with a large stereo tape machine to help create their radio verité.  Explaining the impetus for the series Tom wrote: “A radio broadcaster is among the most detached of all. He lives under fluorescent tubes in a windowless studio, and handles words and ideas on little pieces of magnetic tape.  The temptation is strong to become more and more a processor of substitute reality, and not very different from a transistor in his tape machine. I wondered: Is there still a world out there you can touch?”

Fat Man in Italy, Radio Times 1980

The first series proved very popular and led to a further four on radio and eight TV series for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

In the 1990s Tom and his second wife retired to rural France, in the Cévennes. He died last month of a heart attack, aged 74.

In this audio sequence you’ll hear Tom singing his Radio London song and talking about the early days of the station. There are clips from Fat Man on a Bicycle and reminiscences from radio producer Jenny de Yong, who worked on some of the later series. 

Tom Vernon 1939-2013

Guide to the Fat Man radio series

Fat Man on a Bicycle
6 part series from 13 December 1979
Fat Man in Italy
6 part series from 8 December 1980
Fat Man Out
4 part series from 24 June 1981 visiting Helston, Rochester, Appleby, Grantham
Fat Man at Work
6 part series from 26 May 1983
Fat Man on a Roman Road
8 part series from 21 August 1983 – a trip from Exeter to Edinburgh

Audio comes from Mike Brown’s Transdiffusion article on station launches and Radio 4’s Last Word broadcast on 20 September 2013.

Edit February 2025: When I first wrote this post I said "sadly I have no copies of Tom’s radio series in my archive but surely they should be accorded a repeat on Radio 4 or Radio 4 Extra". Well no repeat of any of Tom's programmes was forthcoming but, thanks to a contact in Western Australia, I did receive copies of Fat Man on a Bicycle. I intend to upload them to YouTube very soon. 

Two for the Price of One

It was a case of too much Bob Harris on Saturday night/Sunday morning with a playout error giving us two sections of Bob’s show at once.

Of course mistakes do happen, that’s part of the joy of live broadcasting, or indeed when playing out pre-recorded shows for that matter! But “glitches” on Radio 2 do get noticed. And since the new computerised system came in just over a year ago that emergency tape has kicked in and there have been unexplained silences on a number of occasions. Most have been at the weekend. Is there anybody at BH monitoring the output on Saturday and Sunday? One for Feedback no doubt.

For the curious here’s what happened in the early hours of Sunday, edited of course. The voice of Alan Dedicoat came in at 01.21 and Bob was back at 01.45.

There was another glitch at the start of Clare Teal’s show last night too. Let’s just put it down to the approaching storm perhaps.

Rock On Tommy

On BBC Four tonight there’s a showing of the rock opera Tommy. 

As usual the authors of the weekly Creamguide, from those lovely people at TV Cream, have long memories and recalled that “when this film was first shown on the telly in the eighties it was the subject of a simulcast on Radio 1”.

Spot on! It was shown on BBC2 and heard on Radio 1 (straight after Peter Clayton’s Sounds of Jazz) on Sunday 29 August 1982 as part of Rock Week. In those pre-stereo TV days there were plenty of opportunities to experiment with simultaneous broadcasts and that year the little SB logo appeared in the listings for some of the Proms concerts and Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

In the kind of season that BBC2 sadly no longer does Rock Week also offered us GI Blues, Jimi Hendrix, That’ll Be The Day, Maze, Joan Armatrading, Squeeze, The Jam, The Last Waltz, The Doors, BA Robertson’s Jock and Roll, Stardust, The Police and Yellow Submarine. There was also a three-hour Bank Holiday Rock special fronted by David Hepworth and Mark Ellen. 

It was a packed week on the telly as we also got the start of the Beeb’s 60 Years celebrations with plenty for nostalgia lovers with repeats of Dixon of Dock Green, Maigret, Stocker’s Copper, The World of Wooster and that creeky old film Death at Broadcasting House.

The Charts They Are a-Changin’

For chart enthusiasts it was all change on Tuesdays from October 1987. Tuning into Radio 1 at lunchtime – listening to Johnnie Walker, Paul Burnett, DLT or Gary Davies depending on your era – and noting down the chart positions ready for Sunday. Come Sunday you’d be there, finger poised over the pause button, waiting to record the latest chart entries. Admit it, we all did it!

“This show is going to kick everything else into touch,” boasted Bruno Brookes, bagging himself a Radio Times cover to boot. From now on chart release day was shifted from Tuesday to Sunday, requiring even more of a trigger finger for home tapers.

Broadcast the chart on the same day it’s compiled? Surely not!  When we now have chart shows that are updated to reflect sales and downloads during the programme it all sounds very quaint. Back in 1987 the chart manager at Gallup, Godfrey Rust, explained all to the Radio Times.

Of the 4,300 record shops Gallup selected a representative panel based on size of outlet, type of shop (chains like HMV, multiples like Boots or independents) and region. For the new chart this panel was upped from 250 to 500 shops.

Each of the panel shops has a little Epson data-gatherer and sales assistants key in each record’s catalogue number at the time of sale. The machine is connected to a telephone line and four times a week Gallup’s computer downloads the data. After the last update in the early hours of Sunday the chart is compiled.

The computer is able to compensate for incorrectly punched catalogue numbers, typically the first letter is missed. About 10 to 20 per cent of the information is rejected as “incomplete or unrepresentative.” For security a back-up system was maintained at Thame in Oxfordshire.
 

Anticipating the new chart and new show on Sunday 4 October 1987 Bruno said: “The Top 40 is already Europe’s most listened-to radio show. Now all of the music industry as well will have to be listening to find out where their records are. I can imagine executives and promoters jumping about making urgent telephone calls as I read out the positions, I like anything with a sense of excitement and this show tops the lot.”

And this is how it all sounded.
 

Here’s Paul Burnett with a Tuesday lunchtime chart rundown from September 1978. I can’t claim to have recorded this one; it comes from the pages of Radio Rewind.
 

From my own collection is this clip of Gary Davies, with his “Bit in the Middle”, and a chart from July 1984.
 

I’m Free!

It always used to be “another chance to see” but now Afternoon Classics is the umbrella title for BBC2’s afternoon of repeats of 30 and 40-year old programmes.  Mind you the best bit is probably the old BBC2 idents coming out of retirement.

Anyway showings of Are You Being Served? set me thinking about any radio connections for the stars of that sitcom.  Mollie Sugden I remember from her appearances in The Clitheroe Kid. I hadn’t realised that she’d previously appeared as Jimmy mother in the ITV series Just Jimmy, even though she was younger than the pint-sized star. There was also a 1982 series with Mollie called Oh Mother!

Frank Thornton co-starred with Derek Francis in The Navy Lark spin-off The Embassy Lark and with Jimmy Edwards in The Big Business Lark. He was in the equally short-lived Mind Your Own Business alongside Bernard Cribbins and Annette Crosbie and co-starred with June Whitfield in Men of Property.

Long-term Just a Minute listeners will recall Wendy Richard sparring with the team regulars. Larry Martyn stepped into the role of Private Walker in the last few radio adaptations of Dad’s Army whilst Arthur English was a radio star back in the days of Variety Bandbox.  

As for John Inman he starred in three series of Inman and Friends on BBC Radio 2 between 1986 and 1989. Speaking to the Radio Times in 1986 he described the show as follows:

“It’s definitely not alternative humour”, says Inman with satisfaction. “You could call it old-fashioned”. By this he means lots of Goonish sound effects, and echoes of Round the Horne.

“Each programme starts with me saying ‘Hasn’t it been a funny sort of day?’, and going on about it. Then I introduce my guests … they really are friends.” This includes the various members of the Grace Brothers gang, and the likes of Ernie Wise, Ruth Madoc and Peggy Mount. “We chat, do gags, sketches, I sing in a strangled tenor…”

This is the first show from series one that aired on 30 September 1986. Alongside John are regulars Jeffrey Holland and Sherrie Hewson and the special guest is Ernie Wise. The comedy is broad (read ‘not very funny’) and with a tribute to Billy Bennett it was certainly “old-fashioned”.

My recording only runs at 18 minutes as it was tagged onto a C90 cassette after an edition of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Obviously it make much of an impression on me, I didn’t record another.

The script was by Tony Hare, Peter Hickey, Stuart Silver, Alan Whiting and Malcolm Williamson. Music is by the Max Harris Trio and the producer is long-time LE producer Richard Willcox.

Promises Promises

In October 1973 The Observer’s radio critic Paul Ferris wondered what the fledging ILR stations would serve up:

LBC’s original application to the Independent Broadcasting Authority for its franchise talked about a daily breakfast-time programme that would “transmit our own editorial conferences ‘live’ so that listeners can be involved in our news-gathering … with no attempts to conceal our own mistakes”. This has been quietly dropped. Says Mr Cudlipp (Michael Cudlipp, chief editor): “I’ve never been at an editorial conference where journalists do anything other than mutter or swear.”

The programme director of Capital Radio, in which the Observer has an 11½% interest, is a former BBC television producer Micahel Bukht, who says they will be an “adult pop music station in the daytime”.  Between the music will be the usual interviews and news.

Drama will be represented by several soap operas. The Mistresses will be a bit of romance about King Charles II and his girls (Mr Bukht describes it as “thigh-squeezing time”), Bed Sit will be about a London boarding house, and Me and ‘Er will be a topical five-minuter. “If it’s raining outside,” says Mr Bukht, “we can have it raining in the script.”