Project Santa Claus

 It’s back to 1986 for this dip into the Christmas Day archives, the first in a short series of seasonal posts.

Flicking through the Christmas edition of the Radio Times - no special artwork on the cover just an EastEnders, it was the year of that Den and Angie episode –  BBC radio offered very traditional fare, with the highlight of the day being a 30 year-old repeat.

On Radio 1 there was a throwback to the days when Leslie Crowther and Ed Stewart used to trek round children’s wards with Peter Powell, Janice Long and Simon Mayo broadcasting from hospitals around the UK. It was pretty much a first team line-up during the day with Bates, Read, Mayo, and Brookes with the day rounding off with P and V’s Christmas Party (The Ranking Miss P and Robbie Vincent).   

Radio 2’s morning included Roger Royle with Good Morning, Christmas and Ken Bruce. There was comedy of the end-of the-pier variety with The Christmas Huddlines and Ken Dodd’s Christmas Cracker. Terry Wogan may have been in his BBC1 chat show period but didn’t entirely abandon radio as he popped up between 1 and 3 p.m. You’ll have nodded off post-lunch with this line-up: In with the Old! (a musical comedy starring Evelyn Laye, Elisabeth Welch, Dora Bryan, Maxine Audley and Richard Murdoch), Gerald Harper as DJ in My Favourite Things, Sing Something Seasonal and A Celebration of Christmas with Roy Castle, Cliff Richard, Dana, Mary O’Hara and Alvin Stardust.

Radio 3’s day including a live concert from Amsterdam, simulcast on BBC2, with Tony Scotland introducing the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink.

Radio 4 was living in the past that year. In the morning we had the Vintage Archers with the Archer family sharing memories and events from the last 35 years.  That 30 year old highlight was The Goon Show edition Operation Christmas Duff, originally broadcast on the General Overseas Service in 1956 but never heard on domestic radio until 1986. There was a 27-year old repeat in the evening with the start of a re-run of Paul Temple and the Conrad Case.  In fact there was a whole stack of drama to enjoy: part one of John Tydeman’s adaptation of Emma, Rattigan’s French Without Tears, Murder for Christmas was The Nine Tailors starring Gary Bond as gentleman sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and a binaural production of Jenny Hursell’s A Winter’s Tale.

Tucked away at 23.30 was Project Santa Claus, an early Punt and Dennis collaboration with Steve providing the script and Hugh doing some of the voices. In fact it was almost a Week Ending spin-off. At the time Steve was writing for the programme, added to which Ending regulars David Tate and Sally Grace (she gets to do her Thatcher impersonation) were in the cast and David Tyler was the producer. You’ll recognise some of the musical cues too.

Project Santa Claus starred Tony Slattery as Michael Downhill, Joan Sims as Beryl Downhill, David Tate as Mr Claygate, Hugh Dennis as James and Richard O’Brien as Ambridge.

Memories Are Not Made of This

Hardly a month goes by without one of the offshore pirate radio guys popping up and talking about life on the ocean wave. Just try stopping them!  So it was no surprise when a Mark Dean, DJ on Radio Caroline North, came in to speak to Alison Butterworth on her late-night BBC Radio Lancashire show this week.

After about an hour or so of gentle coaxing from Alison little in the way of anecdotes about life onboard MV Caroline was forthcoming other than he’d interviewed Gene Pitney a number of times and that he’d heard of but not met Bob Stewart. Then it all got rather interesting when pirate radio guru Paul Rowley phoned in. This recording starts just before that moment. I’ll leave it to you to make up your own mind.

For an A-Z of broadcasters who worked on offshore radio visit The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame.

Sounds Lusher

Trombonist and band leader Don Lusher would have been 90 this month.  Depending on how far you go back you may remember him as a Radio 2 regular playing with his own Big Band in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1950s he played with Ted Heath and his Music and, years later, would lead the Ted Heath outfit until 2000.  

I was reminded of Don a couple of weeks back when he was mentioned on Clare Teal’s Sunday night show. Digging through my tapes I’ve unearthed this session featuring the Don Lusher Big Band with guest singer Valerie Masters recorded for Radio 2 in 1978. Here are some selected tracks. These recordings are not commercially available, though Don had previously released at least two of them on record earlier in the decade.

Kicking things off is Cole Porter’s It’s Alright with Me featuring the tenor sax of Tommy Whittle. Tommy, who died just last month, also played with Don in Jack Parnell’s ATV Orchestra and the Ted Heath Band.

Valerie Masters joins the band for The Best is Yet to Come.

Written and arranged by Don this is DL Blues featuring  Albert Hall, the trumpet player not the concert venue.

Ray Davies, of Buttondown Brass fame, wrote Martinique.

You may remember this tune as one of the themes from Radio 2’s Two’s Best. One of Don’s own compositions this is Carnaby Chick.

Be Good to Me was originally recorded by Deniece Williams. This arrangement is by Ken Moule.

Stuff Like That was recorded and released by Quincy Jones is the same year as this BBC session. Barry Forgie, who would for many years conduct the BBC Big Band, arranged this version.

Finally another piece used as a theme tune: Ragging a Bone was Alan Dell’s choice of opening music for his time on The Late Show in the late 70s. It was written by Wally Ridley and arranged by Pete Moore.

Read more about Don Lusher here.

Read more about Valerie Masters here.

Don Lusher 1923-2006

One Day in Dallas

Where were you the day Kennedy was shot?  An oft asked question for those that remember 22 November fifty years ago. I don’t remember the day, though I have a pretty good clue as to what I was doing: it was my second birthday. I was probably eating a bowl of jelly.

Imagine if such news like this broke today with instant worldwide communications and rolling news channels. How different it was in 1963 when listeners to BBC radio got this 30-second story of the shooting from newsreader Jimmy Kingsbury before moving on with “the rest of the news”.

In this sound montage you’ll hear a brief reminder of John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 and then radio and TV actuality from November 1963. The recordings are taken from US radio coverage, BBC radio and TV and include Leonard Parkin's first report for that evening's edition of Radio Newsreel.


Tonight BBC Radio 2 remembers the events of 22 November 1963 as they happened in JFK: Minute by Minute. CBSNews.com will be streaming the original news coverage in real time over four days from the shooting to the funeral.

Radio on Record – Late Night Radio

There’s a mystique and romance about the late night DJ. Maybe we should blame Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me. In the words of this song its “my best friend when I’m lonely.”

Written by Bill and Taffy Danoff, of Starland Vocal Band fame, John Denver sings “there’s a world unknown to daytime, is forever going on the airwaves of the nation, between midnight and the dawn.”

 

Look out for a new documentary about the singer, John Denver-Country Boy, this Friday evening on BBC Four.

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.