But 25 February 1971 wasn't the first time that radio broadcasts had been from Hull. Before it officially went on air about 90 broadcasts had been made that winter to cover the extreme weather conditions and the cuts in power supply. These emergency transmissions were only heard on Hull's wired Rediffusion service on Channel B and were made from a makeshift studio above the Yorkshire Electricity showroom on Ferensway.

Hull was also chosen as one of the test sites for some closed-circuit broadcasts in 1961 that helped persuade BBC management and the Pilkington Committee of the viability of local radio. This time the studio was based in the Guildhall. When the first experimental BBC stations opened in 1967 the city  had been short-listed but Hull Corporation was unwilling to stump up any ratepayers money for the running costs. When the next round of stations was announced in November 1969 Humberside was short-listed.      

The opening day was Thursday 25 February and the opening programme at 12.30 pm was an edition of the station's news programme Outlook. After an welcome from station manager John Cordeaux there was a live link-up to radio room of the trawler Miranda stationed more than 1,000 miles away near Northern Iceland. Alf Smith the ship's fishing advisory officer offered greetings to the new station.      

The oldest Radio Timesmagazine I can rustle up is for the week of 19 June 1971. The station only broadcast for about five hours a day, with either Radio 4 news or Radio 2's music shows acting as a sustaining service.

Note the logo at the top of the page. Long before corporate BBC branding came along this was the station's own design combining the Lincolnshire Imp and the Yorkshire Rose. It was replaced about six years later by a design put together by Barry Stockdale of a blue and green stripe with the peak to represent the transmitter.   

On weekdays listeners could wake up to the sound of Morningtide, which, along with Countywide were the station's best known programmes of that era. Morningtidewas the main breakfast show through until 1992 when it became Humberside Today but the early morning show at 5 am retained the Morningtidetitle until the end of that decade. Most of the presenters took a turn on the show but Fiona Cowan was the best known and most regular "hostess". Fiona had previously worked as a Studio Manager for the BBC World Service before moving up to Hull. As well as the usual mix of news, weather and music the show offered both a Radio Doctor and a Radio Dentist and morning exercises in Swing Hi, Swing Lo with Maggie and Jo. Maggie represented the local Women's League of Health and Beauty but, as Fiona Cowan says in one of the audio clips below, she has no recollection who Jo was. Fiona left in 1976 to emigrate to the States where her husband Alan took up a university teaching post.

John's successor as station manager was David Challis who'd already had local radio experience at Radio Leicester when is started in 1967 and as Programme Organiser at Radio Solent. David Greddington's successor as Programme Organiser was John Jefferson who'd began his career on the Bridlington Free Press and after other press jobs joined Radio Durham and then Radio Cleveland and Radio Carlisle. After leaving Humberside he was station manager at York and Leeds.  

Other key members of staff when Humberside came on-air were the Engineer in Charge Ken Fossett (succeeded in the post by Mike Jasinski ex. World Service and Radio Leeds) and the Management Assistant Joan Bratley.  

Paul Heiney was part of the original team here listed as presenting the Saturday morning show Scunsby Gookington, a contraction of Scunthorpe, Grimsby, Goole, Kingston-upon-Hull and Bridlington, offering a Singing Granny competition and Telephonagroan. Following an increase in broadcasting hours later that year Paul also presented the teatime show A Taste of Heiney. He left in 1974 to work as a reporter on Newsbeatand then Today. That's Life! and loads of other TV work followed.            

Looking after the sport in 1971 was John Withington. That coverage was mostly football, with Hull City, Grimsby Town and Scunthorpe United as the local teams and, of course, Hull's two rugby league sides. For the majority of the 70s Peter Ward was the voice of sport on Humberside. His first radio experience was with the British Forces Network but back in civilian life he was an assistant bank manager before starting to volunteer for a hospital radio unit in Rotherham and reporting on the rugby league games, this led to his full-time role on Humberside. Assisting were part-time reporters Stan Hall, who'd been providing match commentaries for Hull's hospital radio service though he was a printer by trade, and Elliot Opel, an ex-teacher again starting with hospital radio experience before joining the BBC as a regional sports correspondent. Elliot also devised, presented and set the questions for the long-running Top Town Quiz(1971-86) and also Top School Quiz.   

One of the station's longest serving sports presenters would be Dave Gibbins. Dave was with Humberside from 1978 to 1984 before hopping over to commercial rivals Viking Radio. After a spell with TFM he was back at Humberside as sports editor 1988-2000. Moving into television Dave was the sports presenter for BBC South West on Spotlightuntil his retirement in 2016. 

Presenting Club Together with news from local clubs is Al Gillyon. Over the next six or seven years Al would go on to present a number of shows such as The Good Companions, which became The Centre Show recorded with an audience from Hull's Centre Hotel (just round the corner from the Chapel Street studios, now the Portland Hotel),  For You Alone and Young at Heart. Both The Centre Show, which usually involved some community singing, and For You Alone featured Jimmy Gibbons at the piano. Al had made his stage debut aged 12 as a song-and-dance act. He went into repertory theatre before doing war service with the 2nd Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment where he would eventually produce variety concerts and plays for Army Welfare. After the war he appeared in variety and revues as a utility man playing character roles and made radio appearances on Variety Bandbox, Startime and Workers' Playtime. In the mid-50s he established himself as a club comedian and in 1961 founded the Hull based charitable organisation the Society of M.I.C.E (Men in Charitable Endeavour) along the lines of the Grand Order of Water Rats. (Another founder member was Clive Hunter). It was this entertainment background that led to his Radio Humberside appearances. In the 1980s he took on small television acting roles on programmes that included All Creatures Great and Small and Emmerdale Farm. He died in 1990.     

Other names in the original line-up include:

Jill Ward (now Hopkins) who left in 1974 to produce Roundabout East Anglia and was later at Radio 4, Radios Bristol, Stoke and Oxford. In 1976 she married David Eggleston, also ex-Humberside and at the time at Radio Bristol, who tragically died on their honeymoon in Rhodesia.

Tony Bell who would later produce the religious shows Jigsaw and Fresh Air.                

Colin Caley left Humberside for Plymouth where he was the senior producer of Radio 4 regional opt-out Morning Sou'west and later at Radio Devon.

Jim Hawkins, initially full-time then freelance until 1977 when became a playwright and novelist.

Arnold Miller was yet another former teacher. (Local radio at that time seemed to be full of folk that had given up the classroom or were attached to the education department which all the stations had in the 1970s. Two of my school teachers, Brenda Eveleigh who presented Contact and Margaret Henrickson on attachment to the education department, were with Radio Humberside). Arnold was the first education producer. He left in 1978 to become Programme Organiser and then Manager at Radio Nottingham.   

Pam Gillard was a secretary at the station when it started but left for BBC Radio Highland for a while before coming back to Hull as a station assistant, eventually hosting After Three. She moved south and worked for Radio Solent.

Presenting Round About Folk are local folk musicians Christopher Rowe and Ian Clark. Chris was a regular broadcaster on television and radio. His songs would often feature on the station including that for the tenth anniversary (included in the 1970s audio sequence below). Both were teachers in Hull at one time, Ian at Kelvin Hall and Chris at Hull HE College (he taught me in the early 80s) and together they released a number of records including Songs for Humberside. Ian now lives on Merseyside. Chris died in 2001.  

Humberside's geographic spread caused headaches for the station management as John Cordeaux explained in the Radio Times in March 1971: "After only a few weeks, Radio Humberside is having to pass up some first-rate material, simply because it cannot physically be collected by a modest-sized staff however enthusiastically they extend their efforts ... because of the distances involved in recording the programmes. But Radio Humberside is rapidly shortening its own lines of communications in two ways. First, we are training a team of part-time broadcasters, many of whom travelled far out and about with tape-recorders in their knapsacks and have already made their radio debuts. Then,  in our three studios in Barton-on-Humber, Cleethorpes and Goole, the central station has its own out-stations. News and the people who make it are heard immediately throughout the region." 

Moving forward a nearly two years here's how the programmes looked for the week commencing 30 December 1972 as Britain was about to join the EEC. The importance of Humberside's ports is recognised in Hands Across the North Sea with a live link-up from the North Sea Ferry MS Norwind. For many years they would 'Go Dutch' to celebrate the station's birthday and take a ferry load of listeners across to Amsterdam (and bring them back again!).   

By now there are some more familiar names who've joined the station.

Peter Adamson is now with Radio Humberside presenting programmes about jazz, something he'd continue to do at intervals over the next couple of decades - for a while his Great Northern Jazz show was also heard on other stations in the north east. In time he would become a household name across Humberside with his phone-in show Soapbox, at first on Sundays but in time every weekday throughout the 1990s. Peter left in 2004, shortly after picking up a Frank Gillard Award  for his Outstanding Contribution to BBC Local Radio. Soapbox continued until 2008 with Blair Jacobs (also on Look North and at Radio Solent, leaving Humberside in 2019) as one of the regular hosts.

Barry Stockdale became a very recognisable voice on the station over 20 years initially as a station assistant, joining three months after the station opened, and eventually becoming Programme Organiser. He presented Morningtide and for a while was the Grimsby-based producer and co-presented the South Bank leg of Humberside Today.  Barry was later the manager editor at Radios York and Sheffield and was a Project Director for the BBC leading the projects for the new broadcasting centre in Hull and later at Salford Quays.

Tex Milne, here listed as presenting Country Music Time, was the station's country music expert from 1972 to 1986. He was a storeman with a Hull based company but his interest in country and western dated back to 1959. For a while he worked in a record shop and in 1968 was compering at the original Hull Country Music Club. Tex jumped ship in 1986 to join Viking Radio. Country music remained a popular genre on the station and when Tex left both Tammy Cline (a local singer whose real name is Marilyn Cuff) and Bob Preedy (also a YTV continuity announcer and author) presented shows. 

With the Platter Chatter Show on Saturday morning were Paul Heiney, Barry Nettleton and Tim Jibson. (Three presenters for a 30  minute show!). Barry was a local music promoter involved with The Brick House music venue and later Hull Truck and the Beverley Picture Playhouse. I knew Barry when I worked as a part-time film projectionist at the Playhouse and also volunteered for the folk and jazz festivals. 

Tim presented The Paul Hunsley Electric Wireless Show until the end of 1983 at which time, probably in response to the imminent launch of Viking Radio,  it became a nightly one hour show with Carl Kingston until it ended in December 1984. Tim would, in time, also join Viking (as did Carl) but he was back at Humberside on Saturdays from 2001 to 2006 before leaving once again to establish Hull-based KCFM radio.

My hand thrown mug by Jerry Harper of Blacktoft to mark the 10th anniversary

The news reporters in the mid-70s through to the early- 80s included: Charles Levitt (former Hull Daily Mail news editor), Chris Ramsden (ex HDM and Swiss Broadcasting Corporation), Nigel Robson, Paul Drewitt (ex. Radio Nottingham and HDM), John Andrews, Nigel Lucas, Graham McKenzie, Roderick Clark, Robin White, Peter Grant, Rod Crocker, Graham Smith, Neil Walker, Jane Howroyd, John Drury (ex-teacher and later a co-presenter of Chalk and Cheese), Michele Romaine, Geoff Barratt (ex. Radio Blackburn), Mike Cartwright (Grimsby based reporter for over 20 years), Alan Cuthbertson (also a presenter on After Three), Alan Douglas, Nick Haydon, Sam Jaffa, Steve Howard, Steve Williams, Mike Fennell (later the station's news editor), Nicholas Moss, Charlotte Counsell, Trevor Austin and Chris Bates.   

Rod, Charles, Jim, Paul and Chris are featured in this sequence that I recorded in, I think, 1979.

The biggest new story that Radio Humberside covered , in terms of one which quickly became a national and an international one, was the explosion at the Nypro chemical plant at Flixborough in 1974. 

Here's how the 1977 BBC booklet Serving Neighbourhood and Nation recounted the events of that day:      

Jim Latham, the News Editor of Radio Humberside, was at home digging his garden on the afternoon of Saturday 1 June 1974, when he was startled by an enormous bang at eight minutes to five. The Nypro chemical plant at Flixborough was exploding, and several days of frenzied news reporting were just beginning.  

By five o'clock the duty newsman at Radio Humberside that afternoon had put out a newsflash, even before the debris had stopped falling from the sky. He didn't yet know what had caused the explosion or how serious it was. He then had to summon the rest of Humberside's news team - but first he telephoned Broadcasting House in London with the news. He spoke to what's called the GNS desk (standing for General News Services - the BBC's internal news agency, which collects information and passes it on by teleprinter to BBC staff all over the country in one go). This was the first hint of the disaster to reach London, and the duty GNS man immediately moved over to a nearby microphone and spoke over the special loudspeaker system (reserved for important newsflashes alone) "GNS here: Radio Humberside reports a big explosion at factory near Scunthorpe" - and thus all the main BBC buildings in London were put on alert.

While news editors waited for further details, a Radio Humberside producer, Derek Ratcliffe, was the first journalist to reach the scene of the disaster at Flixborough. By 20 past five, he had picked up a phone in an evacuated house near the factory, and reported his first impressions on the spot - with time just enough before the police removed him too, for fear of another explosion. At a nearby airfield, a very fortunate Radio Humberside reporter, David Eggleston, just happened to be in a plane, ready to record a feature on aerobatics. So he too could record his impressions of the disaster, this time from the air.

In London the editor of the day prepared the six o'clock news bulletin on Radio 4, with the Flixborough explosion at the top of the running order. He recorded Derek Ratcliffe's eyewitness account, sent down from Radio Humberside, and told the station that he'd take any further reports it got - even if it were while the bulletin was going out on air. Television News also made use of the recording, because their camera crew hadn't yet had time to get to Flixborough from the nearest regional base at Leeds. And while the nation slowly became aware of one of the worst tragedies since Aberfan eight years before, the news team at Radio Humberside had to work quickly and efficiently to provide further information about casualty figures and the extent of the damage. They were working for all the BBC's national news output, plus the overseas broadcasts (both the World Service in English and the various foreign language bulletins) and, of course, for Radio Humberside itself, whose audience was, after all, worst affected by the disaster and anxious for every crumb of news. The station itself stayed on air until past three o'clock on Sunday morning, and for 16 more hours on Sunday provided further news, casualty figures, advice and warnings from the emergency services and so on. But during the weekend the national networks transmitted as many as 30 voice-pieces by Humberside reporters in an operation that is still legendary in London newsrooms.

In July 1981 Radio Humberside covered the opening of the Humber Bridge. See also my blog post Bridging the Humber. 

By 1986 Radio Humberside was finally venturing into regular evening broadcasting, sharing specialist music programmes with Leeds, York and Sheffield. So we have Great Northern Brass with Barrie Davenport, Great Northern Folk with Henry Ayrton (also presenter of The Real Music Show and Henry's Jukebox),  Great Northern Folk with Ray Williams (who'd already been presenting Humberside Folk), Great Northern Rock with Jeremy Hibbard, Great Northern Country with Bob Preedy, Great Northern Classics with Martin Hindmarsh and Great Northern Jazzwith Peter Adamson. By May 1991 this sharing arrangement also included local stations in the north west (GMR/Manchester, Merseyside, Lancashire and Cumbria) under the Night Network banner with Radio Humberside providing Adamson's Night Network Jazz and Ayrton's Night Network Folk. This arrangement continued throughout the nineties and the noughties with Humberside taking some networked shows or replacing it with local sports coverage. At the weekend Humberside has sometime shared shows from its sister station Radio Lincolnshire such as Melvyn Prior's Sold Gold Saturday and Howard Leader's musical nostalgia show.         

The line-up now included:

Charlie Partridge, with the station from 1983, moving to BBC Essex seven years later and in 1994 promoted to assistant editor. Managing editor at both Radio Leicester and, from 1999 until taking voluntary redundancy last year, at Radio Lincolnshire.

Liz Meech here co-presenting Countywide with Robin Pulford had been with the station since the late-70s and started out as a researcher on that very programme. She later became the education correspondent for the BBC in the region.

Dave Taviner was with the station for 26 years from 1980 having volunteered at Radio Nottingham prior to that. Moving to television he worked on Songs of Praise until 2015 and then joined the United Christian Broadcasters as Head of Radio and now Director of Broadcasting.

Jonathan Cowap who moved to Radio York in 1992.

Mike Hurley presented the Saturday morning Hurley Burley between 1985 and 1996. Originally at Pennine Radio and then the launch team at Radio Aire he joined Humberside where he created the  "the archetypal, flat capped, opinionated Yorkshireman" Bill Bore, based on a bloke he'd met in a pub in Bradford. He did a similar show on Radio York (2000-05) but his bread and butter was as an advertising voiceover artiste recording thousands of TV and radio commercials. Mike won a Sony award as local radio personality of the year in 1986. He died in 2008 aged just 59.     

Here's Mike as Bill Bore recorded for the Radio Academy Festival in 1986.

Russell Harris presented a Saturday oldies show from October 1985 which became It's Russell Harrisa couple of years later and won a Sony award in 1988 for best children's programme. He moved shortly after to BBC Essex then Radio Kent, GMR in Manchester and 5 live.

In 1988 the station also produced this promotional video. BBC Radio Humberside - We're the Onefeatures manager Geoff Sargieson (ex-Radio Sheffield, Radio Aire, Radio Scotland and later manager at Radio York), news editor Mike Fennell, programme organiser Barry Stockdale, engineer-in-charge Dave Matthews, Charlie Partridge, news reporter Clare Morrow, Liz Meech, LRAC member Joyce Bratton, Steve Massam and Robin Pulford. 

Judi Murden is another long-serving Humberside personality. Starting in 1983 she was a presenter and then producer, latterly the Faith Producer, until last year. Judi was heard on Morningtide, Chalk and Cheese and Countywide.    

Also shown here are Katy Noone, a presenter from 1988, later a producer including BBC Introducing; Phil Squire initially part of the sports team later managing editor at Radio Leeds and now an Assistant News Editor; and Matt Watkinson also on Radio Cleveland and Radio York where he was the District Producer based in Scarborough.

Paul Teague, Richard Usher, Lara King and Andy Comfort in a far from sun-drenched photo shoot on Hessle foreshore

Carl Wheatley who was with the station for 25 years, joining in 1994. He was part of two radio  partnerships firstly a weekday mid-morning show with his 'mother' Gloria Johnson and then five years on the breakfast show with Lizzie Rose.  Carl left in 2019 to become CEO for the Northern Academy of Performing Arts.   

Steve Redgrave (ex-Viking) for many years (1993 to 2012) looked after the early show and had a 6 am and later a 5 am start. He now works behind the scenes as a weekend producer. 

Two of Radio Humberside's most unlikely stars were Beryl Renwick and Betty Smith. The pensioners were spotted by presenter David Reeves (with Humberside from 2001 and now the Social Media Producer) when they were on a tour of the station in 2006. They were eventually given their own weekly one-hour show, billed as Radio Humberside Rewind, which was a mixture of music, chat and banter between the two friends who met at an afternoon club in Hull in 1999 following the death of their husbands. Betty and Beryl garnered the best entertainment programme Sony Award in 2012 with the last show going out that Christmas.  

On 25 February 2011 Peter Adamson was back to present this look back at the station's 40 year history.

Also on-air that day were Steve Redgrave, Andy Comfort (on his bike from Grimsby to Hull to raise money for charity), Lara King (with the station from 1995 and at one time presenting the Grimsby leg of the breakfast show, now the NE Lincs reporter), Look North reporter Caroline Bilton sitting in for Peter Levy, David Reeves, Phil White (presenter from 2005 currently looking after Saturday breakfast) and James Hoggarth (ex-Kingstown Hospital Radio joining Humberside c.1999 as a Sunday afternoon broadcast assistant then seven years in the breakfast show production team. Presented the early evening show 2007-2012 and is now also the head of music).    

On that same day there was a light-hearted quiz Not a Clue on 202 chaired by Phil White that pitted the voices of 2011 Lara King, Andy Comfort and Carl Wheatey against the golden tonsils of Peter Adamson, Gloria Johnson and Martin Plenderleith with Dave Gibbins making a guest appearance. It was produced by Derek McGill, the Assistant Editor at Radio Humberside since 2007.

Other people you'll have heard on Radio Humberside across the decades include, in alphabetical surname order (and this is by no means an exhaustive list. It's taken from the Radio Times and online schedules so won't include news reporters and some sports presenters, nor necessarily those broadcasting from other Yorkshire stations such as York or Leeds and also heard on Humberside): 

Chris Arundel, Henry Ayrton (presenter of Great Northern Folk from 1987 and later The Real Music Show and Henry's Jukebox), Chris Barker (late 70s presenter of Farm), Keith Barnwell, Chris Bell (1979-87 later at Stray FM now working for a transport and logistics company), Jules Bellerby (long-time presenter on Radio York, also on BBC Essex), Helen Brookes, Jeremy Buxton (also worked at Radio Sheffield and BBC Devon, now on Radio York and a BBC Induction Manager/Trainer), Tony Cartledge (also on Radio Newcastle), Andrew Clark, Simon Clark, Lucy Clark (discovered following the 2017 Face of Hull competition and co-presents Absolutely Clueless), Ian Clark, Trisha Cooper, Averil Coult, Siobhan Daniels (1997, also South East Today reporter), Jenny Danks, Gordon Davidson, Chloe Davies, Mike Day, Matt Dean (senior sports journalist since 1999), Tony Delahunty (sports presenter 1982 but mainly at Pennine Radio as commentator/sports editor), Christine Dexter, Keeley Donovan (2014), David Doyle-Davidson(sports presenter, former Hull FC player), Clarke Dunn, Betty Dye (presenter of Fresh Air), Nigel Dyson (presented On Campus in 1976 and later produced this and other shows, see also  Radio Blackburn post), Charles Ekberg (1970s Letter from Lindsey and Scene from the South), Sally Fairfax (from 2012 previously at Radios York and Leeds), Dave Fewster(also on Viking Radio and manager of Beverley FM), Susanne Fraser (Grand Night In 2007-08) , Gail Fryer (1970s), David Golley (sports presenter also on Viking), Alan Grant, Paddy Grice, Joe Hakim (presenter of Culture Night), Kim Harrison (BBC New Voices winner), Paul Hartley (2001-07, later at Stay FM now cabin crew with Flybe), Chris Harvey, Rob Hawthorne (1980 sports presenter), Marcus Heald (co-presenter of Westenders), Graham Henderson (late 70s, 1980s presenter and producer), Andy Hollins(late 80s after Viking), John Howden, Kevin Howells, Paul Hudson (Look Northweather forecaster), Nick Hull(ex-Voice of Peace, KCR FM in Ireland, Radio Wyvern, also on Radio Leeds, Radio Nottingham, Viking as Deputy News Editor, Essex Radio, talkRADIO and talkSPORT), Richard James, Bill Jenkyns (later on BBC York and a BBC Technology Manager), Keri Jones(went on to run Radio Pembrokeshire and Radio Scilly), Steve Kaye, Kevin Keane, Adam Kirtley (also on Radio Berkshire, now a media trainer), Jon Knighton(sport mid-80s before joining BFBS where he is the sports editor), Chris Langmore, Donna Larsen, Chris Lawrence, Alex Lester (1981, one of many BBC locals before joining Radio 2), Gwillym Lloyd, Keith Loxam, Martha Mangan (presenter of No Filter) Richard Marginson (1970s), Sandi Marshall (mid-70s), Andy Marsters, Maggie Mash (mid-70s presenter of Morningtide and Both Sides Now, long time YTV announcer also on Radio Aire), Paul Massey, Ian Meikle(mid-80s, now in Australia), Russell Merryman (later at BBC News and Al Jazeera), Fiona Mills (from 2018 initially with Unheard and Uncensored evening show), John Mills, Honor Morris(mid-80s on It's Saturday, later on 5 live now business consultant), Mike Morris (late 90s sports presenter, ex. Viking FM, later a producer on Look North), Stuart Mountain (a BBC Senior Broadcast Journalist), Dave Nash (late 70s to late 90s including Sounds of Brass), Fr Mike O'Connor (1970s presenter of Jigsaw), Rob Palmer (sports presenter), Jonathan Parker (co-presenter of Westenders), Steve Parkes, Helen Philpott (also on Look North), James Piekos (from 2011 previously on Imagine FM, Hallam and Viking), Mike Plumb, Howard Pressman, Steve Quinn, Alan Raw (Sony Award winning presenter of BBC Introducing), Barrie Redfern (also on Radio Aire and BBC/ITV continuity announcer), Andy Ridler, Barry Robinson, Andy Roche(1995-98 also at Radio Oxford and now Radio Lincolnshire), Matthew Rudd (also on Viking and KCFM, now presents Forgotten 80s on Absolute 80s), Neil Rudd (also on Viking and Magic 1161), Dave Sanders (1970s to early 80s, also on Radios Nottingham, Cleveland, Nottingham and Lancashire before jobs with COI, CIPR and Lufthansa), Helen Schofield, Anne Skellern, Kate Slade (now News Editor), Mike Smartt (later on Look North and a BBC correspondent). 

BBC Radio Humberside will be marking its 50th birthday throughout the day and the highlights include the return of Carl and Gloria (9 am  repeated at 6 pm) and a quiz with Andy Comfort (7 pm)

In addition to this blog post I'll be uploading some old Radio Times listings for Radio Humberside later today covering every year from 1976 to 2008.  

With thanks to Ken Clark, Gary Clarke and the staff of BBC Radio Humberside.

See also Happy 40th Birthday Radio Humberside. 

This is a  companion post to 50 Years of BBC Radio Humberside. Whilst researching that post I went back through my Radio Times archive to trace the history, people and programmes on the BBC local station. I've scanned in that many pages that I thought I'd put some of them online.

My collection is pretty complete from 1976 but there are gaps before that. Nothing from 1973, 1974 or 1975, so if you have an old edition somewhere in the house please let me know. As you'll see this is a case of the gradually shrinking schedule, in terms of column inches at least.  In the 70s the listings get a full page at the back of the Radio Times. By the 80s they share space with neighbouring locals, Lincolnshire, York, Leeds and Sheffield, depending on the edition. By the 90s up to a dozen stations are spread across two pages. I've stopped in 2008 as by 2009 all the schedules appear on the BBC website.   

W/C 13 March 1971 (with thanks to Ken Clark)

W/C 30 December 1972

W/C 29 May 1976

W/C 5 February 1977

W/C 30 September 1978

W/C 20 January 1979

W/C 16 February 1980

W/C 21 February 1981

W/C 29 May 1982

W/C 1 October 1983

W/C 12 May 1984

W/C 13 July 1985

W/C 8 February 1986

 

W/C 5 September 1987

W/C 11 June 1988

W/C 6 May 1989

W/C 29 September 1990

W/C 15 June 1991

W/C 20 June 1992

W/C 1 May 1993

W/C 1 October 1994

W/C 25 February 1995

W/C 27 April 1996

W/C 8 March 1997

25 May 1998

W/C 18 September 1999

W/C 25 March 2000

W/C 24 February 2001

W/C 26 January 2002

W/C 1 March 2003

W/C 3 July 2004

W/C 7 May 2005

W/C 27 May 2006

W/C 18 August 2007

W/C 27 September 2008

Running weekly for nearly 40 years the ten-minute programme played an important role in promoting British business ideas abroad. By the mid-70s it was generating 12,000 enquiries a year to be dealt with by the small production team at Bush House that included an Export Liaison Officer. Those letters were then passed on to the companies who would often report back on an increase in orders. The BBC Handbooks highlight a number of successes from water purifiers, brain diagnosis X-ray scanners, maritime survival kits to asbestos cement cutters, solar energy devices and electronic door chimes.

Though New Ideaswas heard on the English-speaking service of the BBC, other language services made their own versions with the Japanese one being particularly fruitful. By the early 1980s the External Services had over 100 programmes in 30 languages "geared to promoting exports or describing scientific, medical and technological advances".            

In October 1990 New Ideas was merged with the relative newcomer Tech Talk that had launched in 1987. Now with a doubled running-time of 20 minutes and keeping its New Ideas title but with the original element now forming a New Products part of the programme. Co-producer Chris Westcott explained that "we want to keep the new Ideas format of going out and about, talking to people in their workplace and seeing the things being made and used. That's where it ties in nicely with Tech Talk which has been an out-and-about engineering technology programme which hasn't concentrated necessarily on products."

In this programme, edition number 833, the items are an acre-meter, an adjustable lawn rake, a portable charging generator and a plastic holder for use at conferences. At this time New Ideas had a theme, Quite Contrary, a 1966 KPM library music track by Syd Dale. In this recording the continuity announcer is Pamela Creighton.   

The ideas, it seems, ran out in March 1997 when the programme was dropped. There are 27 editions from 1996 and 1997 on the BBC World Service website, though sadly not the final one.

If you have any World Services programmes of any genre and from any era please contact me.

Broadcasting from the studios at 56 St Helen's Street (and by my reckoning the only one of the original stations still to be in the same building five decades later) like all the BBC local stations it was initially heard on VHF only (on 96.5 MHz), transmitting from Sutton Coldfield some 25 miles away. Medium wave reception on 269 metres (1115 kHz) became possible a couple of years later when the site at Burnaston Lane was opened, by which time a VHF/FM relay was also in use on 94.2 MHz.

Other presenters included Mike Warr (who a decade later would be the station manager when Radio Jersey launched), John Stiles (a former station assistant at Radio Stoke who opened Radio Derby in 1971.  He stayed with the station until the early 1990s), Kit Poxon (ex-Radio Nottingham who'd go on to present the Down Your Way type show Kit at Large), David Graham, Jack King, Maureen Axelrod, Leslie Robinson, Ralph Laing and sports presenter Graham Clarke. Producing the educational programmes including the daily 5-minutes Nutshell are Peter Legge and Ann Toy.    

Another very familiar radio name is that of football commentator Mike Ingham. Growing up in Belper he'd joined Radio Derby as a station assistant in 1973 after gaining some hospital radio experience in Birmingham. Initially presenting music shows, in this week Back Track and Up and Coming, he switched to sports presenting following the death of Graham Clarke.  Mike moved down to London in 1979 to join the Radio Sport department where he presented Sport on 2, Sunday Sport and the Sports Desks before becoming a match commentator and later the football correspondent. He retired in 2014. You can hear Mike speaking to Radio Derby's Andy Twigge on the BBC website here.  

With the local cinema news In the Picture is, I'm guessing, the same Ian Christie who went on to be a renowned film historian (at the BFI and now Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London). In 1969 he'd got a job teaching at the Derby College of Art where he established one of the country's first film studies courses.  

Unusually for many of the BBC local station's at this time Derby had an evening show Late Night Derby originally introduced the previous year to provide some late-night company during the power cuts when the television service was forced to closedown at 10.30 pm.  

With thanks to Michael Wincott  @RadioMerch

Behind the news from the 1979 Radio Derby magazine (with thanks to David Ballard). In 1989 the station would win a Silver Medal at the International Radio Festival of New York for its coverage of the M1 Kegworth air disaster.

Editor Simon Cornes hands over a cheque to the Matlock Red Cross following the final Money Mountain Appeal in 2008. The charity appeal first ran in  1983 and over 25 years raised more than £1m

On mid-mornings is the late Graham Knight (14 years with the station, ex-Radio Trent and host of Radio 2's weekend early show 1987-91). Another former Radio 2 early show presenter was David Yarnall (ex-Beacon, Mercia Sound and Radio Stoke) here presenting the Saturday morning breakfast show. On weekdays after lunch with Paul McKenzie the station was still taking Dennis McCarthy's Afternoon Special, something it had been simulcasting since 1980.    

Amongst the specialist music shows is Folkwaves, a folk music show that ran from 1985 until it was axed in December 2010. The longest serving presenter was Mick Peat (who died in January of this year) alongside Bob Hazelwood, Barry Coope and finally Lester Simpson.   

Back in the day when panel games had a regular place in BBC Radio 2's schedule The Law Game was one of the best known and longest-running - 17 series over 16 years. The premise was straightforward enough: three playlets were acted out by three members of the BBC's Drama Repertory Company in which matters of the law are played out in various settings or in court. After chairman Shaw Taylor dings his bell to end the sketch the celebrity panel have to identify what laws have been broken and by whom. Team members then bet points, from their starting pot of 50 points, on the outcome of the case. "It's quite educational, not just an excuse for three celebrities to fool about", said Shaw Taylor to the Radio Times in 1985. 

The Law Game was devised by comedy writer Brad Ashton and he wrote all the mini-dramas, offering injecting the odd comedy line. Ashton had been writing since the mid-1950s on radio shows such as Show Band Show, London Lights and later series of Life with the Lyons. On TV he wrote for Tommy Cooper, Dick Emery, Mike and Bernie Winters, Lennie Bennett and Jerry Stevens and for Little and Large. The format of The Law Game was perhaps inspired by the guess who committed the crime programme Guilty Party (1954-62). See John Arlott blog post.

Shaw Taylor, best known on TV for Police 5, seemed a natural choice as series chairman with a mix of light-hearted authority. He was not unfamiliar in this type of role having presented a number of ATV game shows in the late 1950s/early 1960s when commercial television was devouring as many US formats as it could get through. On Radio 2 in the 1970s he also chaired The 78 Show and Pros and Cons, more of which later.

The Law Game hasn't been repeated since it ended nearly 30 years ago so here's an opportunity to hear a couple more (in addition to the two I've already uploaded to YouTube in 2015 and 2020.

From 23 November 1981 this edition has a panel of Diane Keen, John Junkin and Lance Percival. Acting out the scenes are Miranda Forbes, Nicholas Courtney (so one for Doctor Whofans)and Ronald Herdman.

From the following year, 19 July 1982, we have Sandra Dickinson, Matthew Kelly and Fred Housego sitting in judgement. The actors are Steve Hodson, Miranda Forbes and Vincent Brimble.   

The other Brad Ashton creation was Pros and Cons. In fact it started the year before The Law Game but had a shorter run, just seven series over eight years. A number of the cons were experienced by Brad himself, including one in the 1982 edition below. Many others came from contacts he'd made at Scotland Yard. Writing in the Radio Times in 1980 he admitted that "I get strange looks when I tell people that my hobby is collecting confidence tricks. So far I've got 340 and used 144 of them in the sketches aimed as fooling the panel." His interest began on a trip to new York in 1956. "I was a prototype for all innocents abroad. The airport cab driver circled the whole of New York State to get me to my hotel just two miles away. He was about to do a lap of honour when I recognised a store we'd passed three times."

The format of Pros and Cons was the same as The Law Game, three short sketches played out with enough clues to help or mislead the three celebrities on the panel to identify the con, the person(s) doing the conning and the person(s) being conned. The panellists were a pretty mixed bunch (see series details below) but included a fair number of personalities from the sister show. The series  producers included some very experienced BBC hands such as Alistair Scott-Johnson of The Navy Lark fame, Ian Fenner and Trafford Whitelock, as well as Ros Bartlett, Jamie Rix and Richard Edis.    

In this edition from 17 November 1980 the sleuths are Claire Rayner, David Jason and Roy Hudd. The repertory company are Rowena Roberts, John Church and Trevor Cooper. 

The second recording comes from 24 February 1982. The panellists here are Kenny Everett (that week's Radio Times cover star), Stephanie Turner (at the time known for her lead role in cop drama Juliet Bravo) and Derek Nimmo. Acting out the scenes are Adrian Egan, Miranda Forbes and George Parsons.

The Law Game Series Guide

Series 1: 22 September-27 October 1976

Diana Dors, Pete Murray, Leslie Randall, Rachel Heyhoe-Flint, Patrick Mower and Bob Wilson 

Series 2: 30 March-27 April 1977

Margaret Howard, Francis Matthews, Pete Murray, Rachel Heyhoe-Flint, Barry Norman, Claire Rayner, James Burke and Patrick Mower

Series 3: 30 November 1977-4 January 1978

Claire Rayner, Francis Matthews, Dr Magnus Pyke, Rachel Heyhoe -Flint, Patrick Mower, Leslie Randall, Henry Cooper, William Franklyn and Anoushka Hempel

Series 4: 4 December 1978-15 January 1979  (no tx 25 December 1978)

Claire Rayner, Francis Matthews, Peter Purves, Shirley Anne Field, James Burke, Dr Magnus Pyke, Diana Dors, Russell Davies and Patrick Mower

Series 5: 7 January-18 February 1980 (no tx 4 February)

John Junkin, Aimi Macdonald, James Burke, Peter Purves, Diane Keen, William Franklyn, Lance Percival, Shirley Anne Field and Francis Matthews  

Series 6: 20 January-24 March 1981

Julia McKenzie, David Jason, Andrew Sachs, Liza Goddard, John Junkin, Lance Percival, Judy Carne, Graeme Garden, Don Maclean, Patricia Hayes, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Frank Windsor, Nyree Dawn Porter, Ray Alan and Duggie Brown

Series 7: 16 November 1981-11 January 1982 (no tx 28 December)

Diane Keen, John Junkin, Lance Percival, Stephanie Turner, William Franklyn, Alfred Marks, Joyce Blair, Patrick Mower, Matthew Kelly, Diana Dors, Lionel Blair and Glyn Worsnip

Series 8: 19 July-6 September 1982

Sandra Dickinson, Matthew Kelly, Fred Housego, Janet Street Porter, Nigel Dempster, Wendy Richard, Patrick Moore, Denise Coffey, Christopher Biggins, Rob Buckman, John Peel and Paddy O'Byrne

Programmes listed on BBC Genome in 1983 are repeats of series 7 and 8

Series 9: 12 March-30 April 1985

Christopher Biggins, Denise Coffey, Patrick Moore, Bill Oddie, Aimi Macdonald, Ian Lavender, Stubby Kaye, Bettine Le Beau, Andrew Sachs, Gyles Brandreth, Katie Boyle and Dr Magnus Pyke

Series 10: 4 March-6 May 1986

Barry Took, Patricia Hodge, Steve Jones, William Franklyn, Jean Rook, Nigel Rees, David Hamilton, Anna Carteret, Martin Jarvis, Mark Curry, Toni Arthur, Chris Serle, Iain Johnstone, June Whitfield and Christopher Biggins

Series 11: 28 April-7 July 1987 (no tx 26 May)

Ian McCaskill, Pat Coombs, Peter Jones, Jimmy Perry, Claire Rayner, Steve Jones, Denise Coffey, Colin Baker, Brian Johnston, Stephen Fry, Anna Raeburn, Morwenna Banks, Neil Mullarkey, John Junkin, Patrick Moore and Su Pollard

Series 12: 5 January-23 February 1988

Nerys Hughes, Kenneth Williams, Ian McCaskill, Brian Johnston, Denise Coffey, Derek Nimmo, Stephen Fry, Patricia Hodge, John Gordon Sinclair, Alfred Marks, June Whitfield and Alan Titchmarsh

Series 13: 21 November 1988-23 January 1989

Barry Cryer, Ian Hislop, Nerys Hughes, Denise Coffey, Alan Titchmarsh, Susan Rae, Sally Burton, Graeme Garden, Trevor McDonald, Martin Jarvis, Ian McCaskill, Claire Rayner, John Gordon Sinclair and Alfred Marks 

Series 14: 3 October-21 November 1989

Lynda Bellingham, Duggie Brown, Bob Holness, Joe Brown, Barry Cryer, Claire Rayner, Sue Cook, Chris Emmett, Nerys Hughes, Polly James, Wendy Richard and Tim Brooke-Taylor  

Series 15: 14 November 1990-9 January 1991

Mark Steel, Jenny Eclair, Barry Cryer, Rob Newman, Tony Slattery, Claire Rayner, Bob Downes, Nerys Hughes, Denise Coffey, Barbara Windsor, Wendy Richard and Graham Garden

Series 16: 24 September-12 November 1991

Michael Melia. Cynthia Payne, Craig Charles, Emlyn Hughes, Helen Atkinson-Wood, Geoffrey Durham, Lesley Joseph, Ken Livingstone, Neil Mullarkey, Susie Blake, Frances Edmonds and Craig Ferguson

Series 17: 9 September-4 November 1992 (no tx 14 October)

Anna Raeburn, Peter Jones, Paul Ross, Bill Pertwee, Denise Coffey, Bill Tidy, Fred Housego, Jan Leeming, Chris Dunkley, Miles Kington, Sandi Toksvig and Chris Stuart

Series 1: 24 July-28 August 1975

Marj Proops, Pete Murray, Sydney Tafler, Bettine Le Beau, Leslie Randall, Fred Trueman, Eleanor Summerfield, Tony Brandon, Sheridan Morley, Norma Ronald, Brian Johnston, Leonard Sachs, Charmain Innes, Percy Edwards, Alfred Marks, Isobel Barnett, , George Layton and Barry Took

Series 2: 31 December 1975-24 March 1976

Kathleen J. Smith, Sheridan Morley, Ian Wallace, Jessie Matthews, Brian Johnston, Ned Sherrin, Miriam Karlin, Noel Edmonds, Barry Took, Eleanor Summerfield, Robert McKenzie, John Julius Norwich, Sheila Van Damm, Peter Bull, Patrick Moore, Bettine Le Beau, Deryck Guyler, Bill Jupe, Jonathan Miller, June Whitfield, Fred Trueman, Linda Blanford, George Layton, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, Patricia Hayes, Milton Shulman, Michael Bentine, Thora Hird, Professor Eric Laithwaite, Sydney Tafler, Katie Boyle, Jonathan Aitken, Larry Adler, Beryl Reid, David Jacobs, Dan Maskell, Marj Proops, Pete Murray and Leslie Randall

Series 3: 7 July-25 August 1977

Patricia Hayes, Michael Robbins, Jean Rook, George Chisholm, Pat Coombs, Sheila Scott, Henry Cooper, Jenny Hanley, Yootha Joyce, Keith Fordyce, Liz Fraser, Claire Rayner, Lionel Blair, Sara Leighton, Aimi Macdonald, Joyce Blair, John Snagge, Bob Todd, Bettine Le Beau, Patrick Moore, Marj Proops, Bill Owen, Wendy Richard and Terry Wogan

Series 4: 16 April 1979-9 July 1979

Leslie Phillips, Thora Hird, Paul Jennings, Roy Hudd, Dora Bryan, Roy Plomley, Peter Jones, Sheila Van Damm, Barry Took, Jack de Manio, Mirima Karlin, Ian Wallace, Johnny Morris, Mollie Sugden, Barry Cryer, Leslie Randall, Sheila Hancock, Bill Oddie, Brian Rix, Janet Brown and Terry Wogan

Series 5: 10 November-29 December 1980 

Roy Hudd, Claire Rayner, David Jason, Nerys Hughes, Bernard Cribbins, Francis Matthews, Ray Alan, Lorraine Chase, John Craven, Liza Goddard, Don Maclean and Ian Lavender

Series 6: 27 January-3 March 1982

Honor Blackman, Terry Wogan, Tony Haygarth, Diana Dors, Martin Jarvis, Lennie Bennett, Kenny Everett, Stephanie Turner and Derek Nimmo

Series 7: 5 January-9 February 1983     

John Junkin, Stephanie Turner, Roger Cook, William Franklin, Liza Goddard, Garfield Morgan, Jeremy Beadle, Joanna Munro and Matthew Kelly

Devised by Light Entertainment producer Richard Willcox is was initially seen as a Radio 1 versus Radio 2 contest (early series were carried on both stations) with Tony Blackburn captaining the Radio 1 side and Terry Wogan representing Radio 2. Popping the questions was Pete Murray. Willcox continued to produce and write all the questions, and indeed do the audience warm-up, for the first fifteen series until Mark Robson took over production. By this time Willcox  had already brought in a certain Phil 'The Collector' Swern to help set the questions. Phil had previously attended some of the show's recordings to 'help' Tony with some of his answers until he was thrown out of the Paris studio a few shows later.    

Early guest stars were a  little eclectic to say the least. You can hardly say it was on trend, more like a decade behind. Many of the musicians had been sixties hitmakers with virtually no current chart performers taking part in the early series with perhaps the exception of Lynsey de Paul, Dana, Neil Sedaka, Long John Baldry and Mike Batt. But Deryck Guyler and Reg Varney?

In time under Willcox's tenure a smaller pool of contributors was called upon, often appearing on a other radio panel games. For instance we have actor Patrick Mower (also on The Law Game), singing impressionist Johnny More and Ray Alan (both on The Impressionists), Lance Percival (also on Wit's End and Just a Minute) and Duggie Brown (also on The Name's the Game and Dealing with Daniels). Some folk such as Tim Rice (also on Just a Minute and Trivia Test Match) really knew their stuff but generally it was a chance to muck about and the quiz side was never taken that seriously.    

Later series, produced by Robson, Dirk Maggs and Phil Clarke took things a little more seriously, but only just, with people from the music business and DJs. Typically a show might include rounds such as continuing to sing a song after its faded (think of Clue'sPick Up Song), correcting song titles, identifying song covers or  records played backwards, and a final quick-fire round. Throughout the quiz the chairman would, depending on how many points they'd scored in the round, read out so many letters of a song title that team's could guess at any time for bonus points.   

Following Ray's untimely death Ken took over as quizmaster (Ken was also hosting the Radio 2 general knowledge show The ABC Quiz) and with David off to commercial radio the team captains settled down to be Helen Shapiro and Alan Freeman.       

It all came to an end in April 1992 by which time panel games were virtually a thing of the past  on Radio 2.

Six years later Ken Bruce and Phil Swern, who had both worked together on Pop Score,  put their heads together (together with Ken's then producer Colin Martin) and came up with the format for Pop Master. The daily music quiz which stops the country is celebrated tonight in the Radio 2 programme One Year Out-The PopMasterStory and tomorrow sees the second All Day quiz.

Series Details

Question masters:

Pete Murray series 1 to 10.

Ray Moore series 11 to 13

Ken Bruce series 14 to 18 

The theme tune used for the majority of Pop Score's run was Chicken Feathers by film and TV composer Pat Williams from his 1968 album Think. In the last 80s Birdland was used for a while, possibly the Manhatten Transfer version.  

Series 1 Team captains Tony Blackburn (TB) and Terry Wogan (TW)

24 Oct 1972-6 Feb 1973

Guests: Ken Goodwin, Alan Price, Lynsey de Paul, Kenny Lynch, Roger Greenaway, Rolf Harris, Peter Noone, Vince Hill, Dana, Roy Castle, Anita Harris, Georgie Fame, Tim Rice, Lance Percival andTony Brandon

Series 2 TB TW

20 June 1973-20 Mar 1974

Roger Whittaker, Peter Noone, Tony Brandon, Lance Percival, Wally Whyton, Leslie Crowther, Bob Monkhouse, Mitch Murray, Roy Castle, Dana, Chris Barber, Joe Brown, Jimmy Tarbuck, Adrienne Posta, David Jacobs, George Chisholm, Kenneth Williams, Tim Rice, Gerry Marsden, Peter Jones, Deryck Guyler, June Whitfield, Bernard Cribbins, Johnny Pearson, Matt Monro, Lonnie Donegan, Rolf Harris, Ron Goodwin, Reg Varney, Eric Idle, Ray Fell, Frankie Vaughan, Michael Aspel, Diana Dors, Jon Pertwee, Kenny Ball, Neil Sedaka, Dickie Henderson, Peter Goodwright and Henry Cooper.  

Series 3 TB TW (Paul Burnett covered for TB on two shows and Tim Rice covered for TW on two shows)

2 Oct 1974-26 Mar 1975 Leslie Crowther, Henry Cooper, Cathy McGowan, Bob Monkhouse, Joe Brown, Kenny Ball, Ray Alan, Long John Baldry, Michael Parkinson, Marian Montgomery, Ray Fell, Vince Hill, Clive lea, Tim Rice, Ronnie Carroll, Matt Monro, Mike Batt, Mitch Murray, Cindy Kent, Roy Castle, Diana Dors, Norman, Newell, Roger Whittaker, Ray Barrett and Roger Kitter 

Series 4 TB TW

30 Oct 1975-22 Jan 1976

Bernard Cribbins, Tim Rice, Diana Dors, Kenny Ball, Roy Hudd, Ray Alan, George Chisholm, Long John Baldry, Lonnie Donegan, Rolf Harris, Clive Lea and Johnny Moore

Series 5 TB TW

13 Sept-29 Nov 1976

Leslie Crowther, Diana Dors, Bernard Cribbins, Tim Rice, Rolf Harris, Charlie Williams, Johnny More, Duggie Brown, Bobby Knutt, Jack Douglas, Patrick Mower

Series 6 TB TW

1 Sept-17 Nov 1977

Bobby Knutt, Bernard Cribbins, Faith Brown, Derek Griffiths, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Vince Hill, Duggie Brown, Ray Alan, Johnny More, Patrick Mower, Dave Evans and Tim Rice (also captain on a couple of shows) 

Series 7 TB David Hamilton (DH)

11 Sept-27 Nov 1978

Lance Percival, Joe Brown, Mike Batt, Clive Lea, Patrick Mower, Johnny More, Tony Brandon, Bill Oddie, Rolf Harris, Bobby Knutt, Dave Evans and Tim Rice

Series 8 TB DH

19 May-4 Aug 1980

Dave Dee, Lance Percival, Mike Batt, Vince Hill, Joe Brown, Tim Rice, Duggie Brown, Bernard Cribbins, Bobby Knutt and Johnny More

An edition of Pop Score from this series is on Mixcloud here though sadly the last couple of minutes are missing.

Series 9 DH Ray Moore (RM)

24 Aug -9 Nov 1981

Faith brown, Johnny More, Duggie Brown, Lance Percival, Rolf Harris, Tim Rice, Joe Longthorne, Dave Evans, Vince Hill, Acker Bilk and Joe Brown

20 June-5 Sep 1983

Helen Shapiro, Acker Bilk, Joe Brown, Vince Hill, Duggie Brown (also captain on two shows), Patrick Mower, Susan Maughan, Freddie Garrity and Mike Berry

I've unearthed the 7th programme from this series.

Series 11 DH (Other captain was either Duggie Brown, Joe Brown or Helen Shapiro)

19 Feb-14 May 1985

Rolf Harris, Mike Berry, Acker Bilk, Helen Shapiro, Clodagh Rodgers, Susan Maughan, Frank Ifield, and Russ Conway

I've previously posted the 11th programme in this series before but only recently uploaded it to YouTube

Series 12 DH Ken Bruce (KB)

15 Mar-24 May 1986

Frank Ifield, Acker Bilk, Duggie Brown, Helen Shapiro, Lonnie Donegan, Vince Hill, Helen Shapiro, Tim Rice, Des Cluskey, Con Cluskey, Noddy Holder and Paul Nicholas

Series 13 DH KB

14 Mar-20 June 1987 (includes 200th edition with Pete Murray, Terry Wogan and Tony Blackburn)

Alvin Stardust, Helen Shapiro, Lynn Sheppard, Denny Laine, Rick Wakeman, Noddy Holder, Steve Marriott, Acker Bilk, Tim Rice and Frank Ifield 

Series 14 Helen Shapiro (HS) + either Joe Brown, TB, Adrian Love or Paul Jones (First to be compiled by Phil Swern)

12 Mar-28 May 1988

Cathy McGowan, Adrian Love, Tony Blackburn, Duggie Brown, Dave Dee, Gloria Hunniford, Rick Wakeman, Tommy Vance, Noddy Holder, Robbie Vincent, Tom McGuinness

Series 15 HS + either Adrian Love or Alan Freeman (AF)

25 Mar-10 June 1989

Duggie Brown, Rick Wakeman, Rolf Harris, Peter Dickson, Noddy Holder, John Craven, Tim Rice, Alvin Stardust, Paul Jones and Vince Hill

Series 16 HS AF (Producer Dirk Maggs)

21 Apr-7 July 1990

Janice Long, Adrian Love, Sheila Ferguson, Paul Jones, Duggie Brown, Stephanie de Sykes, Joe Brown, Rose-Marie, Don Powell, Lyn Paul and Colin Berry

The first edition of this series is available on Mixcloud here. 

Series 17 HS AF

27 April-15 June 1991

Cheryl Baker, Adrian Love, Wendy Richard, Noddy Holder, Alvin Stardust, Janice Long, Rose-Marie and Colin Berry

Series 18 HS AF (Prod Phil Clarke)

28 Feb-17 April 1992

Terry Wogan, Pete Murray, Adrian Love, Lyn Paul, Lynsey de Paul, Alvin Stardust, Noddy Holder and Rose-Marie

As is typical with virtually all Radio 2 panel shows from this era they've never been repeated since they ended so if you've got any recordings of Pop Score please let me know.

In the meantime here are two wonderful short publicity films that go behind the scenes at a number of stations a mere forty years ago. Both are titled Action Stations! – BBC Local Radioand were directed by Patricia Owtram for the BBC Local Radio Publicity Unit.

The first, with a running time of 20 minutes, dates from 1981 and is narrated by John Saunders. It’s full of images of newsrooms complete with typewriters, fax machines and Studer tape decks, remote studios, county shows, youth programming, snow days and local elections.

We see at work Radios Lincolnshire, Medway, Sheffield, Humberside (with coverage of the opening of the Humber Bridge this week in 1981), Nottingham, Carlisle (and their farming programme), Bristol (the O Level Show), Leicester, Leeds (with the Best Pub Pianist competition) and London (with the last ever GLC election).

The second shorter film dates from early 1980 though it includes footage from 1977 and 1978. Here the emphasis is more on community involvement and also the BBC Local Radio Parliamentary Unit.  We visit the short-lived Radio Taunton (a Bristol’s emergency news station), Medway, Leicester, Solent, Birmingham, Bristol and Sheffield. There are no credits for this film but the narrator sounds like Laure Mayer to me.      

See how many familiar faces you can spot in Action Stations! BBC Local Radio.

It’s hard to pin down how this all started, though this Radio 1 programme points the finger at the inclusion of Burt Bacharach on the cover of Definitely Maybe. It certainly sent all the record companies scurrying off to their archives and re-releasing   tracks they thought would never see the light of day again. Anything was fair game under the easy listening banner including tv theme tunes, library music, exotica, space age pop and the acts that your parents had enjoyed like Andy Williams and The Carpenters. Collections of CDs labelled as Sound Gallery, Cult Fiction, Loungecore, Cocktail Classics and Music to Watch Girls By filled the shelves at HMV.

In Easy Night we hear a mix of easy listening pop classics, new versions of old hits and a mix from The Karminsky Experience, the guys behind the In Flight Entertainment albums “mining a groove that seemed to be beamed in from another dimension.”

Kevin speaks to Burt Bacharach, whose PRS royalty cheques must have come flooding in as a result of this easy listening boom, and Tony Bennett, “God’s own crooner” in Kevin’s book.

Giving us the benefit of his wisdom is Professor Keith Haringey, Ronco Chair of Popular Musicology at De Montford University. No idea who the voice of the Professor is, and producer Will can’t recall either.

Choosing their favourite tracks in Celebrity Flashback are Paul Whitehouse who picks Dean Friedman’s Lucky Stars (“well slide over here”). Bjork’s unusual choice is the vocal dexterity of Yma Sumac with Tumpa. Ice T goes for Hey! Love by The Delfonics. Paul Hartnoll, one half of Orbital, selects Nancy Sinatra’s You Only Live Twice.   

Count Indigo is in the studio with a unique rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit. There’s Bacharach to the Future – The Definitive History of Easy Listening  which is far from definitive and a Top 10 of Easy Listening. That top 10 features (spoiler alert) Dana, Acker Bilk, Peggy Lee, Mantovani, Dusty Springfield, The Carpenters, Dionne Warwick, Morrissey and Andy Williams with their versions of Moon River, Petula Clark’s Downtown and taking the top spot Herb Alpert with This Guy’s in Love With You.   

Providing all the links and announcements is the purring voice of Honor Blackman.

So once again wallow in the nostalgia of four hours of Easy Night. The recordings, in three parts, include news bulletins read by Jane Bolger and the start of Wendy Lloyd’s show at midnight. If records fade out that’s where I had to turn over the C90 tapes. Some records with a wide stereo spectrum appear to be missing part of one channel.

With thanks to Will Saunders. 

In this post I’ll be taking you back in time to the BBC Light Programme on Tuesday 29 August and Wednesday 30 August 1961. Little is likely to have survived in the BBC Sound Archives from those dates. Looking at the listings I know that Tuesday’s episode of Whack-O was secured away as it’s had a Radio 4 Extra repeat. You never know but maybe The Archers or Mrs Dale’s Diary was kept, but I doubt it.

Fortunately we can now fill some gaps thanks to some home taping done back in the day by a young man called Eric Bartington and, more recently, the timely intervention of Gerard de Roo. But more on that later.

Jack Jackson with Record Roundabout

Post-war Jack performed with his band for a while (including a spell on the BBC tv variety show Rooftop Rendezvous) but his main employment was as a presenter looking after the proceedings on Jazz Matinee (his first show with Mark White as producer) and Band Parade(1947-50).

The first radio series with which Jack was most closely associated is Record Round-up. Starting on the Light Programme in January 1948 it ran until April 1954 and was one of the rare gramophone-only shows on the network at that time. It was during this series that he began to adopt the style that was to become his trademark. Short witty introductions interspersed with comic effects and comedy lines proving something of a nightmare for the studio managers and grams operators. It was only the later Record Roundaboutshows that Jack pre-recorded in his home studio that fully allowed this style to develop.    

In 1955 Jack’s radio work ceased when he signed an exclusive contract with one of the new commercial television contractors, ABC. He was there on the opening day in September 1955 to introduce the Gala Night variety show and was given a Saturday night show introducing “personalities, news and music from the world of show business” from the Embassy Club in Bond Street. This didn’t particularly work for Jack and after a month it was re-titled On the Townwith Australian actor Ron Randell as the compère. Instead Jack was given a Sunday afternoon show (not long afterwards moved to Sunday night) that became known as Record Time. Co-written and devised with his former BBC producer Mark White it better suited Jack who sat behind a desk and presented “a fast-moving combination of music and comedy, chatting to guests and welcoming his own supporting company of comedians”.  His regular team included Joan Savage, Glen Mason and Paddie O’Neil. Ideas for the show were tried out by Jackson and White in Jack’s studio at his home in Rickmansworth mixing comedy effects from records by the likes of Danny Kaye, Spike Jones and Stan Freberg. Producer Peter Glover told the TV Times that each week’s show is built like a variety bill mixing comedy with fast and slow numbers. “It doesn’t always work out in that way because in the record business sometimes everything is a ballad or its all skiffle”.   

By 1959 Jack was back on the radio, both BBC and on Luxembourg. On 208 he presented the Decca sponsored show Record Round-up(later with Colgate-Palmolive sponsorship) as well as The Juke Box Show (“the fast and furious new-style programme for juke-box fans”) and Hit Parade. On the Light Programme he started his run of Record Roundabout shows, initially on a weekday evening before settling into its Saturday lunchtime berth from May 1962 by which time he moved to Tenerife and had set up his studio there. Now a much slicker operation the records came one after another with none of the usual pauses in between for the usual “that was”, “this is” intros. Uniquely for the time he would even announce a record title and artist mid-way through the song. The show ran until June 1969, by now on Radio 1. A final series aired on Radio 2 in late 1971 but he came back for some bank holiday one-offs in 1975 and 1976 by which time he’d returned to the UK. Jack died in January 1978.

This recording of Record Roundabout dates from Tuesday 29 August 1961 when it was broadcast between 21.31 and 22.30. The first 12 minutes or so are missing so there’s no opening theme – Harry James’s Carnival– and his usual “good evening record lovers everywhere, and welcome to the show” announcement. Also in this show, unlike other recordings I’ve heard from this time, Jack doesn’t use any comedy clips between any of the records.    

Record Roundabout consisted entirely of new releases so he crams in a fair few titles with a mix of pop, ballads, trad jazz and the instrumentals that were all the rage at the time. We join the show with Eggheads by Brian Blackburn and Peter Reeves from the BBC tv sitcom of the same name that centred on student life. Other tracks are:

You Belong to My Heart - Ray Adams

If You Don’t Somebody Else Will - Connie Stevens

Ain’t Gonna Wash for a Week - The Brook Brothers (voted a ‘hit’ on the previous week’s edition of Juke Box Jury)

Square Feet– Monty Babson

Skin Divin’– The Avons

I’ll Never Smile Again– The Platters

Don’t Bet Money Honey– Linda Scott

The Avengers Theme– Johnny Dankworth & his Orchestra (missing from the YouTube upload for copyright reasons)

Blue Moon– Frank Sinatra

On Route 66 (Get Your Kicks)– Anita Bryant

Someday You’ll Be Sorry– Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen

I Don’t Hurt Anymore– Ann Margret

One More Crime– Dick Williams & his Orchestra

The Juke Box is Broken– Max Bygraves and the Two-Tones (also missing from the YouTube upload)

Jump for Joy– Sarah Vaughan

That Old Black Magic– Earl Watson

San Antonio Rose– Floyd Cramer

True Love– Terry Lightfoot’s New Orleans Jazzmen

Manana (Is Soon Enough for Me) - Peggy Lee

Starfire – The John Barry Seven (this would be used as the theme for the TWW series Discs-A-Go-Go with Kent Walton)

(These recordings are presented here via Mixcloud but they’re also on YouTube but some tracks are missing for copyright reasons)

Serenade in the Night

In this recording of Serenade in the Musicpresented by John Hobday the lead orchestra is Bernard Monshin and his Rio Tango Band. Monshin, a bandleader at the tender age of 17, would tour with his Tango Band during the mid-30s before taking a year’s residency in 1937 at the Hotel Borg in, of all places, Reykjavik. Back in London he was leading the resident orchestra at London’s Casini Club. Seeing wartime service in the RAF he re-formed his orchestra after the war and made hundreds of broadcasts for the BBC on programmes either in his own name and on Cafe on the Corner, Tango Time, Melody Hour, Break for Music, Morning Music, Melody all the Way, Tuesday Tunetime and, most notably, Music While You Work for which he appeared in 146 editions between 1948 and 1967.

Also in this edition are The South Sea Serenaders led by guitarist Ernest Penfold and the Sidney Bright Trio (Sidney was the twin brother of bandleader Geraldo, real name Gerald Bright). The singer is Julie Dawn who Radio 2 listeners in the early 70s may remember from her Girl Talkfeature on Charlie Chester’s daily show and letters feature on Night Ride as well as Penfriend Corner on You and the Night and the Music in the 1980s.      

This recording is of almost the full show, only the 11.30 pm news summary read by Robin Boyle and part of the following piece of music is missing.

The tunes include (of those I can positively identify) Amico Tango, Fascination (based on a 1904 waltz with English lyrics added in the 50s it was recorded by Dinah Shore, Nat King Cole and others), Ernest Ponticelli’s Owl on the Prowl, The Last Tango,  Ron Goodwin’s Pleasure Island, September in the Rain, September Song, With a Song in My Heart (at the time the theme tune for Family Favourites), Spanish Harlem, Resta cu’mme (Stay with Me), Little Serenade, My Loving Hands, Thou Swell, Caravelle, Drifting and Dreaming, El Gato Montes, What Kind of Fool Am I?from the recently opened West End show Stop the World- I Want to Get Off, Cry Like the Wind, Sweet Hawaiian Kisses, and I’m in Love with the Honourable Mr So and So.    

Exhibition Choice

At the 1961 National Radio Show the BBC presenters of each 30-minute Exhibition Choice included Eammon Andrews, David Jacobs, Jean Metcalfe, Pete Murray and, in this instance, “Mrs Elrick's wee son George”.

George Elrick was an extremely popular presenter in the 1950s and 1960s, especially for his regular stints at the helm of Housewives’ Choice. A former drummer and vocalist with Henry Hall and the BBC Dance Band he’d been broadcasting since the mid-30s on both the BBC and Radio Luxembourg (billed as Maclean’s Laughing Entertainer and his Band, sponsored by the makers of Johnson’s Wax Polish). He also toured in the Jack Hylton-produced show Youth Must Have Its Swing. During the war he was an ENSA officer and continued to broadcast on shows with the Scottish Variety Orchestra and with his band in shows in his own name as well as Music While You Work. An early appearance in 1946 on Housewives’ Choiceled to repeated bookings on the daily request show over the next 21 years. Away from the radio he managed Mantovani for two decades, was a judge on ATV’s New Faces (1974-77) and was very active in the Variety Club of Great Britain. George died in 1999.

At the time the outlet for pop music on the Light Programme was limited so it’s interesting to hear how, when it comes to a free choice from the audience, they’re keen to hear the hits of the day. The biggest cheers go up for Adam Faith and Gary US Bonds (the record is just credited as U.S. Bonds)

In this edition of Exhibition Choice you’ll hear:

Only the Lonely - Roy Orbison

Dum Dum - Brenda Lee

Sailor– Anne Shelton

Don’t You Know It– Adam Faith

The Touch of Your Lips– Nat King Cole

Quarter to Three– Gary US Bonds

(Theme) Polka for Strings– Dolf van der Linden & his Orchestra

There are also some sonic artifacts (several short beeps) in this recording which were on the original tape. After the show we have some programme news and then to fill the gap up to the 12.30 news summary its the Light Programme interval signal Oranges and Lemons which, I understand, was played on the novachord by Charles Smart. 

Parade of the Pops

The format meant it was essentially a show of cover versions, of varying quality it must be said. Listeners to the Light Programme were treated to this show format (see other lunchtime shows such as The Beat Show, The Joe Loss Show, Monday Monday and Pop North) as it avoided eating into the wafer-thin amount of needletime.

Parade of the Pops first aired on a Monday evening between January and April 1960 before returning in August of that year in what would become its traditional slot of a Wednesday lunchtime from the Playhouse Theatre on Northumberland Avenue. The show was, as far as I can ascertain, recorded at noon the preceding Saturday. It finally ended in October 1968 by which time it had transferred to Radio 1 and was replaced by Radio 1 Club.  

The house band throughout the run was Bob Miller and the Millerman. Led by alto-saxophonist player Bob Miller, they were a versatile outfit that would play instrumentals and accompany most of the songs featured on the show.  Their sound was ideally suited for the sax-heavy sound that was so prevalent at the time with combos such as the John Barry Seven, Lord Rockingham’s XI and Ken Macintosh and his Orchestra

Formed in the late 1950s they had already been the stars of the BBC tv Six-Five Special successor Dig This! and its longer-running Saturday night successor Drumbeat.  This latter show was compered by songwriter and actor Trevor Peacock (many years later Jim Trott in The Vicar of Dibley) and often featured the close harmony group The Raindrops. Parade of the Popsprovided the mainstay of the radio work for the The Millermen and they continued to broadcast on BBC radio into the early 1970s

The Raindrops were the featured group for the first couple of years of Parade of the Pops though they continued to broadcast on the BBC throughout the decade on shows such as Workers’ Playtime, Pops with Lenny (with Lenny the Lion and Terry Hall), Music-Hall, The Tommy Steele Show, Benny Hill Time and The Al Read Show. Formed in late 1958 by trombonist Len Beadle, The Raindrops also included Jackie Lee (who married Len later in the 60s and is best known for her singles White Horses and Rupert), Vince Hill (who went solo in late 1961 but continued to appear on the show) and songwriter Johnny Worth (born John Worsley but often credited under his stage name Les Vandyke). In 1959 they appeared on the Light Programme shows Swingsong and Saturday Club and BBC TV’s Trinder Box (with comedian Tommy Trinder) as well as Drumbeat performing with Bob Miller and his Millermen. It was producer John Kingdon that first brought together The Raindrops and The Millermen on the radio in the 1959 series The Pop Shop, the forerunner to Parade of the Pops. By the time of this recording Johnny Worth had been replaced by Brian Adams.        

Denny also wrote scripts for Double Scotch as well as providing funny lines for Val Doonican and Vince Hill. By the 1970s he was mainly working as a television audience warm-up man on shows such as This is Your Life, It’s Tommy Cooper and Please Sir! As to what subsequently happened to Denny I’ve no idea. If you know please do get in touch.

The show was pretty much an immediate success, so much so that by the end of its first year EMI’s recording manager Norman Newell had already approached the BBC to record an LP.

This recording of Parade of the Popsfollowed on from Exhibition Choiceand includes the both the 12.30 and 13.30 news bulletins and some piano interval music before Cricket Scoreboard(not on the tape) at 13.35.

The special guest is a 14-year old Helen Shapiro belting out her recent number one hit You Don’t Know and the B side Marvellous Life. Apart from that its pop tunes of the day all performed by the Miller’s band and his vocal group The Milltones (who included Dougie Arthur) as well as The Raindrops, either as a group or as solos.

There’s some real talent on display here and attending the show live at Playhouse must have been a thrill but you can understand why Britain’s teenagers so whole-heartedly took to the Beatles the following year and the offshore pirates three years later. Elvis had four number one hits in 1961 but if you only heard Dougie Arthur’s version of the reverse side of his latest “waxing” then you’d wonder what all the fuss was about. As for the cover of Runaway, I’d close your ears.  

The songs covered are: Ain’t Gonna Wash for a Week(The Brook Brothers), Old Smokie(Johnny and the Hurricanes), Temptation(The Everly Brothers), Climb Every Mountain (Jackie Lee singing this one as Shirley Bassey had just released her version of it), There I Said It Again(originally recorded by Vaughn Munroe and more recently Al Saxon), Amor Amor (Vince Hill doing his best to impersonate Ben E. King), You Always Hurt the One You Love (Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry), Someday You’ll Be Sorry (Kenny ball and his Jazzmen), Who Put the Bomp (The Viscounts), Lumbered (Lonnie Donegan), Quite a Party (The Fireballs), I Feel So Bad (Elvis Presley), The Trek to Rome (Nero & the Gladiators), Runaway (Del Shannon), Don’t You Know It? (Adam Faith), Together (Connie Francis), The Frightened City (The Shadows) and Weekend (Eddie Cochran).   

The recordings

We have Eric Bartington to thank for these recordings. He taped a number of programmes, mainly music shows, but also comedy (The Goons and Whack-O), royal events and sports events in 1960 and 1961. That collection of tape reels (Scotch, EMI and BASF) went with him when he emigrated to New Zealand later in 1961 as one of the Ten Pound Poms. No doubt he wished to take a little bit of British culture with him. 

Eric was born in 1938 in Hendon and later studied at the Hendon Technical College. He became a telephone exchange engineer so dabbling with electronics and hooking up his reel-to-reel tape recorder to the radio would have been no problem for him.

In New Zealand he settled in Auckland from where he would send taped messages back home to Britain and where, based on this 1962 message, he was still recording off the radio, though now the programmes of the NZBC. We know little more about what happened to Eric until this announcement of his death was posted in the New Zealand Herald last year: BARTINGTON, Eric: Passed away on April 9, 2020 after a brave battle with illness. Dearly loved husband of Jo, cherished father of Andrew and father-in-law to Kerry. Loved son of the late Florence and John Bartington. Brother to Anne, John and Allen (deceased). A gentle, kind and compassionate man who gave so much without expectation of return. You will be missed by all who knew and loved you and especially your granddog Winston. Forever in our hearts. Heartfelt thanks to the staff of Howick Baptist Home who cared for Eric in his final year. A private cremation has been held”.

The family started to dispose of some of Eric’s possessions including the stash of tape reels. They were advertised on a local auction site that read “Bulk 8mm film, canisters, spools & film splicer - my fathers collection - refer pictures for details.   Vanguard film splicer 8mm & 16mm in new condition in box.  Brands include Scotch, Philips, Maxell, Tonecrest, Photax & Collaro.  Magnetic tape recordings include Handel organ concertos, Bing Crosby, etc.  Would like to see go to a good home”.

Fortunately Gerad de Roo spotted this advert and bought the lot for just $NZ56 (about £28). Digitising the tapes he realised they contained recordings that would be of wider interest and should be heard and enjoyed again. He contacted me a couple of months ago about the BBC recordings and we’ve been going through the recordings to identify just what we have and the pinpoint the transmission dates.

This is the first of a series of posts to feature these Bartington tapes. I’m grateful to Eric and to Gerard for this glimpse into radio’s past. I hope you enjoy it too.

The show was devised by the BBC resident comedy guru in Manchester, producer Mike Craig, though obits for Cardew, who died in 1992, erroneously credit him with the idea.

Accompanying the comics for the songs was Harry Hayward, perhaps best known for his numerous appearances on Workers' Playtime and later Ken Frith who often played with the Northern Dance Orchestra. 

The six series started off on Radio 2, where it really belonged, but with series 3 and 4 turning up on Radio 4, though both stations repeated some editions that had been heard on the other one.

Providing the comedy were invariably Northern comics, well steeped in touring the clubs and theatres. Some were fairly regular broadcasters like Duggie Brown, Bernie Clifton, Tom Mennard, Dave Evans.

I've a couple of editions of You've Got to be Joking that I recorded. From the start of the 1980 series on Radio 4 comes this gem of a show with Tom Mennard, one fine form here, Bernie Clifton, with a 3½ minute gag fest at the start, and Tony Peers. First broadcast on 9 July 1980 and repeated on Radio 2 on 30 June 1981 it has not been heard since.

From the fifth series here are Mike Burton, Malcolm Stent and Jan Harding. This was broadcast just the once on 24 March 1982.

Series Guide

Series 1: 13 December 1976-7 March 1977 (13 episodes) BBC Radio 2

Duggie Brown, Bernie Clifton, Tom O'Connor, Bobby Knutt, Mick Miller, Jack Platts and Peter Wallis,  

Series 2:28 November 1977-27 February 1978 (13 episodes) BBC Radio 2

Bernie Clifton, Norman Collier, Tom Mennard, Jan Harding, Tony Kent, Bobby Knutt, Don Maclean, Peter Wallis, Mick Miller and Ron Delta 

Series 3: 28 November 1978-20 February 1979 (13 episodes) BBC Radio 4

Bernie Clifton, Tom Mennard, Dave Evans, Jan Harding, Peter Robinson, Duggie Brown and Mike Newman 

Series 4: 9 July-13 August 1980 (6 episodes) BBC Radio 4

Tom Mennard, Bernie Clifton, Tony Peers, George Roper, Jan Harding and Peter Robinson

Alan Fox, Colin Price, Tony Kent, Mike Newman, Malcolm Stent, Vince Earle, Mike Burton and Jan Harding

Series 6: 10 November-15 December 1982 (6 episodes) BBC Radio 2

Mike Burton, Mike Newman, Jan Harding, Tony Kent, Vince Earle, Ronnie Hayward, Phil Cool and Colin Price  

Amongst the many ghost stories from the pen of M.R. James is one with all the classic elements of the genre: a young boy sent to a remote country house, a reclusive relative, visions of the recently departed, unexplained scratches on the bedroom door and a gruesome final image.   

Lost Hearts was originally published in 1895 and later appeared in the 1904 anthology Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. This collection has been much plundered by TV producers, particularly by the BBC for the series of ghost stories for Christmas. Lost Hearts was broadcast by BBC1 on Christmas Day 1973 but there has been an earlier ABC production, now lost, in March 1966 adapted by playwright Giles Cooper. Film versions appeared in 2007 and 2018.

On the radio there have been a number of readings of the story. In 1946 David Lloyd James read it in an afternoon story slot on the Home Service. At Christmas 1957 it was Hugh Burden’s turn on the Third Programme. Again at Christmas Benjamin Whitrow read it, this time on Radio 4 in 1997. Ten years later Derek Jacobi introduced a 15 minute dramatisation. Both these broadcasts have been repeated on Radio 7/4 Extra. It appeared yet again in December 2019 as part of the Ghost Stories from Ambridge series with John Rowe, aka Jim Lloyd of the The Archers, narrating.   

But there’s one reading that appears to have been overlooked, and its one by the star of numerous Hammer horrors, Peter Cushing. It was tucked away in the now long-forgotten Radio 4 Sunday morning magazine show Forget Tomorrow's Monday. Running from October 1977 to December 1978 it was produced by the Woman’s Hour unit. The guest on the 29 October 1978 show was Peter Cushing and he was asked to read Lost Hearts.  A recording of Forget Tomorrow's Monday was passed to me some time ago by Richard Tucker, a collector in New Zealand, but it was only recently when I listened again that I realised the value of this recording. It’s never, to my knowledge been repeated and may not even be in the Sound Archives.   

So enjoy, for the first time in 43 years, this telling of a story from the master of Victorian macabre.

Today marks Remembrance Sunday, the day to commemorate those who gave service during the two world wars and later conflicts. Marking this day on the Sunday after Armistice Day has been part of British life since 1946.

Armistice Day services were first held in 1920 and a year later the Royal British Legion began selling poppies. Early BBC programmes did mark Armistice Day each November 11^th but it wasn’t until 1928 that it was allowed to broadcast coverage of the events at the Cenotaph in London, including the two minutes silence.  An agreement was made with the Home Office when the BBC assured that it could be done by use of underground cables to minimise the risk of “unsightly mechanical apparatus” except for “one microphone which might take the form of a lectern”.  Thus started a broadcasting tradition that means that this is one of the longest-running outside broadcasts on UK radio.

Radio Times billing for the Service of Remembrance in 1956

Hudson would describe the role of commentator for the event as "having a pastoral role to play; his words, dropping precisely into place, must strike exactly the right note. The mental image of the scene and the personal recollections prompted by his words can often be more vivid and satisfying than any television picture, however skillfully composed."

This brings us to Sunday 13 November 1960 when this recording of the Service of Remembrance was made. The announcer (Frank Phillips?) introduces the programme before going over to “our observer overlooking the scene in Whitehall”. That observer is once again Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. This is another recording made by Eric Bartington and digitised by Gerard de Roo, to whom I extend my thanks. 

Since this recording the radio commentary for the Service of Remembrance from the Cenotaph has been provided by the following:

Robert Hudson (1962-84), Raymond Baxter (1985), John Hosken (1986-88), Tom Fleming (1989-93), Cliff Morgan (1994), Eric Robson (1995-97) Nicholas Witchell (1998, 2000-02, 2006-15), Robin Lustig (1999), Fergal Keane (2003-05), Jonathan Dimbleby (2016 & 2018), James Naughtie (2017), Eleanor Oldroyd (2019) and Paddy O’Connell (2020-21).

Robert Hudson's diagram for the 1984 service (from Inside Outside Broadcasts, R&W Publications 1993)

Paddy O'Connell on broadcasting from the Cenotaph (Radio Times 13 November 2021)

But this is a radio blog. So what, I hear you cry, was on the radio that day? The BBC Programme Index helps fill in the blanks but you can't beat going back to the Radio Timeslistings.    

My edition of the Radio Times is for the north of England so on the Home Service we only get the first edition of Today with Jack de Manio. Replacing the second post 8 am news edition is Today from the North with John Watmaugh. It's term-time so schools programmes take a chunk out of the daytime hours. Wednesday means Choral Evensong and from 5 pm programmes badged as Junior Time in what was the old Children's Hour timeslot include a drama The Immovable Object produced by long-time Manchester-based producer Trevor Hill. From the current perspective the evening schedule seems a little odd, the Home Service carries the Bizet opera Carmen in four acts, so taking up most of the night. However, the Third Programme has the drama, in this case an adaptation of Un Caso Clinico (A Hospital Case) by Italian playwright Dino Buzzati.

Of course it wasn't just the BBC you could tune into to. There were any number of foreign stations, perhaps the AFN, but more than likely it'd be 208 metres for some alternative night time listening on Radio Luxembourg. The schedule for the 22nd can be found in the issue of Disc ("the top record and musical weekly") tracked down online by Mike Barraclough. Essentially its full of lots of very short  pre-recorded sponsored shows with not much clue, at least in this publication, as to who the DJs were

6.00 Record Show

          7.00 Pops at the Piano

7.17 Wednesday's Requests

7.45 Jimmy Young Sings

8.00 Honey Hit Parade

8.15 In the Groove

8.30 Sound of Fury

9.00 Internationalities

9.30 David Jacobs

10.00 Teen and Twenty Club

10.30 Record Show

11.00 Request a Golden Guinea

11.15-11.30 Hits for Six

12.00-12.30 Midnight on Luxembourg 

Meanwhile over on the telly ITV offered us Zoo Time from Whipsnade Zoo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, Coronation Street (so some things never change), Rawhide, the musical programme Pop! Vintage '48 and The Blackwell Story,  a drama about America's first woman medical student Elizabeth Blackwell. Over on the BBC it was an afternoon of live football with Kenneth Wolstenholme commentating of the England v Ireland international, The Flowerpot Men, Tales of the Riverbank, Cliff and the team with Tonight, the US series Frontier Circus, Peter Dimmock with Sportsview and the start of a new 6-part drama A Chance of Thunder by Z Cars scriptwriter John Hopkins.    

First up is another Record Roundabout show with Jack Jackson (pictured above). From this hour long show we get to hear the last third or so. As usual Jack intersperses the tracks with comedy clips. The music on offer this time, none of which troubled the British hit parade, is:

Darn That Dream– Johnny Nash

Copenhagen – a ragtime tune played by Joe ‘Fingers’ Carr

Somebody– Joe Williams

Jersey Bounce– Ray Ellis Orchestra and Chorus

I Found a New Baby– The Trombones Inc.

Bloodshot Eyes– Lorne Lesley

Twelve Days of Christmas– Jerry Fielding Orchestra

The second show from Monday 19 December 1960 is Music for Sweethearts“a late evening setting for romance” with the sound of Eric Jupp at the piano and with his orchestra. This late-night show of lush orchestral music - and based on this evidence arranged to induce you into a deep slumber - ran, at intervals, from June 1957 to December 1961.

Radio Times billing for the first show on 23 June 1957

For the final series of Music for Sweethearts(April to December 1961) the music was provided by Eric Cook and his Orchestra. Cook too would also emigrate to Australia in the 1960s.         

Making the introductions is David Gell, who’d presented the show since April 1958. David would host hundreds of programmes for the BBC and Radio Luxembourg as well as being a familiar face on ITV music shows before returning to his native Canada in 1977. 

Music for Sweethearts ran at half-an-hour but this recording is of the first 20 minutes.

These recordings were made by the late Eric Bartington and I extend my thanks to Gerad de Roo who rescued them and passed them to me.    

The sound of church bells ringing out on Christmas morning was part of the radio landscape (on BBC national radio) for just over four decades.  The peal of bells from British churches and cathedrals were featured in a short programme (10 to 20 minutes) on the Home Service and then Radio 4 between 1943 and 1986. For the almost half that time they were introduced by Robert Hudson (commentator mainly for cricket and numerous royal events) but earlier sequences were linked by staff announcers or former staff announcers.

From Christmas Day 1960 comes this recording of Christmas Bells. It’s another tape recorded at the time by Eric Bartington and re-discovered recently in New Zealand by Gerard de Roo. The first minute or so is missing but the bells included here are from Sheffield Cathedral, Ottery St. Mary Parish Church in Devon (pictured above), Parish Church of St. Patrick Ballymena in Co. Antrim, Parish Church of St. Mary Hampton in Middlesex, Birmingham Cathedral, St. Cuthbert's Church Edinburgh, Parish Church of St. Mary Swansea and, as was often the tradition on this broadcasts, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Church picture credit thanks to Sandra Wright at https://www.otterystmary.info/

This blog is often concerned with radio archive. But in this post I’m looking at an archive programme that doesn’t contain archive material. Moreover it was broadcast with the express intention of not being repeated and not being available to ‘Listen Again’.  Like the radio of old this was radio of the moment, never to be heard again. Until now that is.

Archive Fever is an edition of Radio 4’s Archive on 4broadcast live in April 2017. Presented by cultural historian Matthew Sweet in what was billed as an attempt “to live in the moment and evade posterity as he pieces together an edition of Archive on 4 without the use of any archive whatsoever - and in a valiant attempt at auto-destructive radio, tries to remove all trace of this very programme from the world”.

The programme considers some of the practical and philosophical questions about archiving.  Are we over burdened by ‘stuff’? Should we keep everything? Or anything? How do we decide what to keep? What is important now and will it be in the future? Can we synthesise what we have into something new or interesting? If we lost our archive would we cease to exist?

Archive Fevertakes its title from the 1995 book from French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He suggested that we are all archivists, though we are not necessarily any good at it - ask any trained archivist or librarian.  In the digital world ‘archive’ is all around us in call logs, web pages visited, Instagram photos, cloud storage and the like. But how do we make sense of it or use it?

In this documentary Matthew Sweet is live in the studio but the programme includes five pre-recorded sequences or interviews. At the end he rips up his script and destroys the recordings, held on memory cards, by taking a hammer to them.   Of course we know the BBC will have kept a copy, if only in the short term, for legal and compliance reasons. And of course I, as an amateur radio archivist kept it. After the passage of nearly five years perhaps its time to bring it back to life. Judge for yourself.

Archive on 4: Archive Fever was broadcast on Saturday 15 April 2017. There are contributions from William Basinski, Mike Figgis, Christopher Frayling, Aleks Krotoski, Hanif Kureishi, Andy Martin, Joanna Norledge, Caroline Shenton and Carolyn Steedman. The producer is Martin Williams.

With a less colourful and much longer time at the BBC was his eldest brother Roger. (1) Details of Roger’s early life remain sketchy other than he was Charterhouse educated, failed at the law and had worked for the Foreign Office. By the time he’d been recruited to the BBC by his brother Peter in February 1924 (a case of nepotism that would send the current Minister at the DCMS into a frenzy) he’d had a spell as secretary of the Littlehampton Golf Club and a failed attempt to be a chicken farmer. Ideal BBC administrator material it seems.

Eckersley rose quickly through the ranks, starting as Assistant Controller (Programmes) where he also had responsibility for some early Outside Broadcasts, taking over chairmanship of the Programme Board in May 1926, appointed Director of Programmes in 1927 and, after a management re-organisation, Director of Entertainment in 1933. Subsequently he was Assistant Controller (Programmes), Director of Regional Relations and Assistant Controller (Regions). During the Second World War he headed up the American Liaison Unit.   

Another string to his bow was as a composer with his best known composition being It’s Just the Time for Dancing (2), the opening theme used by Henry Hall’s band that was, rather neatly, the first piece of music heard from the newly opened Broadcasting House in March 1932.

During his tenure at the BBC Eckersley was instrumental in some of the decisions that set the template for British radio broadcasting. When the General Strike was bringing the country to a halt he’d argued for the creation of a news team rather than exclusively rely on the news agency reports; he was part of the Pronunciation Committee alongside playwright George Bernard Shaw and poet Robert Bridges; he held protracted negotiations with Sir Thomas Beecham on the formation of a permanent orchestra for the corporation (this was to be the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Adrian Boult following Beecham’s withdrawal) and he helped persuade the theatre owners  and entertainment agencies to let their artistes  appear on the radio. On the other hand, showing something of a detachment from the majority of listeners, he did express the view that broadcasting should cease between 7 and 8 pm because everyone would be dressing for dinner. 

Eckersley was highly valued by Director-General John Reith. One of his contemporaries (speaking anonymously to Reith’s first biographer Andrew Boyle) said “he was a marvellously smooth operator in the field of social and public relations. He even taught Reith how to fasten a bow tie without turning a hair, and nobody resented his position as one of Reith’s favourites for several years. A select house at No. 21 Thurloe Square was leased, equipped, maintained and run at the expense of the BBC so that Roger could deploy his social graces officially and to the full.” Not all agreed with this practice; one of the BBC governors, Mrs Ethel Snowden, was of the opinion that “our employees should not be exposed to the danger of constant entertainment of people of artistic temperament.”

The early development of the BBC had seen the growth of regional broadcasting – partly out of a necessity due to the limitations of technology and transmitters. Chief engineer Peter Eckersley was particularly keen on developing this service to ensure that listeners could enjoy alternative programmes to the main radio station. Conversely his brother Roger was a proponent of greater centralisation, which is indeed what happened in the 1930s, and he was more metropolitan in his outlook. He wrote:”More has been made of civic pride and amour proper than has been necessary.” In a memorandum to station directors of November 1928 he argued: “Take from London what you cannot do better yourself, and do yourself what London cannot give you.”

In the view of David Cleghorn Thomson (Scottish Regional Director), Roger was “the greatest enemy of regional initiative and independence, and an enthusiast for just the bloated centripetal ‘mugwumpery’ that his brother feared.” Despite this, or maybe because of this, Eckersley became Director of Regional Relations in 1937 and Assistant Controller (Regions) the following year.

With the outbreak of World War II the National and Regional Programme were combined into one Home Service. Eckersley was put in charge of an American Liaison Unit and was therefore the man having overall responsibility for censoring American broadcasts, although he spent much of his time lobbying for greater access. That access included supporting Ed Murrow’s famous rooftop London After Dark broadcasts during the Blitz.

Eckersley retired from the BBC in 1945 and the following year wrote about his time with the Corporation in The BBC and All That. (3) For the BBC’s 90^th anniversary extracts from this book were abridged by Neil Cargill and read by James Fleet.

Broadcast on 23 November 2012, in the first programme we hear of the rapid expansion of the BBC, why the performers in radio drama should remain anonymous and how to pronounce acoustics.

In the second programme, from 30 November 2012, we take a tour of Broadcasting House, hear about audience research and how not to address the Queen. 

Roger Huxley Eckersley 1885-1955

(1) There was also a third middle brother Tom who was also partly involved in radio as a research engineer at Marconi.

(2) Other tunes he wrote include The One in the World, Blue Lagoon, Pigtail Alley, Sentimental Moon, Just a Voice, Lake Isle of Innisfree, Deep Depression over Iceland Blues, Shopping, Three Encore Songs and a couple of two-step pieces Fire Flies and Gnats.

(3) Published by Sampson, Low, Marston & Co Ltd in 1946. I’ve been unable to source a reasonably priced copy so if you happen to have this book and are willing to sell it (for a reasonable price!) please contact me. The following year Eckersley published a book of humorous verses titled Some Nonsense. With rhymes like “She reads him naughty bit from Byron. That stimulating little siren. She says there’s something mute in him. And longs to rouse the brute in him,” it is perhaps best avoided.  

(4) Roger’s son Timothy also worked for the BBC and helped found the Sound Archives. He became Head of Recorded Services, was a Governor of the British Institute of Recorded Sound and founded the International Association of Sound Archives.   

These were the topics on offer in this recording from the Countryside in ... series, an overlooked series that ran on BBC radio for nearly four decades. It first appeared on air on the Light Programme on 30 January 1952 as The Countryside in January, running monthly until 1972 when it switched to a more or less quarterly review.

The Radio Timesdescribed it as a “nature diary” compiled by ornithologist Eric Simms, whose idea the programme was, indeed there had been a tryout of the idea the previous May called The London Countryside. An article in the magazine explained: “News of the events of the month comes to Mr Simms through his numerous contacts with naturalists and he hopes that titbits supplied by this ‘jungle telegraph,’ together with talks by visiting experts on natural history, farming, the weather, and country lore will make the new programme a lively commentary on many aspects of rural life”.  Simms continued to contribute to the series until 1987.  

Providing the linking narration was C. Gordon Glover (pictured above) who, apart from a spell in the mid 50s when David Lloyd James presented, was associated with the programme until just before his death in early 1975.

Glover is an interesting character. Born in Edinburgh in 1908 he was a writer and novelist who during the 1930s lived for a while in Majorca with his first wife Honor Wyatt. Honor would go on to work for the BBC, writing numerous programmes for BBC schools  during the 1940s. Glover himself also worked for the Corporation as a radio producer and then a scriptwriter and presenter.  He wrote a number of radio plays from the mid-40s on, including dozens for Children’s Hour, as well as scripts for series such as Journey into Romance and All Hale with Binnie and Sonnie Hale. During the war Glover was involved in a brief relationship with the friend of his estranged wife, the novelist Barbara Pym. In 1946 he married again to yet another novelist Modwena Sedgwick.  One of the two children from his first marriage was Julian Glover, a noted stage, film and TV actor.

The Countryside in...continued after Glover’s death in 1975 with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas presenting and with regular contributions from Bob Danvers-Walker, Martin Muncaster and actress Mollie Harris, best known as Martha Woodford in The Archers. Following the death of Vaughan-Thomas in 1987 Mollie Harris was the main presenter until the series was put out to pasture with The Countryside in Spring edition on 27 April 1991.

This edition, The Countryside in March, dates from Sunday 29 March 1964 when it went out on the Home Service just after the 1 pm. News. As well as Gordon Glover and Eric Simms you’ll hear contributions from Bill Douglas with a metrological report, gardener Albert Butler, ornithologist James Ferguson-Lees, Stanley Cramp, Vice President of the British Trust for Ornithology and writer Elizabeth Gray. Providing the introductory and closing announcement is Jimmy Kingsbury.  Producing this edition is Arthur Phillips who’d started the programme in 1952. He continued to oversee the series for 21 years and amongst his other credits were Holiday Hour and Motoring and the Motorist.

If you’re wondering what that opening poem is, it’s Easter by Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Gather gladness from the skies,

Take a lesson from the ground,

Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes,

And a Spring-time joy have found,

Earth throws Winter's robes away,

Decks herself for Easter Day.

The theme used for these countryside programmes was, for many years, a piece originally composed by Lambert Williamson for the 1950 Home Service series Northern Rivers. It’s played by the BBC Northern Orchestra conducted by Charles Groves. 

And finally I’m happy to report that I’ve passed a copy of this recording on to the Glover family to be enjoyed once again by Gordon's son Julian and his grandson Jamie.

Matheson was effectively head-hunted by Reith in September 1926 to front the Talks Department, the first woman to be appointed to a senior role at the BBC.  During her brief 5-year tenure she effectively set the template for speech radio on authored talks (a style of broadcasts that has now all but disappeared with the exception of Radio 3’s The Essay), news and political coverage and debate and discussions on literature, history, social conditions, home economics, farming and so on. The Week in Westminster, started by Matheson in 1929 and still heard today, albeit under a much changed format on Saturday mornings, remains a testament to her pioneering work. Broadcasting, she saw as “a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of shrinking the earth’s surface.”  

It was Matheson’s entrée into the life of London’s cultural and intellectual elite that helped secure her BBC employment; she’d first encountered Reith at an event in March 1926. During World War I she worked for the secret service – recruited at Oxford where she’d been a home student, as women weren’t yet recognised as bona fide students at that time - where she was posted to Rome. She left her role as political secretary to Nancy Astor MP to take up her job with the BBC, then based at Savoy Hill. Lady Astor would, in time, contribute to some of the early editions of The Week in Westminster. 

The nature of speech radio was still being developed under Matheson and she was keen to get the key thinkers and doers of the time to speak to the nation, to help shape the way that scripted talks were written for the medium and how they would best be delivered to sound both natural and authoritative without being stilted and lecturing. Her remit also included adult education and news, when the small news section created under Education moved to Talks in 1927. Matheson would commission Philip Macer-Wright, formerly of the Westminster Gazette, to report on how news presentation could be improved at a time when the BBC was still relying on re-writing Reuters-provided bulletins.

One aspect of Hilda’s life that the puritanical Reith would surely have objected to – although apparently it was something of an open secret at Savoy Hill - was her relationship with author Vita Sackville-West. She’d met Sackville-West in December 1928 when she came into the studios to speak with Hugh Walpole on the subject of The Modern Woman (though she had already broadcast some talks earlier in the 1928 on poetry and her travels in the Middle East). Correspondence from Hilda to Vita, of which almost 100 letters survive, also feature in The Battle of Savoy Hill.  

What is also interesting, certainly from a current perspective, is that Matheson’s resignation was also seen as useful to Reith and the BBC over perceived left-wing bias in some of the talks’ subject matter and choice of speakers. The October 1931 General Election had led to the formation of a National Government under Ramsey MacDonald but the bulk of its support came from the Tories and there was growing criticism of the BBC in the right-wing press. Thus her leaving the Corporation helped Reith to be seen to be stamping out any perceived left-wing bias.

After leaving the BBC Hilda continued to be involved in radio. Nancy Astor tried to persuade her to become a BBC Governor but she declined. Instead she became a radio critic and columnist for The Observer and Weekend Review, wrote a book on the subject (Broadcasting , Thomas Butterworth Ltd, 1933) and at the outbreak of World War II became the Director of the JBC (Joint Broadcasting Committee) founded to “promote international understanding  by means of broadcasting”. She also worked for Baron Hailey in 1937-38 on producing The African Survey, eventually taking over the bulk of the work, for which she received an OBE. By now she was living with the poet Dorothy Wellesley – her relationship with Sackville-West had ended in 1931. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease Hilda did not survive an operation to remove part of her thyroid gland and she died in October 1940 aged just 52.

The BBC marked her passing in the annual BBC Handbook adding that “it was her zeal, and her ability to impart it to the wide circle of her acquaintance, that started broadcast talks and discussions, and began that process of bringing to the microphone the celebrity, the expert, the thinker, and the man-in- the-street which has continued since in ever-widening circles”.

Until just a few years ago Hilda Matheson’s pioneering role in radio broadcasting was largely overlooked. The 6’6” frame of John Reith tends to loom large over the pre-war BBC narrative. In 2018-2019 the BBC ran the Hilda Matheson Woman into Leadership regional development programme. Just last month even MI5 recognised her role in that organisation and with the BBC as part of their LGBT+ History Month events.

The Battle of Savoy Hill written by Jill Waters is broadcast on Monday to Friday this week on BBC Radio 4 at 12.04 and repeated at 22.45 and then available to listen again on BBC Sounds. Hilda Matheson is played by Romola Garai, Vita Sackville-West by Nancy Carroll, John Reith by Derek Riddell, Harold Nicholson and R.S. Lambert (a producer in the Adult Education section and the first editor of The Listener) by Richard Goulding and Lionel Fielden (a Talks producer) by Simon Paisley Day.  The narrator is Clare Higgins.

Hilda Matheson 1888-1940

Notes:

(1) When Hilda joined the BBC as a Talks Assistant (i.e. producer) in September 1926 the Talks division was part of the Education Department under the stewardship of John Stobart but was hived off in January 1927 under Hilda’s management. Broadcast talks were an early feature of BBC schedules with the first given on 23 December 1922 and the second on 27 January 1923 on the unlikely subject of How to catch a tiger.

 (2) The changes in the structure of the Talks department and the role of Education and News are too lengthy and involved to reiterate here. For more on this early BBC history see The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless 1927-1939 by Asa Briggs and A Social History of British Broadcasting, Volume I 1922-1939 by Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff.

(3) Hilda Matheson’s successor as Director of Talks was her deputy Charles Siepmann. He was followed in 1936 by Richard Maconachie and in 1941 by George Barnes (later the first controller of the Third Programme and a couple of years later as the grandly titled Director of the Spoken Word which included the Talks division). Succeeding Barnes in 1946 was R.A. (Tony) Rendall and following his retirement on ill health grounds was Mary Somerville from 1950 to 1956. Former talks producer John Green was Controller, Talks (Sound) from 1956 to 1961 when it was merged with Current Affairs Talks under the management of J.A. Camacho. In 1972 it moved again to become part of Talks and Documentaries headed by George Fischer. Under Director-General John Birt it was finally subsumed into the mighty News and Current Affairs Directorate in 1987. The External Services also had an Overseas Talks department and a separate European Talks Department.   

(4) To read more about Hilda Matheson there are a couple of excellent books. Stoker: the Life of Hilda Matheson is a biography written by Michael Carney whilst Kate Murphy’s Behind the Wireless looks at the role of women at the BBC in the pre-war years. There’s also the fictionalised story of plucky BBC secretary turned Talks producer Maisie Musgrave as told in Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford in which Reith and Matheson are main characters.

The genesis of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue goes back to 1969 after the conclusion of series seven of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again(it came back for a final eighth series in the summer of 1972). Writer and performer Graeme Garden was already committed to working on BBC2's Broaden Your Mind with Tim, Bill and Jo from ISIRTA. This was followed by The Goodies (starting in late 1970) and scripts for LWT's Doctor in the House(also 1970), Doctor at Large (1971) and Doctor in Charge (1972).  

Despite all the tv work Graeme was still keen to work on radio and was thinking of recreating something that brought the fun and anarchy of ISIRTA but without the chore of script writing. A comedy panel game looked like it could provide the answer. Just a Minute and My Word! were already very popular and others had come and gone such as The Tennis Elbow Foot Game(1966-68) - which may have provided the spark for Clue's Word for Word round - The Clever Stupid Game and You Don't Say(both 1970).

But could Gyles Brandreth have provided the inspiration for Clue? It's possible. In 1971 Graeme was a panellist on eight editions of A Rhyme in Time, a comedy word game with a poetry twist in which the other panellists, consisting of Cyril Fletcher, Caryl Brahms and June Whitfield, would "converse in verse".  The programme was devised and introduced by Gyles Brandreth. Just seven months later Clue came on air

Graeme discussed his ideas for a new show with producer David Hatch and together they worked up a format and recorded a pilot. Getting the green light for a series the pilot aired on 11 April 1972 and 12 episodes followed, though for these Hatch was busy elsewhere and John Cassels produced. Early editions were, according to Garden "rather messy and self-indulgent". It seemed that completely dispensing with some scripted elements and preparation didn't work. He continues: "In the first series it was all virtually ad-libbed - that was my mistake, and since then we've all learned a bit more about doing panel games. We know that the audience like it a) because you appear to be witty, and b) because you appear to be put 'on the spot' and have to sweat. And those are two different things; if you've got to make up, say, a calypso, it's almost impossible to do that on the spot, and so you spend an hour or so beforehand writing it ... but the team's increasing experience, particularly in knowing which sections they should prepare, has led to a much improved control over the show."     

From my own ISIHACarchive comes this recording, in fact it's the first one I ever recorded, of the Christmas 1980 special so you get an extra 15 minutes or so. It features all the regulars from that time and the producer is Geoffrey Perkins.

The passage of time has taken its toll on Clue participants with the deaths of series regulars Willie Rushton, Humphrey Lyttelton, Jeremy Hardy, Tim Brooke-Taylor, writer Iain Pattinson and, just a few weeks ago, Barry Cryer. But the formula is still proving durable as it marks its golden anniversary and recent series with a host of new voices to the programme are just as funny with plenty of laugh out loud moments.

Radio 4 will be marking the programme's anniversary this Saturday in an edition of Archive on 4 at 8 pm. 50 Years Without a Clue is presented by Greg James.    

Notes:

Quotes cited in From Fringe to Flying Circus by Roger Wilmut (Eyre Methuen 1980). For more on the programme's history see The Clue Bible by Jem Roberts (Preface 2009)

The Tennis Elbow Foot Game was devised by Norman Hackforth (the 'Mystery Voice' on Twenty Questions) and produced by David Hatch (series 1) and Bill Worlsey (series 2). Regular panellists were Sheila Hancock, Olga Franklin, Paul Jennings, Fenella Fielding, Hackforth himself and Max Robertson as the umpire. Series 1 October to December 1966 (13 episodes) on the Home Service. Series 2 November 1967 to May 1968 (26 episodes) on Radio 4. It then transferred to BBC2 for a series of 12 episodes July to October 1968.    

The Clever Stupid Gamewas devised and chaired by Robin Ray. John Cleese was a panellist on one of the 8 episodes broadcast on Radio 4 May to July 1970.

You Don't Say was devised by Jimmy Thompson, Johnny Whyte and Nicholas Parsons and chaired by Cyril Fletcher. A 12 episode series produced by Alastair Scott Johnson was broadcast on Radio July to September 1970.

A Rhyme in Timewas broadcast over 8 episodes from July to September 1971. In this BBC blog Gyles Brandreth says there were two series, the first produced by David Hatch and the second by Simon Brett. I can only trace the one series with Brett producing. My guess is that an unbroadcast pilot was produced by Hatch.