ANTIQUE RECORDS ROADSHOW (mid 90s) First presented by ANDY KERSHAW, then MARK KERMODE. Usually came from a record fair with some relevant pop person in tow, eg Peter Hook in Manchester. People bring along weirdo collectables to be talked about, and get them played to the nation. Good examples being an obscure Marc Bolan record credited to 'Dib Cochran and the Earwigs', a Timothy Leary LSD instruction record and a unique acetate of Stones producer Glyn Johns singing Lady Jane with Brian Jones on sitar (possibly). BACKCHAT (1988-89) Another in R1's long line of "music magazine" shows (cf Studio B15, Walters Weekly, Soundbite), this late 80s effort was presented by the not-exactly-dream-team of LIZ KERSHAW and RO NEWTON. Also ONE MORE TIME, Sunday afternoon half-hour wrap-up of highlights from previous week from same era. THE CHRISTMAS PARTY Based on the misguided theory that, if you were alone on Christmas Day, listening to a tape of Mike Read giving DLT a box of pipecleaners would somehow make you feel better. Happily, the seething loathing was never far from the surface, the only saving grace of the whole debacle. "So, Steve Wright, having a good time? What's been your record of the year?" As the whole concept started to sink under the changing nature of the network, a last-ditch bid was made to save it by (this hurts to type) having the meal at Grey Gables. In Ambridge. This was in the darkest hours of The Archers (darker even than Walter Gabriel keeping an elephant on the village green) when they'd do anything to get a few column inches (Anneka Rice rebuilding the Village Hall kitchen was the thud at the very bottom) So not only did everyone have to pretend to like Simon Bates, but also pretend they were in a restaurant run by Jack Woolley. Who isn't real. The other side of this link up saw John Peel - supposedly at school with Robin Snell - visiting the village (strangely, the rest of the R1 DJs never made it down to The Bull) and sounding like a particualy poor impression of himself. Eddie Grundy, naturally, attempted to blag himself a Peel Session. Thank God this madness has stopped. FRONTLINE (1982-83) Bates-fronted weekly "young issues" magazine of an early evening, ie drugs, sex, Space Invaders, bodypopping, that sort of thing. See also MAILBAG from same era, Richard Skinner husbanding readers' letters out for a whole hour. KING IN NEW YORK (1979-84) Audaciously fancying himself as the network's answer to Alistair Cooke, gurning, baseball-capped, Genesis-discovering and all-purpose self-appointed "music industry expert" JONATHAN KING filed regular five-minute reports from the Big Apple on a Saturday afternoon in the early 80s. Idea later transferred to BBC2 for the annoyingly long-running Entertainment USA. THE MARY WHITEHOUSE EXPERIENCE (1989-90) Decent enough aural prelude to the sixth-form comedy fave of the day, cross-pollenating NEWMAN AND BADDIEL and PUNT AND DENNIS and originally broadcast to the somewhat limited audience still listening after Tommy Vance's rock show. This being the early 90s, the targets included the Gulf War, Twin Peaks, answering machines, the, er, common European currency and that Levi's ad "where the bloke on the motorbike got through reception, backed his bike carefully into the lift..." Reassuringly, there are probably enough cassettes still lying around to prove that dissolute novelist and anti-globalisation campaigner Rob Newman really did do a mean Ronnie Corbett. Theme was Jack To The Sound Of The Underground by Hithouse, natch. "Who's going to present Jim'll Fix It nowwwwwwwwww...?" NEWSBEAT News on Radio One usually cut straight to the point, presenting a quick run through of the headlines on the half-hour ("Radio Ooooooone... News!") frequently dwelling on the showbiz stories. Extended lunchtime and evening bulletins kicked off in 1973 with future Al-Fayed lackey and South East Today frontman LAURIE MEYER at the helm. BBC Radio head honcho MATTHEW BANNISTER started here in the 1980s. Could have done without the annoying banter with the DJ beforehand, though ("So Sybil, what are you going to have for us at 12.30?" "Well Gary, we'll have the latest news of the Hungerford massacre..." "Great!") Birt-era saw arrival of half-hour magazine at 5.30 ("News 90! With Sybil Ruscoe and Allan Robb!") in 1990. Oh, and not forgetting those travel reports ("Beep Beep! Beep Beep! Yeah!") PLAYGROUND (1976-82) Saturday morning pre-Junior Choice half-hour kiddies magazine. Short-straw drawer in chief was DAVID RIDER. Started with a load of kids all shouting out "Playground!" If you listened in five minutes early, you could hear all the R1 jingles ("It's the happy happy sound!") played one after the other, to "warm up" the transmitters, a dawn tradition they maintained until they went 24 hours in 1991. THE ROADSHOW (every summer) "Today, live from Morecambe Pleasure Beach, with Miiiiiiiike Reeeeead!" Resilient summer fixture, kickstarted by Fluff in the summer of 73, in which a bunch of massive trucks visit various old skool seaside towns - Minehead, Scarborough, Rhyl - with a R1 jock in tow to arse about between records. Audience participation most infamously included Bits And Pieces, in which four punters plucked out of the crowd had to identify as many Mel and Kim middle eights played in quick succession as possible. The winners of these ordeals received a Radio One Goody Bag - R1 mug, R1 car sticker, R1 pen, R1 iron-on denim patch, R1 "bug" and a R1 car sunstrip, reading The Happy Sound of Motoring on 275/285, as seen on many a Mark IV Cortina estate well into the early 90s. Unsurprisingly, Steve Wright became King of the Roadshows, with his gallery of hilarious comic characters. Smiley Miley, the supposed driver and "chirpy" second banana to the main jock, told everyone how far they'd driven, and handed out more Radio 1 tat. Then, come dusk, the trucks weighed anchor and trundled off to bring a ray of sunshine to the lives of another provincial resort. Margate, maybe. Or perhaps Southport. Who knows? ROADSHOW ADDENDUM The Radio One Fun Day at Mallory Park. Bay City Rollers on an island in the middle of a lake, with various pre-pubescent tartan terrors wading towards them before fainting and being rescued by members of the BBC scuba-diving club. Tony Blackburn zooming around the lake in a speedboat being driven by someone in a Womble outfit. Noel Edmonds was probably screeching around in an Escort Mexico. And not forgetting those typically-crazed R1 "themed ideas" for special shows. Ticket To Ryde - broadcasting live from the ferry to the Isle of Wight; Three Men In A Boat - Edmonds, Read and Gambaccini broadcasting live from, erm, a boat; In The Country - Read (again) doing his breakfast show from "the countryside", largely because Read-endorsed 80s chancers The Farmer's Boys had done a cover of Cliff's In The Country. ROUNDTABLE/SINGLED OUT (1970s-92) Juke Box Jury without the silly hooter, basically. Dependable format - get several pop pundits, plus a jury "foreman" selected from The One's jock roster to review the week's new releases. The blandness of the guests usually led to bland old opinions on bland old records, though. Two exceptions to the rule stick out from Mike Read's stint on Singled Out in the late 80s - Malcolm Maclaren being blithely offensive, calling ex-Prince proteges Wendy and Lisa "a couple of lesbians" who "don't care and just fuck about", and Yello's quixotic Dieter Meier describing Mike and The Mechanics' The Living Years (a song about Rutherford's dead dad), not entirely without reason, as "worse than the worst pornography". Became Roundtable again, before being axed, only to be semi-revived in the mid 90s by Cream-prose-style plagiarism sources Collins and Maconie, with music journos instead of pop pundits. Then that was scrapped, too. Hey ho. STAR WARS (1978) Summer holiday kiddie-bait, featuring most of the original cast reprising eyewidemaking lasercentric space opera but (and here's the central flaw) on the radio, unsatisfyingly chopped up into five minute daily chunks, with an omnibus on Saturday afternoons for the 80s repeat. An American radio production, you can still get it in beautiful crisp stereo in Smiths, along with similar Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi efforts, which the BBC never bothered to purchase. Idea revived, with a touch of irony, in the mid 90s when the Batman films were doing the rounds. STUDIO B15 (1981-83) Sunday afternoon music magazine, broadcast from, hey! Studio B15. Presented by the late ADRIAN LOVE. Show's content largely forgotten, except for a youthful STEPHEN FRY'S pastiche of Newsbeat, cunningly entitled Beatnews. THIRTY ONE DAYS IN MAY (1989-91) Month-long prizestravaganza, which, purely coincidentally you see, coincided with annual survey of radio ratings. Format thus - breakfast DJ of the time (usually Simon Mayo) would announce "cue record" at 8am, along with big prize of the day (usually a trip to go and see Michael Jackson in Bucharest). When the cue record played, all mayhem would break loose, as thousands of listeners grimly tried to get through (on 01 637 4343) to answer simple quiz questions. Plenty of Monkhouse-style suspense-baiting from 1FM's resident jocks. "So Linda, for a trip to go and see Simple Minds live in Houston, you're saying that their lead singer is Jim Kerr...[pause]...Linda, do you really want to see Simple Minds?...[pause]...well...I can tell you...[pause]...You! Are! A! Winner!" THIRTY YEARS OF NUMBER ONES (1990) Took over from the revived Pick Of The Pops in the Sunday lunchtime oldies slot in 1990, in which Fluff played every British and American number one from 1960 to 1990. On one memorable occasion, the years were USA 1960 and UK 1987, which led to Connie Francis and Marty Robbins going out on the same programme as Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body and Pump Up The Volume by M/A/R/R/S. TOP FORTY (1967-) "Sing Something Simple featured the Cliff Adams Singers and the Jack Emblow Quartet..." And with those heart-glowing words, a nation's teens pressed Rec and Play on their big brother's shiny silver Amstrad ghetto blaster, and prepared to create their very own Close Encounters Of The Chart Kind - albeit on a flaky, overused WH Smith C90. Back then, R1 was only allowed access to the FM airwaves on a Sunday afternoon for the Top 40 and on weeknights for John Peel*. Originally two hours long, it managed to cover the whole Top 40 by simply not playing the ones going down. Another key difference in those days was that the chart had been unveiled at 12:45pm the previous Tuesday by Dave Lee Travis or Gary Davies - depending on your generation, you could always spot clusters of Jam or Smiths fans loitering by the sixth form common room door, straining to hear if A Town Called Malice or Shoplifters Of The World Unite was the highest new entry. Originally fronted by ALAN FREEMAN, then mellow-voiced TOM BROWNE and the BATES, the Sunday afternoon countdown came into its own for Generation Cream in the early 80s with TONY BLACKBURN's tenure - Adam And The Ants! Toni Basil! Altered Images! He introduced the idea of playing every song in the Top 40, but getting them all in by playing two-thirds of each one, an idea eventually canned. Oh, and not forgetting the time he announced a new entry for a new band from Birmingham: "...with Planet Earth, this is Dur-run Dur-run". Then it was the turn of the man with pebble-dashed tonsils, TOMMY VANCE, to count down those hits - using an instrumental version of Men At Work's Down Under as backing music ("...at number 23, its The Lotus Eaters, with The First Picture Of You!"). In 1984 - the year the Top 40 Show was allowed to buck the network's ban on Frankie's Relax - competition hoved into view with ILR's The Network Chart Show, as David Kid Jensen weirdly morphed back from evening semi-alternative guru and Peel-endorsed rhythm pal to Capital housewives choice. By now, RICHARD SKINNER was charged with counting down the platters that matter, before the dreaded BRUNO BROOKES took the chair for the as-they-happened countdowns in the late 80s, with, for completeness' sake, MARK GOODIER in charge since 1995. More info here WALTERS' WEEKLY (1980s) Ba-ba-ba-dooby-da-whoo-whee! "Hi, fans!" Longtime Peel Show/Sessions producer, the late and legendary John Walters (who to his death regretted teaching The Slits how to tune their guitars properly), had his own arts-oriented hour at eight o'clock on Wednesday, linking featurettes on the jazz revival, the ragga invasion, the latest Fall-inspired ballet, etc etc with - quote - "The Magic Mingle-Mangle Music" (that is to say, the phrase "mingle mangle" chanted repetitively to the tune of the Twilight Zone theme). The word "offbeat" was invented for Walters. An acquired taste, but this whimsy could be fun. The format was revived in the mid 90s as SOUNDBITE with rotund Baker sidekick Danny Kelly at the helm. And then shelved again. Magic trousers, do your stuff! *Radio One was resolutely medium wave the rest of the time until 1988, when Bros helicoptered up and down the country switching on FM transmitters, relieving us of the test broadcasts featuring Adrian Juste being Adrian Juste. In 1991, they started only broadcasting on MW between 6am and 12am. Imagine being in your Fiat 127 on the M62 with just a MW radio. John Peel's show starts, and instantly fades out to be replaced with Bates on a tape loop telling us not to be such a cheapskate and get a new radio. Now what? Atlantic 252? Bollocks, switch off... When 1053 and 1089 were finally switched off, after Steve Wright's breakfast show one Friday morning in July 1994, they played a brilliant historical montage of R1 jingles. You'll have a tear in your eye by the end. Forming a queue at the Goodiemobile: Louis Barfe, Michael Binns, Simon, Robin Carmody, Kay Cotterill, Ben H, Chris Hughes, Cassandra J, Graham Kibble-White, Martin Lycett, Adrian Partington, Droog Robinson, Tim Unwin |
