Radio One More Time: Fun At One

It's the happy, happy sound
(Fun... at one)
Of Radio One

Perhaps one of the oddest, but tenacious, slots on Radio One was Fun At One. As the name suggests, it was an attempt to inject some "fun" at one o'clock in the afternoon. It's not entirely clear if this five minutes of official "fun" was intended to undermine the dj by implying that the rest of the time Radio One wasn't very much fun at all, or merely offered a chance to recalibrate our level of what the Radio One of the day saw as being "fun". It might also have been an attempt to balance out the 12.30 Newsbeat slot - offering a jelly and cream of light entertainment in return for the bread-and-butter of world affairs and a two minute interview with Owen Paul.

In this case, "fun" was actually defined "a substantial but unsatisfying chunk of an old comedy production". Since this came at a time when the network had managed to get through a decade and a half without making a single proper comedy programme, producers were forced to rummage back in the dusty cupboards of the Light Programme, undermining the cutting edge youth sounds by throwing in five minutes of hairy old comedy. I swear in 1983, they interrupted the latest chart run down to play ten minutes of a back episode of The Glums. Laugh? It was like giggling was still on the ration.

Incidently, Southern Sound took the concept of Fun At One, and based its entire Sunday afternoon programming around it, when the End of The Pier Show it promised the IBA when applying for the licence (live comedy and entertainment) was replaced by a more budget-friendly End of The Pier Show which consisted of Sean Bolger sticking on one of those commercial remakes of Hancock's Half Hour that were released on LP in the 1960s, and disappearing off for a Sunday Roast.

Of course, Adrian Juste made frequent calls on the BBC Record Library's spoken word section during his inexplicably long-running programme on the shows. Juste's role - we suspect awarded by himself - was to be the network's joker; having only a couple of hours to fill each week gave him plenty of time to prepare old comedy clips to sprinkle over his show the way firecrews cover blazes with foam. And, like a firecrew's foam, these would also drain all the oxygen away from the spark, too. Juste had two ways of destroying any comic potential in a piece - one way was to cut out one half of a two-hander, and fill the role of straight man himself (here, all his lines would be delivered in a "oh, I'm about to lose it in a minute" style which was one part Knockout-era Stuart Hall to two parts pre-eruption Mount St Helens); the other would be to try and skim out any preamble from a monologue, thus rendering little more than a punchline and a canned laugh.

When tiring of pre-recorded bits, rather than using the time to actually play records, Juste would instead resort to overlong shaggy dog stories. These, for some reason, he decided couldn't just be reduced to their punchline, even although they were just as "amusing" like that: I Left My Harp In Sam Plank's Disco. See?

Curiously, during Gary Davies' era of attempting to update lunchtimes on Radio One, dropping Fun At One merely opened up space for him to introduce a feature that involved a long shaggy dog story the punchline to which was a pun on a current pop song. It might have been no funnier than Ron Glum using Bisto to hide Pa Glum's parson's nose (allowing Ethel to visit him while Pa's toe was stuck in the bathtap), but at least it had a slightly more contemporary feel.

Still wasn't much fun, though.