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Horrible news tucked into the Mail today about Janice Long being mugged for her Echo And The Bunnymen backstage pass outside the BBC.
It happened at the end of September; a 51 year-old woman is due to appear in court in December.
So, we've actually made it through forty brief essays on Radio One, and what way more apt to finish than looking at some of the exits from the station?
The most famous, of course, would be DLT's "changes being made which go against my principles" on-air resignation - a move which might have been slightly braver had he not known he had only ten weeks left to run on his contract and Danny Baker was already measuring up for curtains.
Andy Kershaw's departure from Radio One similarly had an eye on remaining contracts - Andy Parfitt offered him an extra three months in May 2000, on the strict understanding that after that his slot was going to be turned into a dance show. Kershaw elected to not bother with a twelve week goodbye, and disappeared in a burst of Bhundu Boys and chat about the TT Races.
Lisa I'Anson's bemusing period filling in lunctimes with the observations such as her back announcement for Garbage's Only Happy When It Rains that "that's really odd, because I like it when it's sunny" was halted when she enjoyed herself during a Radio One Ibiza weekend to the point where she didn't turn up for her show.
The launch of Virgin 1215 proved a magnet for many of those who felt uncomfortable at being asked to play records that listeners under the age of 90 might enjoy. Gary Davies jumped ship, with a lot of nudge-nudging of a "I can't tell you where I'm going, but, oh, is it quarter past twelve already?" nature, while Tommy Vance also headed off to the perpetually reformatting AM rival.
Steve Wright supposedly quit when he tired of being told what records to play during his short-lived breakfast show - that would be "some" records, presumably, judging by the low number of tracks he usually managed to get in between the chatty bits, and his decision to join TalkRadio. (That, in itself, was a cause of some grief as the BBC maintained he still had three months contracted to them to work through.)
But perhaps there is one name, above all others, who should be remembered for his departure. Duncan Johnson, the first man to be dumped from Radio One, after just three months on air. Jordans crime? He was considered too old for the station. His age? A crinkly 29.
One last farewell: Janice Long, who failed to return from maternity leave. She later told the NME that, having been presenting a daily night-time show at the time she left to have the baby, management suggested on her return she downsize a little: "They asked if I could manage being a mother and presenting a half-hour programme every week." The show she was offered was Radio One's weekly round-up of its best bits - a podcast before podcasts were possible. Its name, of course, was Radio One More Time.
[Part of Radio One More Time]
As part of the BBC, Radio One has always struggled to justify its existence - mainly to people who felt that all the network did was play pop music (for some people, a waste of money in its own right) or duplicate the work done by the commercial radio sector (a common complaint even before the ILR network was completed, meaning that everyone had access to a Top 40 station; usually heard from someone who couldn't tell them the difference between John Peel and Johnny Vaughan's musical choices).
Radio One, clearly, needed to prove it was different and valuable in a way to critics who couldn't see that there was a difference between a radio giving a session to the Jesus And Mary Chain and one playing Rick Astley seven times a day. An easy way of doing this, of course, was to promote Social Awareness. Of, you know, things.
My first actual intersection with one of the network's big campaigns was when I sent off for a Which Way Now? pack - a plastic folder, crammed with helpful information on choosing your options wisely, and a colour picture of Peter Powell. It arrived too late to actually help me choose my options, and I suspect had I followed its advice I would have wound up doing Geography in the portakabin classroom with Young Mr Curtis rather than History in the bottom of the C-Block with Mr Nicholls, which would have been rather a mistake.
More useful was the Art-E-Fax campaign on Janice Long's show, which although smaller in scope (not breaking in to programming every five minutes across the day) was much more useful. It was, seriously, the first time anyone had suggested to me that working in what we're now expected to term the "creative industries" was something you could seriously aspire to rather than the sort of pipe dream which would see you "starving in a garret". This was back when there were only just four TV networks, four national radio networks and none of that internet business; schools career teachers tended to rely on "bakery or army" as providing 'career choice'. It was just the sort of encouragement I needed; without it, I suspect by now I would be a very, very rich baker. And miserable.
The more usual social action stuff would be what you'd expect - endless campaigns about the dangers of drugs, and AIDS, and getting AIDS while taking drugs. To be fair to the commercial sector, this sort of accessible advice, delivered by djs and tucked between pop songs, wasn't the sole preserve of Radio 1; ILR stations used to do it a lot, too, and for much the same reasons. Partly a desire to be of genuine assistance to their listeners, but mostly because it made good sense for their survival - a promise of community action was essential to persuading the IBA or the Radio Authority to choose your franchise bid. This might seem a cynical viewpoint, but the way the larger commercial stations dropped their in-house teams working on such material as soon as licence terms were made more fluid in the late 90s would suggest conviction was less motivating than the desire to appear a good corporate citizen.
It's not recorded if Simon Bates saved more people from drug misuse than his programme drove to drink.
[Radio One More Time]
Travelling through space and time with the mingle-mangle music
John Walters is, of course, remembered as John Peel's producer, the man who had to "ring up Mrs. X and ask if her Overlord wanted to come on the programme." He also was a member of the Alan Price Set, scoring a top ten hit in his own right. But he also had another role - that of Radio One's arts correspondent.
Sort of arts correspondent. Presumably on the basis that he turned up at the studios carrying a paper you had to fold to read on the tube, John Walters was assigned the job of going to galleries and other events, and reporting back for the audience. Originally, he did this in a stand-alone programme, Walter's Weekly, in a slot which created a no-man's land between Night-time and Daytime programming. When this timeslot disappeared as part of a schedule shake-up, he became a roving reporter for Janice Long's show, delivering a Tuesday night Walter's Week slot, and a Thursday pop papers review. At the next schedule shake-up, when management created a buffer between night-time and daytime, Walters Weekly was revived for a short while. The final programme promised there was going to be another series, but it never happened before Walters retired.
Sort of arts correspondent. There were reports from openings - often enlivened by the presence of Quentin and Dave, respectively the Critic's critic and the People's critic, who sat on his shoulders whispering into his ears, in much the same way small angels and devils would attempt to influence the behaviour of characters in comics. Walters' great strength as an art critic was that he could understand the multiple complex levels being unravelled by Quentin, while retaining sympathy for Dave's view that a kid of three could do better.
But, generally, Walters used his time for discoursing on things he found interesting. There was much about the Archers - including his journey on an Archers themed tour where the coach visited places that, obviously, weren't in the made-up Borsetshire:
They'd say 'there's the cathedral where David and Sophie are going to get married in a few weeks - and you'd think, no, no it's not, that's Salisbury... a milkfloat overtook the coach at one point and the woman behind me said 'that'll be Mike Tucker' - and you just think, no, no, don't do their job for them...
once even composing a poem calling for more Grundy action in Ambridge, bemoaning how it's
It's Archers, Archers, all through the week
(Looks like Kenton will be up before the beak)
Then there were the "is it me" pieces, about breaking wind in apparently empty breakfast rooms only to catch the eye of a waitress who had been hiding round the corner, or being offered a slice of hot buttered something, or trains being full of screeching infants:
People stay at home trying for babies, then as soon as they're successful, they start to come out again, taking their babies to places where I am...
It's hard to disagree with a man who sees a sign outside a pub reading "Families Welcome" as a warning rather than an advertisement.
Then there were the frequent not-really-covert plugs for his arts series on BBC2's opt-out North-Eastern service, Northern Lights (or "ahem-hem-hem Northern Lights") and the obsession with the lack of people visible from the train when it went through Riddlesdown. Riddlesdown - City of the Dead spawned a feature in its own right, where Walters would take up the challenge of other towns to be similarly depopulated.
Much as we loved both iterations of Walter's Weekly, and the second's multi-tracked human brass band theme tune, it was the time he spent on the Janice Long's show which worked the best. Even the most natural raconteur works best with an audience, and Long's willingness to corpse on air made for a great partnership.
John Walters had the knack of turning the small print of daily life into wonderful stories; it's a pity his retirement proved so cruelly short at a time when he was available to other broadcasters to turn in work which walked the dangerous tightrope between whimsy and student-revue standard observational comedy.
We never did find out what happened to Alan, the furry soap cat, though.
[Radio One More Time]
Listen... and win!
One of the all-time great radio competitions, originally heard on Peter Powell's nightly teatime programme before being spun out to support an entire hour or so on Friday nights, filling the gap in the schedule left by the axing of Roundtable. It was a really, really simple premise: a caller would be on the phone, and a record would start playing, accompanied by a slow countdown of "ten... nine... eight...". After enough of the introduction had been got through for the caller to identify the track, they'd call out the name excitedly, and the countdown would stop. The caller would then be rewarded for their ability to recognise a song played seven or eight times a day on Radio One by being given as much of the top ten as the countdown had left to run.
Younger readers will just have to be assured that, back then, getting even three or four seven inch singles was a prize akin, in modern terms, to an X Box and half-a-dozen pair of training shoes. It just was. You had to go into town and fork over lots of money for them songs, whereas nowadays, of course, you could probably download the entire Top 75 in less time than it would take Peter Powell to count backwards from ten.
The only flaw in basing an entire programme on this, of course, was that after the caller had got the song right, the usual social niceties of "a few hellos" and "anyone else who knows me" had be done over the top of the record. During Janice Long's helming of the Friday night programme, Janice's chatty style, coupled with the larger number of contestants and consequent increased number of people getting to 'one' before identifying Like A Virgin by Madonna meant that while a lot of record were played, hardly any music was actually heard.
Janice Long and Peter Powell, besides having shared the Record Race format, did spend a very brief time as the Sonny and Cher of Radio One - a pairing that, in today's terms, would have been on a par with Edith Bowman actually dating Colin Murray.
The best Radio One competitions were the ones which were built on some sort of knowledge of current chart music - supposedly the network's raison d'etre in its first two or three decades. The weekly 'predict the top three' write-in was always fun: actually challenging, impossible to cheat on, simple to understand the rules and requiring actual skill and judgement. Except when Bryan Adams was at number one, of course.
[Radio One More Time: Radio 1 at 40]
Big news from Radio 2: Next month there's going to be a late-night reshuffle, with Mark Radcliffe moving forward from 10.30 to 8pm. And, in a bemusing move, being teamed-up with Stuart Maconie, presumably in case the extra two hours a week proves a little much for him.
MediaGuardian suggest this is a "move into primetime" - although being set up to compete with evening telly makes the eight o'clock slot seem less Prime time; indeed, defending the knock-on move of specialist musical shows into the later slots, Radio 2 points out the audience is larger at 10.30 than at 8.00.
Janice Long is a loser in the new schedule, with her midnight slot turning into a midnight-thirty slot (give it a few years, and she'll be back on in daylight.)
Steve Lamacq is also getting a regular slot on the station - we think this will make him the first person to have a regular show on Radio 2 and Radio 1 at the same time, and certainly the first person to be on 6,2 and 1.
