Radio One More Time: Goodbye

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.

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Radio One More Time: We can't play this

Much of what we think we know about what Radio One would, or wouldn't play, is reflected through myths and urban legends. The BBC, of course, maintains that it's not in the business of banning records, but merely suggests producers think more carefully about whether they should play them or not.

The pinnacle of not-exactly-banned records, of course, is land inhabited by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. After several weeks of playing Relax quite happily, one morning Mike Read happened to hear the lyrics. Spluttering tea from his TeaHee mug, he proclaimed it "overtly obscene" and pledged to ban it forthwith. It's never been clear why, if the song was so overt in its obscenity, he'd managed to spin it quite a few times before noticing; but the rest of the BBC duly fell into line, helping Frankie slide up the long shaft of the Top 40, and leaving Top of the Pops feeling unable to play the number one single.

We say the rest of the BBC; as Number One gleefully pointed out, not only was the then-newcomer Janice Long still playing Relax on her Saturday night show, but she was choosing the Sex Mix.

It's not always sex, of course: advertising can also see music banished from the network. Earlier this year, of course, there was that nasty attempt to try and pass off a slogan for some sort of hair product as a single; the manufactured band, Shocka, were rumbled and kicked off the airwaves. Oddly, though, Robin Beck's Diet Coke ad was able to find airtime despite being little more than an extended commercial soundtrack. First Love, true, didn't mention Coke; but then Style Attract Play didn't mention its hair product in the lyrics. It gets rather confusing.

Back when Doctor Hook released The Cover Of Rolling Stone, BBC executives nixed the very idea of playing the track - advertising Rolling Stone? The very idea. A group of pluggers, though, realised that Radio One in those days had no trouble pushing the Radio Times (you'll recall the "it's out today... the new Radio Times" jingle being a daytime staple back before competition in the listings markets meant they could no longer get away with it). So a recording session was hastily arranged, with the pluggers bellowing "Radio Times" every time "Rolling Stone" up in the lyrics.

The first Iraq war also shook some tracks off the airwaves - Carter's Bloodsports For All was deemed unsuitable for broadcast - although the chances of any daytime show making space for a song about bullying in the forces would surely have been slight, even during peace time. Massive Attack managed to keep on the radio, though, by the simple expedient of dropping the word "Attack" from their name for duration of hostilities. Kind of like when they took the Liver Birds down during World War Two, it's unlikely it fooled anyone but the sense of fake sacrifice was considered important.

Ten years ago, Diana Spencer's failure to use a seatbelt led to a sludge of instrumental, empty music pouring out of Radio One. Funnily enough, the only letter I ever had read out on Feedback was during the early 90s, when I asked if it was true that the death of a royal (we were all betting on the Queen Mother going first, of course) would lead to a period of funereal music on all networks. A BBC executive denied that was the plan; September 1997 proved that to be a half-truth - it might not have quite been funereal, but we did come close to death by ambience.

One small break in this po-faced parade, though, was Jo Whiley, who slipped There Is A Light That Never Goes Out onto her show. Whether we'd have got more apt-but-awkward songs during the week, we never found out, as Jo went off sick shortly afterwards.

Our favourite story about Radio One's tolerance for songs also features The Smiths. At the time of Shoplifters Of The World Unite, John Walters used his diary slot to tell Janice about the meeting convened to decide if the track was acceptable for daytime play. In the end, the pro-Morrissey vote carried the day, but only after convincing stragglers the repeated mantra of "hand it over, hand it over" meant the song was to be understood as an injunction to shoplifters to give back their ill-gotten gains.

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Radio One More Time: A King In New York

Considering that much of its daily business is related to an artform born in the United States, the modern Radio One doesn't bother itself overmuch with what happens in America. Oh, sure, Newsbeat might keep a watching eye on the Kanye West - Fifty Cent battle, but these days the actual detail of the American charts are of no interest to the station.

It wasn't always so, of course: right through the 1980s, Paul Gambaccini would pop-up, week-in, week-out, filling Saturday afternoon with a run-down of what was doing well in America. Despite Gambaccini's enthusiasm for the music, and his natural skills as a broadcaster, he never shone, being forced to work with one of the most depressing source materials known to man. The Billboard Hot 100 was as dull then as it is today, and you'd find yourself sitting through an awful lot of music inappropriately filed as "radio-friendly rock" to get to anything even as appetising as a Bangles or a Go-Go or a Til Tuesday.

That the drabness wasn't Gambo's fault was shown when he got the chance to break free from the chart chains - sitting in for holidaying jocks, or hosting The Other Side of the Facts, the bizarre spin-off from his Rock God Hagiography series for Channel 4, The Other Side of the Tracks. This Sunday afternoon confection, co-presented by his Guiness Hit Singles colleague Tim Rice, was little more than an illustrated Did You Know...; the atomic trivia-powered brains of the pair lifting the programme way above the sort of well-worn factoid that you'd get on the Steve Wright in the Afternoon show.

There was another regular slot dedicated to Americana around the same time, too: A King In New York. Probably the shortest programme ever to get a regular slot on Radio One, this was the pop culture answer to Letter From America, with Jonathan King taking the role of the essayist. We'd love to know how many BBC producers it took to persuade him the first word of the title should be "a" and not "the".

It's worth recording that, with his knowledge and passion for all things American, King's weekly short could actually stand shoulder to shoulder with Alistair Cook's and was much more than a simple radio precursor of Entertainment USA. Indeed, the decision to end the programme came from King himself rather than any negative feedback from audiences - with a typically self-aggrandising flourish, in the last programme King explained that he was travelling around the world so much, either he'd have to give up the programme altogether or change its name weekly to reflect the fabulous locale in which he found himself at time of recording. To the audible relief of the typesetters at the Radio Times, he chose the former route.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Keeping It Peel

You can't talk about Radio One without mentioning John Peel, in much the same way that you can't mention Peel without him being seen in the context of surviving on Radio One. For most of his time on the network, Peel functioned as the network's conscience. Nobody likes their conscience, of course, because without it, we could all live like we were in a video game shooting and screwing to our black heart's content. But we're also aware that without it, we'd probably end up in serious trouble. Like, being pelted with rocks and condemned in the tabloids, at the very least.

So it was with Peel: happily playing his music in a series of unlovely slots, as controllers knew that - although giving his six hours to someone a bit more showbiz might bring a listening boost - while Peel was somewhere not too close to dawn, they could always point and demonstrate their commitment to new music and supporting rock that would otherwise be largely ignored.

Peel's programme was, for the network, like going to church at Christmas - the bare minimum non-believers can do in case they one day need to explain themselves to Saint Peter.

His death, then, was something of a shock to the system. It's not so much that you wouldn't invent the Peel programme if you started from scratch, it's more that if you did create it, you wouldn't bother to pitch it to Radio One. So, what was the network to do?

It came up with the idea of Keeping It Peel, some sort of promise that John would function as the station's Saint Christopher medal. From this day forth, Radio One would be Peelie.

The first act of Keeping It Peel was to replace his show with three programmes under one banner, One Music, with the three presenters, Rob Da Bank, Ras Kwame, Huw Stephens and Rob Da Bank each taking a chunk of the sort of thing that Peel did under their belt. All three are excellent presenters, and all three shows are stuffed with delights, but this very Balkanization of musical styles suggested that somehow, the point of what made John Peel's shows different - the idea of there not being any genre-tramlines to keep within - had been badly missed.

Next came the big, showy event in honour of a quiet, shy man. The suggestion was that this was to be Radio One's equivalent of the Reith Lectures; a focus for continuing the founding father's work. And in year one, it was a fitting tribute. Last year - year two - it had already shrunk somewhat and had the atmosphere of an anniversary meal for a couple heading for divorce: everything was booked, all the elements for the evening was there, but a sense of going through the motions hung above the night.

This year, it's shrunk even further, and been co-opted into the Electric Proms, although you can still submit details of a gig you might want to do, to. And, as part of the 40th Birthday celebrations, Elijah Wood is presenting a programme called Keeping It Peel. This isn't totally inappropriate - Wood had been lined up as a guest host to cover what turned out to be Peel's final holiday - but the attaching of a Hollywood name to the Peel show demonstrates how far from "Keeping It Peel" the network has drifted.

Clearly, Colin Murray is seen as being a sort-of the 2007's John Peel. But we know in our hearts that he's just keeping it Campbell.

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Radio One More Time: Johnny Beerling

Probably the most famous of all Radio One's controllers would be Matthew Bannister, who not only broke cover by rebuilding the network in public in the mid-1990s, but then went on to present radio progammes as well, most notably for Five Live. Andy Parfitt, the current boss, has also attracted attention - he's been handed the BBC's Teen Tsar job, which recreates the original problem his network had (the assumption that 'teenagers' radio' and 'pop radio' must be the same thing.)

But, for us, Johnny Beerling remains the personification of a Radio One boss, managing to be just that vital distance from his audience to give the sense of a proper, well-meaning but at-sea, management figure. Bannister you could imagine sitting down sipping a rum and coke at a Nirvana gig; Beerling, forever, occupied a similar mental position to that of Jeffrey Fairbrother at Maplins: somehow finding himself organising fun despite a built-in detachment.

Two Beerling incidents fix him in our minds. The first was his decision to not play The Boiler by Rhoda Dakar and the Specials, explaining that if you took the screaming out at the end, it was "useless" as a warning about rape, but if you left the screams in, it was unpleasant to listen to. He never, as far as I can recall, insisted that all songs played on daytime Radio One offered warnings about rape, nor explained how pleasant a song about rape should actually be to make it onto his network.

The other golden Beerling moment was when, after someone pointed out that there were no women on Radio One during daylight hours, was to claim that "listeners don't like to listen to women's voices." He did relent a little towards the end of his reign, although whether because he changed his mind, or simply because he thought on medium wave the audience couldn't tell, was unclear.

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Radio One More Time: The Beatles A to Z

Every DJ likes to have a big, regular feature which defines their show. They cheerfully assume that people count the minutes down to the slot's appearance, just awaiting the jingle announcing it.

Normally, though, they're just not very good. Who can forget - without assistance from a fully qualified doctor - Bruno Brookes' "Misheard Lyrics". This shared the idea behind the Weekend Guardian's Come Again column, and KissThisGuy.com, of inviting people to share lyrics they'd not heard properly. Trouble was, what Brookes lacked in subtlety he made up for in a willingness to bludgeon his audience repeatedly over the head by playing the snatch of song again, and again, and again. If you didn't think it sounded like Simon Mayo's name appeared in La Bamba on first play, by the sixteenth time in a row it didn't sound like anything at all other than a noise, like when you say the word "cymbal" over and over until it stops having any meaning at all.

Then there was Paul Burnett's Soundalikes. This was based - he would tell us every week - on a computer prediction that all possible permutations of music would run out by 2000, leaving us facing a world full of soundalikes. He never said exactly what computer this was - and, clearly, it failed to take in pisspoor remakes by the likes of Atomic Kitten into account when doing its number crunching - but he still managed to spin a write-in "I think this song sounds like this one" feature out of it for months.

The most audacious long-running feature, though, has to be Mike Smith's Beatles A to Z. When he first appeared on the network, doing weekend mornings, he kicked off this trawl through the Lennon and McCartney songbook, doing nothing more than taking every song the Beatles ever recorded, and working through them, two in a show, in alphabetical order. The Beatles, of course, recorded hundreds of bloody songs, and he was still working his way through the catalogue when he shifted to a daily programme. Bravely, he ploughed on, like a party host still desperately trying to keep guests interested in a game of Trivial Pursuit in the face of general indifference.

Finally, he made it to You've Got To Hide Your Love Away. Just as the nation was breathing again, he then announced what we'd been fearing: A Rolling Stones A to Z. We suspect this one was allowed to drop quietly by the wayside.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: 1FM

Every week, tucked in the corner of the radio listings in Radio Times was a tantalising mystery item. We say "every week", although to be honest we only ever bought the Radio Times at Christmas, so we take it on faith that it was always there:

Radio 1/2 VHF.

This strange hybrid network appeared to consist entirely on "as Radio 1" and "as Radio 2", but every so often would actually feature entirely separate programmes, all of its own.

As I got older, the truth became clearer - Radio One and Radio Two shared a VHF network, with the signal switching between the two networks at pre-arranged points; this listing merely told fancy Dans with stereo radios which service would be broadcasting in what Bruno Brookes would always insist was "fantastic stereo" at any point in the day. Sometimes, when Radio 2 was entertaining evening sports broadcasts, the VHF channel would adopt a third persona, carrying the displaced music programming of Radio 2.

Even as I got older, though, I still couldn't quite work out why this state of affairs existed - if Radio One was the nation's favourite, why didn't it get an FM network of its own? And even if it had to share, why did the more popular network only get a couple of hours every day? At the end of the day, too. Now, I love the irony that Radio One would wait all day for the magic stereophonic transmitter, only wresting control just as John Peel's show came on at 10pm. Perfect aural reproduction, just in time for the Bogshed session.

Eventually, of course, Radio One slowly got its own network. Way too slowly, in fact, as the staggered switch-on seemed to run on for about two years - there is nothing more nonplussing than listening in a place firmly stuck on 1053/1089 as Philip Schofield excitedly turned on FM transmitter after FM transmitter.

In the end, though, the FM coverage was complete - The Stereo Sequence changing its name to the Saturday Sequence to indicate that, now, at last, even the Early Breakfast show was coming out of both speakers and stereo was no longer such a big deal. Although, having said that, every jingle was re-recorded to stress this was now Stereo Radio One. And, come to think of it, they changed the name of the network to 1FM ("formidable One FM", as John Peel would always have it) until, after a couple of years, they quietly changed it back.

But that wasn't the end of switchover madness. Oh, no: Thatcher had decided that simulcasting was a waste of the scarce national resource of radio frequencies. While local radio panicked and launched a slew of Gold Stations to make good use of their AM channels - a ruinously expensive exercise which doubled their costs without increasing audiences, leading to the mess of mergers and networking which effectively killed off the commercial radio sector - the BBC handed back their duplicate AM wavelengths. After a series of warnings, and a weaning process which saw the transmitters first closing down over night before going altogether, Radio One left its spiritual 275-285 home to make way for Talk Radio UK.

Worse, Radio One's original 247 frequency, which had been home to Radio 3 and Test Match Special, would become Virgin 1215.

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Radio One More Time: Sound City

What a surprise when, emerging from Pilgrim Street in Liverpool, my path was crossed by John Peel, his son and a couple of their friends. That, in itself, wasn't so very strange, but four paces behind them was a bunch of starstruck Scousers, trailing along in mute admiration. Peel was in town as part of Sound City, one of those events where Radio One would just pitch up and take command of a town's music scene for a week. (There was also One Live, and the shorter lived Radio Comes To Town, where the other networks would also join in.)

When Sound City was in Liverpool, everyone wanted a piece of it. The faltering annual local music festival tried to cast itself as senior partner to the Radio One festivities; a Radio One sponsored seminar about music on the radio was effectively hijacked and turned into an attack on Crash FM's betrayal of its original supporters (the BBC had the bad luck to turn up just after Bernie Connor had been dumped from Crash for caring more about music than building a radio brand) and, for a few nights, the Liverpool Lomax's two-story L2 was at the height of its powers, as audiences crashed from the downstairs stage to the larger upstairs room for a continuous live broadcast.

(Arguably, of course, the L2's bigger claim to fame would have been the time it played a key role in the poorly-conceived denouement of the Brookside Musgrave rape storyline, but by that time watching Brookside had become such a parochial affair, it's unlikely anyone noticed.)

Even for a city that swaggers like Liverpool, the appearance of one of the national networks in your midst, broadcasting pretty much all of its evening output from the place, does make you feel special. We'll bet even during One Live In Nottingham, the city felt like it was at the very heart of the world of music.

There is, simply, is no better way to watch Marine Research than over the shoulder of John Peel.

And - unlike the time Any Questions was at Riverside College - nobody cut the cables connecting the event to the transmitters.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Blue Jam

I can't see too well because I pawned my corneas

There was little truth in the claim that comedy was the new rock and roll - after all, it's not like comedians ever wake up, like rock stars, to discover bloated corpses floating in their swimming pools, is it? But, for a brief while, comedy did challenge pop as Radio One's stock-in-trade. Like one of Amos Brearley's short-lived obsessions, Radio One decided it was a comedy station, too.

Experience before the And it did have quite a claim to be doing it seriously, with a 9pm comedy slot which challenged Radio 4's 6.30 prominence in radio humour. And, with the likes of Radio Tip Top, also had as many duff shows as Radio 4 manages. But when it was hitting, it was a thing of beauty - The Mary Whitehouse Experience; Lee and Herrings Fist of Fun; Armando Iannucci's slightly awkward attempt to combine being a satirist with playing enough records to convince people tuning idly in that they were on the right station. This he did by means of aping the Chart Show's information boxes over the top of the songs.

Then, of course, the work of Chris Morris. The late-night (really, early morning) Blue Jam was one thing: a stumbling-out-the-club soundtrack coupled with Andrew Morton being asked to comment on spurious stories about Diana-themed video games. But better yet was the Christmas Day when - for reasons we've never quite understood - Morris ended up hosting the afternoon show.

It must, surely, have been an administrative error, mustn't it? Presumably Adrian Juste took delivery of an envelope the same day asking him to produce a late-night comedy show.

Suddenly, though, Radio One abandoned comedy altogether - presumably it was while playing the Mary Whitehouse Live At Wembley show that someone realised this was the future held: punchlines ripped from their contexts and bleated back by baying crowds; wit abandoned for slight characterisations; the frightening thought of teenage girls throwing knickers at Punt and Dennis. Something had to give.

Radio One returned to what it used to do before it employed comedians and scriptwriters, and instead got teams of researchers to stand in the studios guffawing at the daytime DJs every bon mot.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Twenty-Five Years Of Rock

As we've seen, when Radio One's documentaries were good, they were very, very good.

When they were poor, though... well, they stank so bad you could hear your speakers hum. The bad ones were usually due to the
application of an well-meaning, but too expansive, idea, or one that the production team were too close to too notice they were producing something overlong, obsessive and trussed in an anorak.

We know, we know, the irony of writing that last sentence in the middle of a forty-part series on fragments of Radio One.

The Story of Music Radio was one of these, a lovingly-crafted hymn to the joys of Luxembourg, pirate radio and the first days of Radio One, crafted, mostly, by people who were there. What could have been a interesting hour-long romp stretched out for weeks and weeks, and it was like being played old tapes by your aunt, while your uncle explained them all to you. For weeks.

But Music Radio was whistle-stop compared to Twenty-Five Years Of Rock, a "celebration" of the first quarter century of the music of Elvis. Like a school tour of a poorly curated museum, an uninterested audience was marched past dusty artefact after dusty artefact, as a pantheon was knocked-together before your ears. Any sense of joy, excitement, of the original spontaneity which drove rock to rule the music world was carefully removed; a music which jumped your bones and stuck its hand up your skirts was made to wear its best suit and sit quietly in the parlour as its parents enthused over what a good boy it was.

I suspect there may only have been twenty-five episodes, but it seemed to run non-stop from 1977 until 1981 and - just when it was all over - it appeared in a revised format. Thirty Years Of Rock. There was much to be admired about rock's pioneers - the Richards, the Hollys, even the Presleys - but it couldn't be taught like multiplication tables or the development of steam power. They'd have been better off just playing the records.

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Radio One More Time: Simultaneous Broadcasts

Now, with NICAM digital stereo and all that, stereo music coming out the TV is as normal as small worm-like larvae coming out of Scottish taps. But it's not always been like that. In the 1980s, stereo was for radios, and TVs were restricted to a single speaker, usually lop-sided on one edge.

So, what to do when transmitting a musical event? There was always the option of pumping the sound through the one wheezy
speaker, but the BBC came up with a more elegant solution: the simultaneous broadcast. As the name implies, the pictures would be on one of the TV networks, the radio carrying the stereo sound, all indicated by a giant "SB" in a circle in Radio Times listings, with instructions that, for best effect, you should position your hi-fi speakers either side of the television.

Normally, the SB blob would pop up in the BBC2 and Radio 3 listings - proms, opera, that sort of thing. But sometimes, Radio One would get to join in. Whistle Test and Radio One In Concert would come together for Sight And Sound In Concert specials, and we suspect it was this experience which led to the same combination being called up for what, surely, is the high-water mark for the SB: Live Aid. So simultaneous was the experience, so cross-media was the event fertilized, that the news summary during the afternoon was done by Newsbeat's Frank Partridge rather than someone from the television news squad. It also explains why there was the slightly clunky "Live Aid... From London... around the world" jingle, which was way too wordy for television, but attempted to deliver the same message to radio listeners as TV's glitzy silver world map.

Radio One also hosted the audio leg of the longest-running SB, when Top of the Pops turned up on the radio at the same time as on the television. It's likely the association would have been longer still, but it couldn't happen until Radio One had a proper FM network, and only lasted until BBC One was broadcasting nationwide in stereo. We're still not sure agreeing to take the audio feed was the best idea that Radio One ever had, but we'll charitably assume they thought all their natural constituency would have been watching the Pops anyway, so saw this as a graceful concession.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Christmas Lunch at Grey Gables

Every year, the nation's families gather and try to pretend they like each other for long enough to enjoy a Christmas Lunch together. So, too, did the Radio One djs, forced to get together to pre-record a show full of bonhomie and good humour to be played out on the big day. We're not entirely sure this idea had ever been fully thought through - no Dad was ever going to let his kids have the bloody tranny on during Christmas dinner, so the only people who would ever listen to the show would have been the ones who had elected to avoid turkey, rows and the Queen, or else who had no-one with whom to celebrate. It's unlikely either would have actively requested the chance to hear Mike Read and Steve Wright going through a grim parody of the self-same event they were excluded from.

And, for all the professionally-faked enthusiasm as Annie Nightingale unwrapped a "gift" from Ready, the truth about this event - that it wasn't a jolly get-together for friends, but a works Christmas do on a three-line whip - always came through. So it's little surprise that one year, in a fit of crossover madness, Radio One bosses decided to hold the let's-pretend party in a fictional locale.

Grey Gables. Yes, that Grey Gables. The one in Ambridge. The plot of the Archers buckled in order to explain why the entire on-air staff of Radio One was driving two hundred miles on Christmas Day - hinging, apparently, on the hitherto unmentioned fact that Robert Snell had been at school with John Peel. This seemed slightly unlikely - a social climber like Linda would surely have been keen to drop that gem into conversation at any opportunity - but did earn Peel an appearance or two in Archers scenes. Trouble was, he turned out to be rubbish at doing his own voice, and sounded more like they'd got someone from WeekEnding to do his bits.

Regardless, it was to Grey Gables that the DJs went, with the usual Christmas festivities being punctuated by cameos from Archers characters. We've no idea what the crossover audience between daytime Radio One and Radio Four would have been at this point, but the crashing of an event at the hotel by Eddie Grundy would surely only make sense if you knew who Eddie was, and, for most of the listeners, we're assuming that they wouldn't have. They might as well have decided to hold the party in historical Nazareth, and peppered the show with cameos from Biblical patriarchs for all the sense it made.

And Gary Davies never even tried it on with Susan Tucker.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: The pseudonyms

If, as we saw yesterday, Radio One's listings played host to a surprising number of unexpected names, the airwaves also played host to a depressing number of fake and adopted personas. It seems that nobody can work on a radio programme without being given a matey name.

Comedy Dave on Chris Moyles' show is but the latest in a very, very long line of producers, researchers and sidekicks who've travelled under false documents - either to disguise their real names, or to create a hilarious comedy character. The Steve Wright show buckled under the weight of them: Sid The Manager; Jervaise the hairdresser (complete with 'hilarious' homophobic overtones); Mr. Angry From Purley. Even Marc Riley spent his entire time at the station under the "Boy Lard" banner - although, oddly, Mark Radcliffe dropped the "Scrawn" nickname when the pair moved over from Radio 5. Gary Davies found space every day for Willie On The Plonker - two knob gags for the price of one - and Kevin Greening's travel was handled by Major Holdups. Jimmy Savile's Record Club owed the debt of organisation to Dignified Don, while Tony Blackburn's Junior Choice carried a credit for Uncle Ted.

And, one Christmas, Mike Smith got through the thankless task of presenting breakfast with the assistance of a Christmas Fairy. The fairy bore a surprising vocal resemblance to Sarah Greene.

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Radio One More Time: Those who also entertained

Radio One has had, in its time, some unusual choices presenting programmes. Some were surprising and right, some surprising and wrong. Some were Kelly Osbourne.

Mark Ellen used to present occasionally, sitting in for Annie Nightingale, heralding his appearance with rhyming trailers. This was a good thing.

Emma Freud, for some reason, was in charge of the lunchtime programme for a ridiculously long time. We have a soft spot for Emma, but the one thing that spot is not is a two and half hour spot on a pop radio network.

Muriel Gray did a few swing shifts for Janice Long; we quite liked her, but Radio One at the time had problems with women doing radio, never mind Scottish women.

Tom Watt also did Night-time a few times - now that he's doing lots of football programming, it's not so odd, but when he was still Lofty off EastEnders, it felt wrong having him turning up to play Housemartins sessions.

Lenny Henry was recruited for some weekend work - we imagine the thinking was "an anarchic force in the mould of the young Kenny Everett". He wasn't bad, but he didn't stick around overlong.

Jamie Theakston turned up at One FM as part of the ongoing attempt to turn TV stars into radio personalities - while it worked with Zoe Ball, and people seem to have accepted Vernon Kay, Sara Cox and Fearne Cotton despite shows which can be as cold as Gazpacho Soup outdoors in Iceland - he was one who didn't take.

An even stranger presence, though, was Greg Proops, who we seem to remember having a crack at being Mark Radcliffe for a week or two. It turned out he really was at his best when Clive Anderson could sound a buzzer to get him to move on.

Tom Robinson was another "in for Janice" choice; his style, and introduction of Then Jericho and "the devastatingly handsome Mark Shaw" was encouraging, but felt a little off-key for Radio One. Still, Tom only had to wait another fifteen years or so for someone to invent 6Music to give him a home.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Current Affairs

Radio One's news means only one thing, of course: Newsbeat. Except for the brief period when Newsbeat in the evening had given way to News 89, or News 90, depending on what the year was - a whole thirty minutes of mainly news which, we suspect, had been launched in response to Capital Radio's much-missed The Way It Is, only abandoned when Five Live was launched to cater for the I-like-news-but-I'm-not-obsessed-with-news audience. Perhaps the key Newsbeat - the most Newsbeaty Newsbeat of them all - was the lunchtime edition which covered both the attempted coup by military-obsessed hardliners in Moscow and the launch of Take That's first single. Who knew that both would be organising their comebacks at the same time?

We've never been sure, but we've always suspected that the existence of Radio One's semi-unique news on the thirties would have been down to sharing a news team with Radio 2 in the early days and an easy way of letting one presenter be on two networks without needing to be in two places at the same time. Of course, the two minute, half-past news bulletin never used to part of the Newsbeat 'brand', only changing during the Banister-era. "It's not Newsbeat" protested Danny Baker, "it's just the news".

The station has always seen a current affairs offering as being essential to its position, sometimes going a little extreme in its determination to keep world affairs in amongst the pop. Mike Smith's tenure at the Breakfast Show saw headlines bursting out every twenty minutes, but without a 'crew', Smith himself was expected to do the newsreading for all but the standard news slot. You don't know the meaning of "clunking change of gears" until you've heard a man trying to get from "has the victim of the IRA bomb made it through the night" to "has Bon Jovi made it three weeks at number one". When Simon Mayo settled in to the Breakfast chair, he was gifted a team to try and make this work more easily - Rod Mckenzie, who then did the news and is now in charge of Newsbeat, and Sybil Ruscoe, who was travel and weather, and went on to open the BBC Bar in Manchester Oxford Road. Ruscoe was the first female breakfast regular, although, of course, she was only allowed to do the lady-slanted "don't forget your sou'wester and make sure the kids get to school on time" bits.

Simon Bates, clearly, wanted to be thought of as Radio One's key anchor, which meant that if something interesting happened, he'd be jumping into a radio car to bring the news. We do wonder if anyone actually asked him to drive to Berlin when the wall was coming down, but he did, popping up to report for the breakfast show. Bates was away from the rest of the world media, but bravely insisted that this was because Radio One's Golden Hour was right, and CNN, BBC News, ITN and the German Media were wrong: "If you're watching TV, you're missing the story. They're at the Brandenburg Gate, that's not where the real Germans are, that's where the TV cameras are, that's where people go when they want to get on TV. We're where the real Gemrans are." And Simon Bates, of course.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Bird or bloke?

Is it a bird? Is it a bloke?
Haven't a clue, mate
Sorry I spoke
Is it a bloke? Is it a bird?
No idea, pal
How absurd

It's not just Radio One where the management value the big, sweeping competitions while the presenters (and usually audiences) would rather have the offer of lots chances to win small, rather than the occasional opportunity to win big. I once came across a memo while working in, shall we say, a large commercial radio station which banned any competition offering anything smaller than a holiday. The management believed that audiences were built by the big bang, thereby reversing the prevailing wisdom in broadcasting that what counted was lots of contact between station and listener. The memo was especially disdainful about giving away CDs. The station felt that sending out hundreds of envelopes with gifts of music in was, in some way, a bad thing for its image, rather than a great way of making a large number of people get a small but significant 'thanks for listening'. It's kind of the way men believe that what counts is the enormous , sweat-drenched, non-stop shagnight, whereas relationships are really built just as much on the holding hands in the supermarket and little kisses when you're heading to the toilet.

Radio One sometimes goes mad for its competitions - Thirty One Days In May being a case in point, where the entire arsenal of the network would be put on standby for what was a giveaway Olympics. Simon Bates voiceovers, all presenters having to do at least one part, prizes that "money can't buy". All presenters - even John Peel was roped in, admitting he felt "nervous as a kitten" seconds before playing his "trigger record" (Teenage Kicks, of course) and then asking some sort of questions which won a caller the chance to go to a European football match with him.

It was all very impressive, but - really - nowhere near as much fun for listening to as something as simple as Mark and Lard's Bird Or Bloke. This was a list of people with ambigendered names - Lesleys or Joes - with an invitation to identify them as a bird or a bloke. (When Lindsey Corkhill came up, I think they needed the third umpire.)

The idea was adapted for Dobbins or Bobbins, where the names may or may not have been horses running that day. The different rules required, of course, a different jingle:

Is it a dobbin?
Really a horse
Or is a bobbin?
Made-up, of course
Will you be stealing
A prize on the spot
Or will you be sobbing
Thick Jack (or Jill) Clot

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Junior Choice

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Radio One More Time: Records by DJs

They reckon that music journalists are just frustrated pop stars, which might be true. But they're nowhere near as frustrated as disc jockeys are. The desire to make a record instead of merely playing them seems to seize every DJ at some point in their career and, however ill-advised, they will go ahead and find someone willing to stick something out.

We've already explored Mike Read's attempts to boost his Trainspotters profile by recording his own jingle based on his own single, but there were to be worse transgressions.

Steve Wright, for one. Wright's first toe dipped into seven inch vinyl was merely irritating: as Young Steve and The Afternoon Boys, he turned a weak catchphrase into a weaker single - one which even Russ Abbot might have thought twice about recording:

I'm alright
You're alright
Everyone's feeling alright tonight
Having a laugh and singing a song
If you're alright, you can't go wrong

The b-side, though, Oh, Damien, wasn't bad for a novelty single - being based on one of Wright's "characters" back when they had some sort of actual character to them - this was an ode to Radio One's supposed in-house social worker. Obviously, you wouldn't want to hear it more than once, but that's still more times than you'd want to hear the follow up single, Get Some Therapy.

Again, trying to spin out a catchphrase into three minutes, Get Some Therapy still managed to sell well enough to persuade Steve to try something more complex on his third single. Unfortunately, "complex" turned out to mean homophobic. In an age where Konnie Huq gets a bollocking for suggesting that we should ride bikes rather than taking the car, it's incredible that as recently as 1984 one of the BBC's highest-profile presenters was able to release The Gay Caballeros, which suggested that Wright being pursued by stalking Mexican male rapists was a light comic motif, and nobody batted an eyelid.

Perhaps one of the most successful bids to storm Top of the Pops as artists rather than presenters was Convoy GB. Having noticed that CW McCall's Convoy - a tribute to the then slightly-modish CB Radio - consisted mostly of talking, and realising they could talk, Dave Lee Travis and Paul Burnett knocked up a spoof, rushed into a studio and released it under the not-entirely-secret identity Laurie Lingo and The Dipsticks. Despite being a novelty parody of a novelty hit, and despite Travis' cod Scouse accent, it was taken to the nation's hearts.

Of course, even John Peel popped up from time to time on record. He once whistled on an Altered Images album track.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Perkins Grange

If you ever needed evidence that some ideas work much better on radio than on television, Noel Edmonds' Sunday morning trips to Perkins Grange, compared with the same idea, transplanted to BBC One and Crinkly Bottom, pretty much makes the case open-and-shut.

What on radio could be implied and glossed over - naturally, you're in the baronial home of Radio 4 newsreader Brian Perkins, who happens to be on hand to help out during the morning - needs to be shown on television; where Perkins Grange existed as a perfect mental image, Crinkly Bottom was clearly a cheap studio set in a television hangar in London.

Other elements lost something in translation.

On Radio 1, Noel pretty much invented the funny phone call. Actually, the Funny Phone Call, for that's what he called them. Before every idiot able to operate a mixing desk phone got in on the act, and the wit was bludgeoned out to make room for Scott Mills telling parents their kids are changing their name to Wanker, there was still something amusing in the idea of Noel ringing up in a "disguised" voice, making a mild claim (traffic lights outside your window, that sort of thing), letting the victim get slightly riled, before the big reveal "it's Noel Edmonds, on Radio 1..."

Actually, we don't know why Noel bothered putting on a fake voice, as it was always the same fake voice. As a relatively fresh idea, it never needed to push itself to levels of credulity-stretch or cruelty to get its laugh, and was so popular BBC Cassettes even stuck out a couple of compilations of the 'best' calls.

When taken to television, though, the concept was ratcheted up into the Gotcha, and the extra budget required celebrity targets, and before long it was all about Dave Lee Travis and Keith Chegwin. Interestingly, the move to celebritising the format had been presage during Mike Read's period on the Sunday morning show, where he took to doing prank calls on celebrities - most notably, persuading Su Pollard she'd been chosen to sing the lyrics that were about to be added to the EastEnders theme tune.

Likewise, the readings of Thomas The Tank Engine - the 'something for all the family' element of Sunday Mornings - somehow worked itself up into being Mr. Blobby on the TV. Presumably, these days, no Radio 1 show would be able to the cost of rights to bring Thomas to the air, but Edmonds was working back before Ringo Starr built the Tank Engine's stock to such levels.

Noel might point to the surprisingly high figures for Noel Edmond's House Party and proclaim it a success. On the other hand, when he did the Radio 1 show, he was one of the most popular presenters in the UK; by the end of House Party, Noel was something of an entertainment pariah. It all depends, of course, on what you see as a success.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: You'll Never Be 16 Again

We're only going to be slightly misty-eyed about the lost art of the rockumentary on Radio One - for reasons we'll return to later in this series. But part of the space lost on the network over the last fifteen years has been that occupied by well-crafted, well-researched, longform music features. First they were shifted from the weekends to the midweeks, then they got sliced up to fit in small segments of Lamacq Live, and now, we think, they might have disappeared altogether.

Well - not quite, as a lot of the sort of programming which used to appear on Saturday lunchtimes on Radio One now crops up on Radio Four. Histories of the pop press, investigations in Northern Soul; features which place music into some sort of context beyond a chart position and which hip-hop producer has taken an executive role. Features which treat music as something that can do more than fill the gaps between Chris Moyles' pearls of wisdom. Indeed, it's the loss of this sort of programme which makes the network's Macca and Gallagher fronted birthday programmes look so out of place: how do you celebrate a network by making the sort of shows it no longer does?

Three documentary series we particularly cherish - as in literally, by having them on cassette somewhere up in the loft.

You'll Never Be 16 Again was a history of the teenager, from the 'invention' of something between childhood and adulthood up until whatever was then the present day. It's a path that's been well trodden since, but the perspective it took - amused detachment from archive predictions of Teddy Boy-brought doom from the Daily Express set against the music of the time and first-person testimony - means it's seldom been bettered.

Peeling Back The Years was sort-of-revived, briefly, by BBC7 during its celebrations of John Peel's life, only even they could only be bothered to play one half of one episode, even though it remains something of a definitive biography of the man. In conversation with John Walters, Peel told his life story through the music which had driven it. It was an extended Desert Island Discs, but one which managed to avoid most of the self-indulgence giving six hours of radio to one man's choices would generate. Yes, it did feature Teenage Kicks.

Peel also presented Protest Songs, a four-part history of - you might be ahead of us here - political music. These ranged from the expected leftist sentiments - Shipbuilding - to right-wing calls for low taxes by Tex Payer. A few of the songs haven't been heard on Radio One since, we'd suggest.

[Part of Radio One More Time]