Heart attack

Friday, January 31, 2020

Sad News

I was at Camphill yesterday (Tuesday) when one of the guys discovered the sad news that Nicholas Parson had died, at the grand old age of 96. I love 'Just A Minute,' which he was chairman of for 52  years and remember clearly it starting in 1967. Radio Four has been a major part of my life. My family always had it on (previously called the Home Service, until they introduced Radio One in 1967, as a replacement to pirate radio which the government outlawed that year.) It's first episode was broadcast on 22nd December 1967. In fact, a mere three months after the station's launch. The basic premise of the show was that contestants have to talk for one minute on a given subject, 'without hesitation, repetition or deviation,' Contestants who appeared on the show included Derek Nimmo, Paul Merton, Kenneth Williams, Sheila Hancock, Graham Norton, Beryl Reid, Gyles Brandreth, Andree Melly, Sue Perkins, Tim Rice, Wendy Richard, Peter Jones who is perhaps best known as the voice of The Book in the Douglas Adams radio series 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' and many more.

It's such a simple format for a game and radio is the best place for it. There was a television version, but, frankly, because it is so speech-based, the fact that television is visual, there's really no point in it being done on television. The shows theme music is Chopin's piano waltz in D flat major, No 1, nicknamed the "Minute Waltz," although it does actually last a good deal longer than one minute, the nickname refers to "minute" as in 'small,' rather than a unit of time.

Nicholas Parsons was also a compere for the ITV gameshow, 'Sale of The Century,' which was produced at the Anglia Television studios in Norwich. I have to come clean and tell you that I secretly wrote in to Anglia to suggest my mother as a contestant. She got a letter, inviting her to audition. I didn't go with her, but she had to go to Cambridge (if my memory serves.) and went with my Aunt Gemma (although I would have loved to have gone.) She wasn't, unfortunately chosen. It would have been great if she had. I think possibly she was too clever for this particular gameshow.

Radio 4 is a unique station. As I've mentioned above it was called the Home Service up until 1967, when the BBC introduced Radio 1 and the Light Programme transformed into Radio 3 and the Third Programme became, imaginatively, Radio 3. Radio 4 is a speech-based station which schedules news, drama, comedy and documentaries which would never be produced or heard elsewhere. There is no commercial station which compares. You won't hear anything similar anywhere. I would say that the chance of it being replicated as a commercial station is highly unlikely, being funded by the television licence (why no radio licence?) A good reason for protecting this as a funding model and a definite 'brick' in the Public Service remit (ie- The core values of the BBC, going back to it being set up under Lord Reith in 1922,  'to inform, educate and entertain.) I think Radio 4 was instrumental in my having an interest in literature and probably theatre. I listened to many of there adaptations of books and plays which were, and still are, broadcast by the station. In some ways I think I prefer radio to television, particularly with drama, where the words are so important. As someone said, and I don't know who it was, the 'scenery is better,' or words to that effect. Many sitcoms have been produced by Radio 4, and quite a few have then been transferred to television, perhaps the most famous being 'Hancock's Half Hour,' which began life on radio in the 1950's and eventually transferred to television. Radio is a good place for more surreal comedy, because, with the use of sound effects, suggests more in the mind than with visual humour. The most surreal comedy of performers and writers such as Spike Milligan, made use of radio with shows such as the ground-breaking 'Goon Show,' which kick-started the careers of not only Milligan but also Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. I was introduced to the Goons by a friend who I met when doing an A Level course at what was then Mander College in around 1967-8. His father had been a fan when the show was first aired in the 1950s and apparently recorded these episodes when they were broadcast, on to reel-to-reel tape. My friend, John, used to visit me at home and bought some of these reel-to-reel tapes with him. I had become interested in tape recording (a good many years before the introduction of cassette tapes.) because a teacher when I was at Rushmoor School, had a tape recorder and I became intrigued by the fact that you could record your voice and edit material that you had recorded. Anyway, a lot of those 'Goon' episodes were transferred onto cassette and would have been the first time I had heard them and was hooked, probably because of the wacky, surreal nature of the shows, the amazing sound effects, some created by the then infant BBC Radiophonic Workshop (no, sadly defunct.) which went on to produce many of the sound effects on such BBC shows as 'Doctor Who,' and 'The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.' I was also introduced to 'Hancock's Half-Hour' and I suspect other radio classics such as 'Round The Horn,' 'I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again.' I bought a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder from a teacher at the next school I went to when I left Rushmoor, further expanding my experience of recording and then editing. This experience came in useful when I eventually got work in stage management, being able to then make up tapes of sound effects which I used to compile whilst working as, first, a student A.S.M. at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, and later, as a fully-fledged D.S.M. at Ipswich Theatre in the early 1970's.  Amazing to think that the memories of one thing sparks off different things and how one person, a teacher, could set in train so many different interests which still carry on today.


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