The trial run went okay so On The Beat began in a new time slot, and a prime one, following Billy Butler’s Hold Your Plums on Sunday lunchtime. Billy and Wally had about 50 people crammed into Studio 1 in Paradise Street, which would certainly break today’s fire and safety regulations, and the programme was full of laughter. Occasionally, when the other studio was out of action, the studio had to be cleared while the final record was playing and I had to be in place when it ended. In turn, I was followed by the Liverpool novelist and former docker, Brian Jacques, with Jakestown, which was an eclectic mix of opera, folk music and scouse humour. Brian was an extraordinary character, considerably larger than life, and Radio 3 missed a good opportunity to bring opera to the masses through employing Brian nationally with his Liverpool accent. Brian once asked me if I would like to put a fiver on a fight in Sefton Park between two Liverpool bouncers. Big Stan, say, was a sure-fire bet. Maybe but although I wasn’t interested, the next week I asked him what happened. He said, “George cheated. He bit Big Stan’s ear off.”
Eric Wise once told off Brian Jacques for smoking in the building and Brian said to Eric, “You find somebody who’s bigger than me to tell me to stop and I’ll do it.” In the first Sunday programme, I referred to him as BJ The DJ so I might have been heading for a punch myself.
On The Beat adopted a more measured approach. The initial programmes had been quick moving – if you don’t like this item, it doesn’t matter as there will be another one in a minute, and the fact that some records aren’t played in full emphasises this. The idea now was to have one guest per programme; that is, until I got restless.
I was taking over from John Kennedy’s oldies programme, Now And Then, which mostly played rock and roll. John’s show was very popular but his wife wasn’t keen on a local headmaster playing rock and roll on air and after 12 years, he was giving up the weekly show, but still doing some holiday specials. I played Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ for him. He had previously had a Saturday night slot and I used to wonder why he got so many requests from Walton. When I took over his show for a couple of weeks when he was ill, I found out the answer: they all came from Walton Prison.
OTB 0006 (1CD) Sunday 2 March 1986, 1-2pm
Alan Freeman
It was cunning of me to start my Sunday series with one of the country’s top DJs, Alan Freeman, the man who said, “Hi there, pop pickers”. He did, as it were, top Billy Butler and it put my programme in safe hands.
I had travelled to London one Saturday morning to interview Alan after his stint on BBC Radio London. He was hot-seating with Kenny Everett and when Kenny came in, they kissed each other on the lips, the first time I had seen two men kissing. It hadn’t been difficult to secure an interview with Alan as he had an acting role in the new film, Absolute Beginners, to publicise.
It was, I think, a decent interview covering his career and he said, “There I was, approaching 40, heading for middle age, and the Beatles made me feel young again. They were sensational.”
Unreleased Merseybeat. Denny Seyton and the Sabres with ‘That’s What Love Will Do’ (1964), played 55 minutes in.
I was continuing to answer listeners’ questions. One of them, “What happened to Marion Ryan who was a small woman with a big bust?”
In the introduction, I refer to covering all forms of popular music – pop, rock, soul and country – oh, how simple life was then. The programme has an odd piece about people over 40 having hit records – the first person of pension age to have a No.1 was Louis Armstrong at 67. This research had been prompted by Frank Sinatra entering the charts with ‘New York, New York’, which, oddly enough, was popular in discos.
Freeman MD 0045 T
