Radio 4 Extra Live - but for how long?

Like many other listeners I have been distressed to learn that by next spring the BBC's Radio 4 Extra may be no more - as a DAB radio station, that is. 

Its archive, so we are told, will remain online, though how many programmes will be accessible remains to be seen. At present episodes are available for a set number of days after a repeat broadcast then vanish until - or unless - they are broadcast again some time - maybe even years - later. I know that Ray Connolly was frustrated when trying to make the case for a play of his being retained on the website, so it seems highly unlikely that absolutely everything will be there to hear again at the click of a mouse. But even if that were magically to be the case it still wouldn't make up for the serendipitous discoveries which delight the regular listener to the DAB station.

Billy Shelton

Sorry to learn that Billy Shelton is unwell. Jan D'Agostino Trapani recently posted the following on Facebook:  

My good friend and fellow performer Billy Shelton (The Spaniels) has been placed in Hospice Care in Indiana.

If you enjoyed Billy's singing and beautiful voice, I'm sure he would appreciate cards or notes from those who followed him during his long career, and the pleasure and positive demeanor he exuded.

In Which Edward Bear Scores a Century

 

 Today marks 100 years since that perennial children's favourite, Winnie the Pooh, was published. It wasn't the writer's first work for children: in addition to When We Were Very Young, in which an as-yet-unnamed Pooh made his first appearance, A.A. Milne had already written a play called Make-Believe and a novel-length fairytale entitled Once on a Time (though the latter was half-intended for adults). 

The Pooh books - "These four trifles for the young", as he dismissively called them in a late poem - have long overshadowed his other work but during his lifetime Milne made several reputations for himself as a writer. In the early 1900s, as Assistant Editor of Punch, his articles and light verse were very popular indeed with readers; writing Milne's obituary in that magazine fifty years later, H.F. Ellis (of A.J. Wentworth fame) described the "genuine stylistic innovation" which his writing represented.

Birkenhead to Barrow or The Moving Theatre

If you saw the documentary Freddie Davies: A Life in Show Business on Talking Pictures TV recently you will have caught a glimpse of his grandfather, Jack Herbert, walking past a theatre and standing on its stage (above). The footage comes from a 1969 documentary about Sid Field, the sketch comic revered by Tony Hancock; Jack and Sid had worked together in revue in the 1920s, Sid as juvenile lead and feed to Jack, an up-and-coming comedian by then, thanks to his success in several revues produced by Clara Coverdale. 

Sadly, however, there is very little of Jack Herbert on film; the two-part Field programme, part of a Thames Television series called Applause! Applause!, contains almost all there is, and he had retired from performing by then - or rather, as Freddie has put it, "the business gave him up": theatres began to close in the fifties and not all variety acts were able to adapt to the brasher style demanded by the clubs.

Freddie Davies documentary on Talking Pictures TV

If you missed the broadcast yesterday, Martyn Tott's "chatumentary", as he has called it, about Freddie Davies is currently available to watch online on TPTV Encore. You will need to subscribe but provided you can tolerate the adverts it's free to watch. 

It was made in 2017, three years after the publication of Funny Bones, Freddie's autobiography (what I cowrote), and yesterday was its first screening on the Talking Pictures TV channel, though Freddie has already been involved with them, appearing in a couple of their live events; on one of those occasions, calling to mind his time as a Redcoat at Butlins, he led the audience in a singalong.

No leading definitions: R.C. Sherriff

 

A distinction drawn in Radio 4's Today programme between the genres of autobiography and memoir  may be less than wholly convincing - is "a work of literature that is verging on fiction" really an adequate definition of a memoir? - but it did remind me of my feelings when reading Ronald Wales's comprehensive 2016 biography of the playwright and screenwriter R.C. Sherriff, best remembered for Journey's End. I had greatly enjoyed Sherriff's own account of his life, No Leading Lady, around thirty years earlier, and was prompted to read it again after finishing the more recent work.

Musical differences: Sven Klang's Combo

 

At last the film Sven Klang's Combo (as it was known on its UK release) is - at the time of writing, anyway - available to watch online. This is a big deal as when I last checked a few years ago it wasn't possible to buy a DVD with the appropriate subtitles - and it's well worth seeing.  Benny Green reviewed it very warmly in Punch as the most convincing portrayal of a band's interactions he had ever seen on film. 

It's about a group of Swedish musicians in the late fifties, happy to play Dixieland jazz and other crowd-pleasing music until they are joined by a  saxophonist with Charlie Parker-type aspirations. Either with permission from the leader or out of devilment (I haven't yet rewatched the film), he plays a Parker-type solo in the middle of a dance, and the reaction is interesting: displaying none of that "Go home dirty Bopper" reaction which famously greeted Bruce Turner's joining Humphrey Lyttleton's band, the crowd opt to remain quite still until he has finished and the more familiar, danceable style kicks in once again.

Of Gospel Groups and Coastal Cottages ...

 

 

When I first heard the Flamingos' doo wop classic Golden Teardrops I was puzzled by the reference to "a cottage by the sea", which seemed an arbitrary place in which to picture the loved one. Did it perhaps signify something to the record's original audience which I had missed? 

I'll remember
No matter where you'll be -
In a crowded room 
Or a busy street
Or a cottage by the sea

That was around fifty years ago but I didn't think to investigate further - until now. 

The prompt was a transfer of the Swan Silvertones' 1957 recording of the gospel song A Lady Called Mother; despite some crackles it sounds sharper and clearer than any I'd heard online before - and it reminded me that the parent of the title is "in a cottage far away."

Kommendable Kinks Kompositions

 

As the Guardian has published a list of the Kinks' 40 greatest songs which omits several of my favourites I've dusted off these notes about some of Raymond Douglas Davies's finest. 

Summer day reflections on two socially distanced Leitch gatherings

Hard to believe but Donovan, that seeming child of faerie, recently turned eighty. 

He is still performing and only a week or two ago on social media trumpetingly denounced as "fake news" the possibility of his retiring. At the time of writing his most recent concert was four days ago, in Cork; another, in Galway, is scheduled for October.

I don't think I'll be buying a ticket should he ever venture to England again, but I'm glad I went to see him a few months ago at Richmond Theatre; it felt like a final farewell to one whose music had once meant a great deal to me.

Settling into my (very comfortable) seat an usher handed me a Donovan CD. Possibly this happened to everybody - I was rather late in arriving, so don't know - but for a moment it felt like a "thank you" from the veteran troubadour himself, a way of acknowledging all the cash I must have thrown his way over the years, though later I did entertain the unworthy thought that his merch people might have been trying to offload copies of the less well-known albums which hadn't attracted many buyers in the foyer.

A few years ago in these pages I described my disappointment at a 2004 Dono-concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the first experience to test my Dono-faith, nevermore to resume residence in my heart with the same ardency. As I finished that piece, I found myself being pulled two ways: he had meant so much, even if he was no longer what he had been. Then, still searching for the precise words with which to tie a ribbon neatly around the experience of those long years of fandom, I noticed that his official site had a link to a live concert in Germany ...

Click.

Your budget stationer's has left its Croydon once for all

 Danish chain Flying Tiger Copenhagen has been based in Croydon's Whitgift Centre for at least seven years, but its store is now labelled as "permanently closed" on Google Maps.  

[Daily Express, 28 April 2026] 

 

The above news is, as a friend of mine would put it, "A wee shame." Especially as Croydon's Tiger store is not the only branch of  these cheap but inviting stationer's-cum-giftshops to have closed in recent times; I mourn the loss of a North London branch which happily occupied many post-prandial minutes when I was working nearby.

More than a hundred Tiger establishments remain aroar in the UK though it seems that their days might be numbered too: according to a recent report the Flying Tiger company is about to be taken over by the private equity firm which acquired and rebranded WH Smith as TG Jones. That might not be the reprieve it seems: as 150 of those translated Smith's are now at risk of closure that surely doesn't augur well for other acquisitions.

Number One? Ah, that'll be this day ...

 

The soundtrack double album for the fifties-set British film That'll Be the Day was number one  on the UK charts today in 1973, or so I have recently been informed by social media. 

Its featured oldies helped foster a love in me for doo wop and rock'n'roll more generally even though I have never actually owned a copy. Tracks were played on the radio at the time - Luxembourg as well as Radio 1 - and I still recall the moment I first heard Frankie Lymon hitting a certain note on Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

The modest film, written by Ray Connolly, has endured, probably because it wasn't primarily conceived as a means of shifting records. Quite the reverse, in fact: the soundtrack LP came into being in order to raise the rest of the finance to make the film, as Connolly has said:

Shuttling between Count Arthur Strong's radio and video shows

Although I found Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show on Radio 4 entertaining I had reservations about whether it really worked as a sitcom, as opposed to an extended sketch or "turn". I could see that he belonged to a noble tradition of bumblers but a big part of the pleasure of, say, The Shuttleworths (the original Radio 4 series featuring John Shuttleworth), is the sense it conveys of the constricted world which Graham Fellows' creation inhabits: hospices, garden centres (with their newfangled "campuccinos"), fun runs etc. 

I didn't get a similar sense of a precisely realised setting during the Count's radio outings: such details of his showbiz career as occasionally escaped his lips in those shows seemed vague and fragmentary. Had his showbiz career all been in his mind? If not, just how far had he ascended on the showbiz ladder and what had gone wrong?

Safka's Metamorphosis

 Today, or hereabouts, marks fifty years since West Country group the Wurzels had a UK Number One with Combine Harvester, their parody of Melanie's Brand New Key, a British hit in 1972. 

Memory insists, however, that the group originally sang a rather different version in live performance in which their lead singer, rather than boasting of having acquired a large and expensive item of farming machinery, merely declared his possession of a Brand New Pair of Underpants.

Let me say at once that I haven't heard those alternative lyrics for myself but I'm pretty sure that the existence of this ur-Harvester was reported in the music press at the time - or in one paper, at least. But as I used to read most of them and can't be certain of the date of this article, nor how many of those publications might await in digitised form in the British Library or elsewhere, it's not a search I feel particularly eager to begin - and if anyone tells me those yellowing pages haven't yet been scanned and I'll have to turn over page after inky page even to the edge of closing time then fuggedaboutit. 

morecambeandwise

Today, as is readily apparent on social media sites, marks 100 years since Eric Morecambe was born.

I don't recall Ernie Wise's centenary making a similar hoo-ha last year, which is a pity: as with the pair's onetime TV guests, the Beatles, there have been many books, articles and documentaries about Morecambe and Wise, and, just as Ringo is given short shrift in some assessments, the role which Ernie played in securing the laughs for the pair often seems to be undervalued, as though Eric was really a solo act. 

Nohow and contrariwise. I don't suppose sculptor Graham Ibbeson had much of a say in it himself but there seems to me to be something fundamentally wrong about a joint tribute to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Laurel's birthplace, Ulverston, when Eric Morecambe is depicted on his own in the former Eric Bartholomew's home town; even with a pair of binoculars bunged on the statue to indicate interests beyond comedy no one is going to look at it and think: "Wow, that's one ace birdwatcher!"