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.

So - assuming the Beeb prove impervious to protests and a recently launched petition - the first question is: without a recent broadcast as the criterion for availability online just which programmes will those who log on to BBC Sounds be able to hear? How will they be chosen and will those choices change from week to week? Or perhaps even day by day, a lucky dip? Will new additions continue to be made to the archive or will the task of hunting out and restoring forgotten treasures be considered an expense too far, like the maintaining of a DAB outlet for the material?

Some years ago the station - possibly when it was still known as BBC 7 - had a season of plays by Rhys Adrian, a name which often cropped up in those once-annual volumes of radio plays which had won the Giles Cooper Award. Missing from the works selected for rebroadcast, however, was a drama I remembered with particular fondness entitled Toytown. It was a joy to hear it again more recently on Radio 4 Extra; presumably it had finally been located or a copy handed in by someone. 

But the point is: where else would I have heard such a piece again but on that station? Not in its original home, that's for sure, given the cutbacks in drama on Radio 4 and its increasing reliance on series rather than the single play, not to mention its greater focus in recent years on issue-driven stories.

What is Toytown about, you ask? Er, well, it's about some park keepers. What happens in it? Not too much - or at least not the sort of thing which can be gleaned from a pitch. It doesn't teach you anything - or at least nothing which can be reduced to a slogan. I only know that listening to it was important and richly rewarding and that it had stuck in my mind for 35 years.

I'm guessing that once upon a time radio drama at the Beeb was like its TV equivalent used to be, to judge from commentaries I've heard on DVDs of Dennis Potter's and Andrew Birkin's work: once a project had been accepted, it was trusted that the writer and director knew what they were doing and were left to get on with it. Andrew Birkin has spoken of his discovery, when writing his superlative series about J.M. Barrie, that he would need much more screen time to tell the story he was discovering; he got it. 

Readers already familiar with the protests about Radio 4 Extra's closure - including one, tellingly, from the editor of the Radio Times - won't find much new in what I am saying in this post but two essential points bear repeating ad nauseam by all who care about keeping this station on the air. 

One is that it's not enough to have an online archive, regardless of how many programmes are available at the click of a mouse. One of the joys of Radio 4 Extra, in addition to reacquainting yourself with old friends, is happening upon an unfamiliar drama or documentary or quiz or obscure sitcom (or whatever) simply because you happened to be listening to the station that day. 

And the second, related, point is that BBC radio has such a rich fund of material, especially with an archive of radio drama of a quality unequalled anywhere else in the world, why - for relatively small savings in its overall budget - is it taking the self-destructive step of limiting its reach by switching off the station which promotes and preserves its distinguished history? 

As Jimmy Clitheroe, who is all there with his mic drops, would say: Make It Make Sense. 

 

A petition to save Radio 4 Extra has been set up by Chortle; sign it here. 

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. His address is Billy Shelton, Dyer Nursing and Rehabilitation, 601 Sheffield Ave, Dyer, IN 46311. Let's make this a card shower. 

  

I was contacted by Billy in 2015; he was keen for his story to be known and we had several lengthy and wide-ranging conversations about his life in and out of music:

Billy Shelton: Spaniel Forever 

 

 

 

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. 

After the Great War he turned to playwriting and had considerable success, in addition to writing a  highly-regarded detective novel amongst other things. Unlike his contemporary P.G. Wodehouse, he kept giving himself new challenges, which is why there were only four Pooh books in total - and given that there is such a clear, and poignant, leave-taking at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, I can't imagine he would have taken kindly to a recent attempt to write a sequel (source of the Shepard-style illustration below).

There are a number of posts about Milne's work scattered through this blog; links are provided in the discussion below and a monograph will, I hope, soon be added to their number. The latter, entitled Wisdom Lingers, is a relic of an earlier incarnation as an art student, not that my writing has noticeably matured in the interim. 

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.

Freddie, interviewed at home, tells some of the stories in the book as well as some of the events in his life which followed its publication; there are also film and TV clips giving an idea of the range of his work beyond the budgie-obsessed stand-up act which made his name when he appeared on the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1964. 

If you want to know more about Freddie there is a blog promoting the book. I haven't updated it recently but there are quite a few interesting posts. Here's hoping the screening and ongoing availability of the documentary help spread the word about the man Martin Kelner has called "A living history of variety".

Here is a guide to some posts from that blog.

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. It didn't disappoint: No Leading Lady is engagingly written, with quite a few comic moments. Sherriff's career is about much more than his groundbreaking play about the Great War, although he does provide a very full account of its genesis. It's fascinating to learn, for example, that the relationship between Stanhope and Raleigh, the younger man who hero-worships him, had been in the playwright's mind long before the decision to place the action in a wartime setting. He was primarily interested in exploration of character and war happened to be the backdrop chosen, an approach which I'm sure has contributed to the work's longevity.

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.

The impression is given that they didn't stop in order to give their whole attention to this new musical experience; it was just an irrelevance. And their ignoring of this would-be revolutionary playing is worse, in a way, than outright hostility, raising the possibility that this is music which is not going to tear down the walls after all. 

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." 

The Swan Silvertones are best known for their rendition of Mary, Don't You Weep but for my money this more restrained side is almost equally compelling. An account of an unfulfilled yearning rather than a celebration of victory, it's slower-paced and lacks the same sense of release as Mary ..., offering only the occasional hint of the emotion beneath the surface, but this more subdued and deliberate performance remains an effective showcase for the subtlety and good judgement of Claude Jeter's singing.

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. 

  

PEOPLE TAKE PICTURES OF EACH OTHER & PICTURES IN THE SAND

Loss is Ray Davies' big subject; a song like People Take Pictures of Each Other could not have been written by anyone else and the essence of the song is captured in a few paragraphs in a book about The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller, who ends:

There is something neurotic about the wordless vocal tics that punctuate the song, and something desperate about the singsong round the piano as the track fades. The summer has passed by, childhood and freedom have vanished, love has been stolen away. You used to matter to someone, but now you don't. You might as well sing. It's all you've got - that, and your photographs.

 

Pictures in the Sand is one of my favourite Kinks tracks, first heard on The Great Lost Kinks Album, a 1973 compilation of mostly 1968-69 tracks whose release Ray Davies hadn't approved, though the songs are mostly of a very high standard. A music hall - or rather a more decorous end of the pier - atmosphere is there in the song in brightly coloured plastic spades, but for all the chirpiness - Ray and chums coming across like a Pierrot troupe - it seems to be a song about a hopeless love:

    Every single day
    I waste my time away
    Drawing pictures in the sand
    Writing messages to you

At the end the vocal seems to break down into a kind of discreet blubbering - or perhaps an imitation of the trumpet notes which tend to signal defeat in a cartoon or film comedy - but that is the only hint of the mask slipping. 

The tempo of Pictures in the Sand may be sprightly (an old-fashioned word which seems to fit), but People Take Pictures ... is married throughout to an infernal, Tiggerish bounciness. Miller is spot-on, I think, about the desperation at the recording's end. It, too, is about a hopeless, or a lost, love among other things:

    You can't picture love that you took from me
    When we were young and the world was free
    Pictures of things as they used to be
    Don't show me no more, please

    [...]

    People take pictures of each other
    And a moment can last them forever
    Of a time when they mattered to someone

    Picture of me when I was just three
    Sat with my ma by the old oak tree
    How I love things as they used to be
    Don't show me no more, please

There is even a Cossack dance-style interlude in the song which may suggest that the only way to cope is to avoid reflection by continuous whirling and bouncing: the hunger to relive the past is better resisted ("Don't show me no more, please").

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.

The Croydon branch of Tiger seems to have been particularly popular with its customers, so why did it have to close? According to the Extra London News website it's merely one of many retail casualties, the result of "economic pressures, high business rates, and the post-pandemic e-commerce boom".

True, you can still find shops which stock inexpensive stationery and the sort of small impulse-purchase which Tiger specialises in but for me, at least, they aren't a viable alternative - even if, like Paul Simon, mutatis mutandis, I took (and take) some comfort there. 

The blunt fact is that whatever their consolations most of the correspondingly cheap'n'cheerful emporia lack, or lacked, Tiger's style. Wandering into the branch of Wilkinson's (before its contraction) which was situated upstairs from Tiger in that North London mall I remained in a state of painful sobriety, acutely conscious that I was merely frittering away what remained of my lunch hour by looking through cheap tat. The moment I stepped into Tiger, however, its decor and choice of background music was enough to give me, however fleetingly, a kind of spiritual elevation: with Wilkinson's above me only in the literal sense I felt, for a moment,

little lower than the angels

And - to proceed at last to the point of this post - quite apart from their less inspired surroundings, Tiger's rivals never seem to stock the stationery item which I prize above all else:  

The Modestly-Priced A5 Unlined Notebook.

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!"

I have written a few times about Morecambe and Wise earlier in this blog and will provide links to them at the end. The piece I'm fondest of quotes extensively from David Nathan's admirable book The Laughtermakers (1970), which devoted most of the chapter entitled Mixed Doubles to Nathan's account of Morecambe and Wise recording a TV show, and how - as born theatre performers - they responded to mistakes.