Today is the first of May - sufficient excuse, I reckon, for my fancy lightly to turn to thoughts of broadcaster Russell Davies, who for many years hosted a weekly, much-missed, programme on BBC Radio 2.
A few years ago - before it was decreed that retaining the regular services of a witty and literate musical authority was an expense too far for the station - I paid particularly close attention to one edition of the show when I was considering the possibility of creating a podcast version of this blog. I didn't get much farther than buying a microphone but what I wrote then might still be of interest to anyone thinking of assembling a music programme.
Russell Davies's show was a successor to Benny Green's, aired on a Sunday and concentrating on the Great American Songbook; both drew attention to forgotten or neglected numbers and made unexpected connections between songs.
In 2012, during that short-lived quest to uncover the secret of Broadcasting Man's Red Fire, I looked at the way Mr Davies linked his musical selections together.
Another, older, broadcaster, Ken Sykora (the young Paul McCartney had listened to his programme Guitar Club on the Light Programme in the 1950s), found an easy solution to the problem of playing widely differing records when he began work for the newly-created Radio Clyde in the early 1970s. He called his show Serendipity with Sykora, which meant that provided some associative process, however tenuous, could be cited then just about anything went.
Serendipity with Sykora was my introduction to Spike Jones, among many others, and one of Jones's masterpieces of musical mayhem also happened to feature in the editiion of the Russell Davies Song Show I chose to scrutinise, broadcast on Radio 2 on Sunday, the second of May, 2010.
Below are the summaries I jotted down of Mr Davies's rationale for each selection, followed by further thoughts written at the time:
