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!"

How's that for serendipity?

 

Just realised that an edition of Serendipity with Sykora can be found online which takes its theme as the month of June, positively demanding comparison with the Maytime episode of the Russell Davies Song Show discussed in the previous post. 

It's harder to compile an equivalent playlist, however, as Sykora often plays only a brief snatch of music, not the whole record, with artists and even song titles frequently left uncredited.

With thematically linked quotations from poems, newspapers and other sources added to the mix, the overall effect is more stream-of-consciousness than Russell Davies's May-minded show. Yet it works: Sykora's choices don't seem random because his links do serve to make us feel that the jumble of information is the musing of one man. I'd forgotten just how soft-spoken and intimate his presenting style is, ideally suited to night-time broadcasting, when the mind may be permitted to wander more freely than within the constraints of daytime programming. (My memory is that Serendipity was on late at night though other shows he presented about big bands and the like were early evening.)

The Serendipity show does not consist, as I'd thought, of the Great American Songbook plus a few token novelties but is genuinely wide-ranging, with music from many other countries included. His distinctive voice and avuncular manner make it feel all of a piece but it's less formally educational than Russell Davies's programme - not that Mr Davies is formal in manner, merely that the narrower scope of his musical choices inevitably teaches you a lot about that golden period of American songwriting between the twenties and fifties in particular, whereas the experience for the listener to a Serendipity programme is more like falling into a kind of dreamy pinball game, rapidly (but not violently) shot from one musical or literary idea to another.

May-minded

 

Today is the first of May, which reminds me of the much-missed Russell Davies Song Show.

I once tried to analyse a episode broadcast around this time of year, hoping to find pointers for making a podcast equivalent of this blog. I didn't get much farther than buying a microphone before the madness wore off (there really ought to be a proverbial phrase advising caution about purchases made during this month) but the exercise did give me a keener appreciation of the craft involved in preparing an hour of radio which doesn't sound slung together.

Like his predecessor on Radio 2, Benny Green, who had created the blueprint, Russell Davies's focus in his show was on the Great American Songbook, drawing the listener's attention to forgotten or neglected numbers awaiting within that capacious tome, making surprising connections between songs and celebrating felicitous lyrics. 

In the early 1970s another, older, broadcaster, Ken Sykora (the young Paul McCartney had listened to his programme Guitar Club on the BBC's Light Programme in the 1950s) had presented a not dissimilar show on the newly formed independent station Radio Clyde. He, however, had the advantage of an inspired title: Serendipity with Sykora, meaning he could include material outwith the aforesaid songbook as the fancy took him. Hawaiian music and the Lovin' Spoonful's Nashville Cats crept in from time to time, as I recall, though his penchant for the voice of Peggy Lee and others meant that standards were always threaded through each week's choices

That catch-all title having already been nabbed, and synonyms for serendipity such as Happenstance not providing similar alliterative possibilities in my case, I fell to examining Mr Davies's method of linking his musical choices in my short-lived quest to discover The Secret of Broadcasting Man's Red Fire.

80@80 (Spencer Leigh autobiography)

 

 

I have just finished reading Spencer Leigh's autobiography 80@80: A Liverpool Life in 80 Chapters, which was published in February last year, and can warmly recommend it. As the title suggests it has eighty chapters to tie in with its venerable author reaching the milestone of his eightieth year, despite the still-boyish features displayed on the cover. (How does he do it?)

A thoroughly enjoyable read from start to finish for the musically inclined, it covers a wide range of genres, as you'd expect from his show On the Beat, a former fixture on Radio Merseyside, but there is much else besides. I didn't realise, for instance, that broadcasting and writing about music had been, in effect, merely a hobby for him until the mid-1990s and that for over thirty years he had a day job as an actuary - and appears to have been efficient and well-respected in that entirely different field too.

 Personal chapters entitled "A Day in the Life" alternate in the book with those more focussed on music, though the distinction isn't a hard and fast one, as music is bound up with so much of his life anyway. The memoir draws on material in his many existing books, taking to heart the advice of his friend, Beatles press officer Tony Barrow, "Rework your catalogue", but the chapters about his day job and his schooldays also have considerable interest because of his knack for selecting the telling detail.

No Off Switch: of Andy Kershaw and others

 I was sorry to hear of Andy Kershaw's death.  As he presented programmes on BBC Radios 1, 3 and 4 there will almost certainly be a tribute to him on one station or another in the coming days but in the meantime I can recommend his very entertaining, full-throttle autobiography, aptly entitled No Off Switch. 

 It's mentioned in the piece below, reposted from 2012, about Music in the Air, a radio documentary series about the history of music radio, presented by Paul Gambaccini: 

 

 Turn on, tune in, tape dropout ...  

 

There have been various programmes on the radio to commemorate the fact that it's now ninety years since the BBC started broadcasting. This post isn't going to be a digest of them all but one series, Music in the Air, might be of particular interest to readers of this blog. It's a comprehensive history of radio in the US and UK, presented by the Beeb's American import Paul Gambaccini (above); you can find available episodes here and listen to them via BBC iPlayer. [see note at end]

Episode Two, The Moondog Years, presumably concentrates on Alan Freed. It won't be available on iPlayer until after its transmission next Tuesday night, but I have heard Episode One, which takes us from the medium's very beginnings, with lots of archive audio, though the very first radio broadcast didn't survive and it seems we have to take the broadcaster's word that it actually happened. (Only a friend was listening, apparently.)

There's a bit of personal Gambaccini reminiscence thrown in at the beginning of the first programme - the shock of hearing his father swear and rush to turn the set off as rock'n'roll began blasting out, which had the unintended effect of causing the young Gambo to cleave unto the music ever after - but after that it's a more general account which could have been presented equally well by any number of people, so Episode Two, whose title promises a greater emphasis on rock'n'roll and the beginnings of modern disc jockeying, will probably be more interesting. And perhaps in a later episode there will be some insights into the Radio 1 environment which Gambaccini entered.

Rock & Roll Man (musical about Alan Freed)

On Saturday I went to see Rock & Roll Man, an agreeable musical about Alan Freed, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre; this week it's playing at the Lighthouse arts centre in Poole, and if you are within reach it's worth a visit.

As far as I know that will be the end of the production's short UK tour though it deserves a longer life. The show had a three-month Off-Broadway run in 2023; this British production has retained Constantine Maroulis as Freed, and the passion and conviction which he brings to the role are a big part of its success.

Alan Freed was a hugely influential DJ in the 1950s; he not only popularised the term "rock'n'roll" but even copyrighted it (a stricture which proved impossible to enforce). He was eventually undone by a payola scandal (the then-common practice of accepting bribes for playing records), though it seems he was a scapegoat; others such as the fresh-faced Dick Clark, more acceptable to the authorities, got away with it. That's putting it very broadly - there is much more detail in the Freed biography Big Beat Heat by John A. Jackson.

Neil Brand's radio play Stan repeated today on Radio 4 Extra

 

Not to be confused with a later television adaptation, Stan, Neil Brand's 2004 radio play about Stan Laurel, has just been broadcast again on Radio 4 Extra and will be available on BBC iPlayer for the next thirty days.

 

Stan, the radio drama, is very good indeed and a natural for the medium; the TV version doesn't simply add visuals but has been considerably reworked: we see scenes from the pair's past rather than their simply being recounted by the elderly Stan. Nothing wrong with that, but the intimacy of the radio play, and in particular that feeling of luck and privilege in being magically present, unseen, at the last meeting of these two great clowns is diluted.

Crying My Heart Out For You: the flop which made Sedaka a hitmaker

 

Crying My Heart Out For You is one of my favourite Neil Sedaka songs.

It's not wildly original, and was not a hit in the US or UK when it first came out - Italy is the only country which seems to have warmed to it - but for me the anguished wails which bookend this simple tale of love lost make the recording.

His later songs might have become more artful but Sedaka retained his love of doo wop. In 1993 he took part in a live radio broadcast hosted by the DJ Cousin Brucie and was so taken with the superb acapella group 14 Karat Soul, also appearing, that he sang a few impromptu numbers with them, including Earth Angel. These are understandably less than perfect - "I goofed it, I goofed it!" as he shouts when he messes up a couple of lines on the Penguins' classic - but there is obvious love and enthusiasm in the performance.

Leaves off Snodgrass (after posting the following supplementary observations)

 

If you've read the earlier post about alternative Beatles histories, here are more thoughts about Snodgrass, the short story by Ian R. McLeod which imagines the group achieving success without John Lennon.

In that earlier piece I had been relying on my memories of the original story and the film adaptation (above, with Ian Hart as Lennon); since then I have reacquainted myself with both, and it's interesting to note the differences between the two.

The Fabulous Beatles - literally

Listening the other day to Ray Connolly being interviewed by Tim Haigh on BooksPodcast about his novella "Sorry, Boys, You Failed The Audition", I remembered that it is well worth reading.

 

There have been earlier attempts to evoke the Beatles in imaginative ways, some of which I'll discuss below, but Connolly has the distinct advantage of having known the group well, especially John Lennon - he's also written a biography of Lennon and, according to the critic Philip French, the protagonist played by David Essex in Connolly's film That'll Be the Day was based in part on John. (I haven't seen this claim made by anyone else but Jim McLaine's relationship with his mother does seems to resemble that between Lennon and his stern-but-loving Aunt Mimi.)

 

 With the additional advantage of coming from the same area, Connolly has the trick of the group members' individual voices in his novella in a way that some others, including the American writer Mark Shipper, in an otherwise creditable comic account of the group's rise and fall, cannot manage quite so convincingly; small wonder that in the podcast Connolly couldn't help admitting, in response to the interviewer's praise, that he was quite pleased with the book himself.

Sans Everything

In 2019 I wrote a piece about a 78 rpm record which I'd picked up at a jumble sale or record fair in Glasgow in 1975 or 1976.

The disc was credited to the Harry Donaldson Orchestra, the vocalist one Sanky Franks. The side I preferred began with a voice - Donaldson? The producer? - advising: "Hey Sanky, try to get a kick out of it!" - and as far as I'm concerned he did.

Farewell, My Lady Nickerteen

 

D.J. Taylor, who celebrated the songs of Allan Smethurst, AKA the Singing Postman, in a 2010 radio documentary, announced today on social media that the troubadour's muse Molly Bayfield (the Molly Windley who "smokes like a chimbley" in his most famous song) had  died.

Smethurst's songs have considerable charm although the simpler world he describes seems so remote now that for a moment it seemed astonishing to think that the woman who inspired his most famous number had still been around for the first quarter of the 21st century.

A BBC News article by Laura Devlin describes the day, momentous only in retrospect, when Smethurst visited his old schoolfriends, Albert Bayfield, and his wife, Molly, in the seaside village of Mundesley, on the North Norfolk coast:They shared a few roll-up cigarettes over lunch and a walk on the beach, with Molly thinking "nothing more of it".