There are a few more broadcasters I'd like to salute before bringing this occasional series to a conclusion. Gearing up to do my own podcasts (well, I've bought the microphone, anyway), I thought I'd attend a bit more carefully than normal to Russell Davies's regular BBC Radio 2 show this week (access it on the Radio 2 website here). Not that I don't enjoy it on a regular basis anyway, but as such a range of music and artists is included, I thought I'd pay a bit more attention to the links, to see just how he squeezes them all in and makes them seem of a piece in my personal quest for the secret of Broadcasting Man's Red Fire.
If you have read earlier entries in this series then you may remember that Ken Sykora got over the problem of selecting records by calling his 1970s show for Radio Clyde Serendipity with Sykora: provided some associative process, however tenuous, could be cited then just about anything went.
Which, following my own paperless trail, reminds me that Bob Holness of British TV quiz show Blockbusters fame actually hosted a programme of that title - I mean Anything Goes - on the BBC World Service. It enlivened many a late night/early morning for me when I was working as a security guard in the 1980s - though Holness's task was rather easier as the show was wall to wall listener requests, and even spoken word recordings, pastoral-tragical or whatever, were permitted.
Oddly, though, he chose Duke Ellington's Things Ain't What They Used to Be as the theme rather than the Cole Porter song suggested by the programme title, much as Hubert Gregg eschewed Thanks for the Memory and chose Nelson Riddle's arrangment of Time Was for his programme. Odd, that: is it about not being in thrall to one song, or prohibitive costs for regular use of particular songs? I think in Gregg's case it was about the title being foisted on him, and his shaping the programe, over time, to reflect his own particular enthusiasms (and how do I know that? Because I've now read his autobiography, which I'll discuss in the next entry).
What? No, that was a different Things ... And made different again when recorded by Max Bygraves. What? You haven't? Oh, but you must - at least once, anyway:
