Dream jobs are hard to come by. Look at
lovely Tony Blackburn. When he was a small lad, he dreamt of being a
milkman. Up at 3, out, delivering bottles and creams and yoghurts. A
merry soul with a kind smile and maybe the odd joke along his route.
But fate played a cruel hand and he became a disc jockey. Which is
probably just as well as no one has a milkman anymore and he would be
alone, unemployed and unskilled by now and probably ending his days
in a dark basement with a shotgun in his mouth. Fortunately he is on
Radio Two. Which I know for a fact is on the fourth floor.
I myself have done the odd bit of
'jocking'. In 1972 David Hamilton took two weeks off to have his hair
done, and I was invited to fill in. Now people do say that sitting in
a comfortable room taking records out of sleeves and putting them on
a record player, playing them, muttering in between some incoherent
rubbish and then playing another record does not constitute hard
work. But it does. I am not the only one who thought that, as the
Producer, Pat Bennington agreed that the programme was 'bloody hard
work'. Bennington left after the first three days citing a religious
conversion, and was replaced by the more progressive Geoff Lyons. We
had some fun on that show, I can tell you. People would ring in, and
almost all of them could not believe what they were hearing. David
came back after just six days and was amazed at what I had done. I
still remember him sitting there, his head in his hands, looking at
the show listening figures and wondering how he was going to equal
them.
I did offer my services a couple more
times but they said that once was enough, and on reflection that's
true. They don't want to give their audience too much of a good
thing, and then the audience gets spoiled and expects good things all
the time and when the good things are not as good as the audience
wants then they get all noisy and animated and demand their money
back from frightened box office staff.
This did lead to a brief spell on City
Radio. For those who don't know, the millionaire Hors Gorvitz started
a commercial radio station, and I was on the line up. In his
autobiography I am flattered to be referred to as 'someone who made
us all look good'. One in the eye for those bodkins at Radio Two I
think. I was to present the Overnight Express. A mixture of music and
entertainment with the odd phone in. I decided not to do the average
phone in, this was a chance to really push the envelope, to move
things into a new arena. The subjects I covered were areas untouched
by other presenters. Apostrophies. Pottery. Mowers. The show was an
overwhelming success, garnering much media attention, esp after that
man from Hastings said what he did about the Queen.
