The Dark Side Of Radio One

Craig Brown loved listening to the station when it began, 50 years ago. But beneath the DJs’ cheesy grins, there lurked malice and paranoia.

In 1959, an American disc jockey called Peter Tripp, the inventor of the Top 40, gained a place in The Guinness Book of Records after deejaying non-stop for eight days and eight nights, or 201 hours in all.

Tripp had, in a way, fulfilled the dream of every DJ, before and after: to talk and talk and talk, without interruption, for hour upon hour, day after day.

‘I’d like nothing better than to broadcast all day if someone would let me,’ writes our very own Tony Blackburn in his autobiography The Living Legend (1985). ‘To me a microphone is another human being I’m holding a conversation with – hopefully an attractive woman.’

Fifty years ago, on September 30th 1967, the very first Radio One disc jockeys assembled for an inaugural group photograph on the steps of All Souls Church. The choice of location was surely ironic, but no one seems to have let them know. They are all beaming away, happy as Larry, the sole exception being the late Kenny Everett (top row, third from the left). As Tony Blackburn observed a few years later, ‘People are a problem for Kenny... I think he’s a bit mixed- up.’

It’s a curious photograph, as ghostly, in its way, as a group portrait of soldiers marching to the Somme, with over half now dead and buried, among them Kenny Everett, Jimmy Young (top row, second left), Terry Wogan (middle row, second left), Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart (front row, second left) and John Peel (bottom row, first right). Nowhere to be seen is Jimmy Savile (later Sir Jimmy Savile OBE) who was to join the team a year later, in 1968.