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.
Esta historia es de la edición September 2017 de The Oldie Magazine.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición September 2017 de The Oldie Magazine.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Travel: Retreat From The World
For his new book, Nat Segnit visited Britain’s quietest monasteries and islands to talk to monks, hermits and recluses
What is... a nail house?
Don’t confuse a nail house with a nail parlour. A nail house is an old house that survives as new building development goes on all around it.
Kent's stairway to heaven
Walter Barton May’s Hadlow Castle is the ultimate Gothic folly
Pursuits
Pursuits
The book that changed the world
On Marcel Proust’s 150th anniversary, A N Wilson praises his masterpiece, an exquisite comedy with no parallel
RIP the playboys of the western world
Charlie Methven mourns his dashing former father-in-law, Luis ‘the Bounder’ Basualdo, last of a dying breed
Arts
Arts
My film family's greatest hits
Downton Abbey producer Gareth Neame follows in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandmother, a silent-movie star
Books
Books
A lifetime of pin-ups
Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage. He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on