Eventually I started occasionally listening to programmes, the news being the most regular daily fare. As a child it seemed to me that the radio carried news, while our telly in the living room seemed to be mainly for wrestling, Thunderbirds, Pogle’s Wood and NASA space missions. So naturally enough I felt myself privy to information that the rest of the family were sadly denied by TV. One broadcast was to provide some much-needed grist to my eager young conversational mill. In March 1967 a supertanker called the Torrey Canyon hit rocks between the Isles of Scilly and Cornwall, spilling over 30 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. It was one of the first real headline-grabbing environmental disasters, and was widely reported on the radio. The coastline of southern England and even the Brittany Coast was devastated.
My young mind was obviously keen to impart this urgent nugget to anyone who would listen. Mum was entertaining one of her friends with tea, biscuits and ‘grown-up talk’ and I was being frozen out of proceedings.
Eventually, when I could contain myself no more I blurted to her friend, ‘Have you heard about the Torrey Canyon disaster? It’s very bad.’
The two adults stared at me in silence for the briefest moment before bursting into fits of laughter. I consider this the sole reason I never moved into current affairs as a career.
At the age of six, we lived in a shack in the scrubby Essex woodland just north of Horndon on the Hill with Bob. It was here where I crystallised the notion that the radio was something that could be listened to for the pure enjoyment of its actual content rather than just the daft noises you could get out of it. This discovery was facilitated by the shack not having any mains electricity, which precluded telly. I listened to the radio because there was little else to do in the morning, or at night. The only outside entertainment coming into the shack was weekly copies of The Beano, Dandy and Victor and the various broadcasts on what Bob delightfully referred to as ‘the wireless’.
It was in this rural idyll that he would sit me down to listen to The Goon Show. These absurd tales with their endless parade of silly voices and effects punctuated by the elegant swing of Ray Ellington and the band or the incredible harmonica of Max Geldray were the soundtrack to my woodland years. No child could fail to be entertained by such madness; even if the majority of the jokes did go soaring over my head, the joy was implicit in the sound. Bob explained to me that he had listened to it as a boy and the shows were actually over ten years old! That seemed incredible to me, that I was listening to something made before I was born.
Despite being born in the television age, 1968 for me was my radio year. In the evening we’d all sit around the radio and just listen. I’m quite glad that I had the chance to experience family evenings in the same way my parents had. On one occasion listening to The Goons, I leaned against one of the supporting beams in the middle of the room in my pyjamas and slid down it to sit on the floor. As I did so, a one-inch splinter of wood buried itself in my back. I remember Bob doing his Eccles voice in an attempt to distract me from my howling as Mum dug the splinter out with the aid of Dettol, hot water and the business end of a safety pin.
During the day the radio was always on, just burbling away in the background. So one of my first solid memories is of Jimmy Young doing his recipes, with the assistance of ‘Raymondo’. There was something almost hypnotic about the timbre of his voice and the repetition of the instructions.
‘Take eight ounces of self-raising flour…’ Then he’d say it again but slower. ‘…That’s eight…ounces…of self-raising flour.’ After he’d told you the ingredients, Raymondo would pipe up with his Pinky and Perky high-pitched voice, ‘And this is what you do…’ I thought Raymondo was hilarious when I was five.
All the while the music of the day was burying itself in my mind, only to surface again decades later when I listened to Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2. It’s a really odd feeling to hear something that you haven’t heard in forty years. You feel an uneasy wave of familiarity even though the name of the song and the artist doesn’t ring a bell. The fact that radio was operating on me in this subliminal way, at a time when none of us knew what subliminal meant, has always made me aware of its power as a medium.
We moved back to Barking briefly in 1969. The only reason I am sure of this is that I remember watching Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the Moon from the vantage point of Granddad’s Parker Knoll reclining chair. I was blithely unaware of the significance of the events fuzzily unfolding on the screen in front of me. This was what most people nowadays cite as the single most important television moment, but I just thought the picture was rubbish.
Also in the mix was my Aunt Josie. She was a vital conduit to the teenage culture of the day. She and her mates Lynn and Helen would spin Motown and Trojan records and ensure that the kitchen wireless was tuned to the new Radio 1 whenever they were around. The sounds of Detroit and Jamaica were now a fundamental part of my childhood in suburban Essex. The turbulent sixties ended in just that fashion, with Sid running off with Peggy the barmaid. Nan’s seemingly unassailable rule had been broken along with her heart and her spirit, and she was never the same again. Those of us left in the wake of this disaster left the Tap and Barking behind us and carried on. Nan and Josie went to live with Auntie Pat in Suffolk. Uncle Gerald went to work overseas as a diving engineer, and we went back to Bob who had left the shack for a new home.
We moved to Stanford Le Hope in summer 1969 and, as I was growing older, so music and radio were becoming more and more a part of my life. Our house was a former manse and conveniently situated next door to Stanford Junior School where I would be a pupil for the next four years. It was here that I met up with people who had older brothers. And older brothers had record collections. Children are slavishly populist by nature so it takes an outsider to show you what kind of alternatives might be available to mainstream culture.
Mark Tindale’s brother David was a guitar-playing hipster deep into his Lou Reed and David Bowie. The record player in his room was on a plywood board suspended from the ceiling on wires. I remember going round to his house and picking up the guitar and swinging the neck round and accidentally hitting the record player, sending the stylus skidding noisily across the surface of his brand new copy of Transformer. I was never allowed into his room again. Brian Gooden’s brother John worked for a record label in London so we had all kinds of unknown white label treats available to listen to at Brian’s. Every Thursday I watched Top of the Pops religiously. It came on immediately after Tomorrow’s World. Now I could see those bands who were playing the great songs I was listening to on the radio: Slade, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and my own favourites, The Sweet.
For Christmas one year I got my own small transistor radio. It was a black plastic model with a volume dial, a tuning dial and a socket for an earpiece. My nights were often spent cruising the ether looking for more strange sounds. Every Sunday I would listen to the chart countdown show for what new entries had arrived and how the bands had fared since last week. Some of my friends were so clued in that they recorded their favourite tracks with the condenser microphones that came with their cassette decks. Listening to Radio 1 on medium wave on a Sunday night, however, meant that your enjoyment of the show was usually marred by the repetitive call signal of Radio Prague, a sonorous brass and woodwind jingle that would play for five seconds, then a ten second pause, then it would play again. This would annoyingly go on for the entire hour of the chart countdown no matter how much you tried to fine-tune your receiver.
Mum always had the radio on during the day, so whenever I came home at lunchtime I’d hear what was on. She can’t have been listening to Radio 1 because I often heard comedy shows like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, Hello Cheeky and I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. Years later I appeared as a panellist on Clue alongside Tim Brooke-Taylor, who didn’t seem that