Red Light, Red Faces
The two o’clock news was always the same as the one o’clock bulletin. This was not because nothing happened in Newcastle over lunchtime for its eponymous radio station to report. I’m sure that somewhere in that big city a police car chased some urchins, a cat got stuck in a tree, or a man bit a dog – the classic definition of news. But if so, these earth-shattering events would not appear in ‘the two’, because all the journalists spent the intervening sixty minutes in the pub. There, they would down four or five pints, put the world to rights, then lurch back into the studios as if nothing had happened. Which, indeed, if you heard the next news bulletin, appeared to be the case. The Tyne Bridge could have collapsed, Newcastle United might have signed Pele, but the two o’clock bulletin would have remained blithely unaware. Since the pub was just over the road, the newsreader could finish his last pint of Exhibition Ale at two minutes to the hour and still make it into the studio on time, to announce the (lack of) news.
This was usually Charlie Forster, possessor of a stentorian voice, further ennobled by the amount of cigarettes he smoked. Which he did in the building of course, for this was the late Seventies. Settling rapidly on his seat, lit ciggie teetering on an overflowing ash tray, he would clear his throat, wipe the foam of the last pint from his moustache, and read the hour-old non-newsy news bulletin all over again, with impressive sang froid. Although his composure was admittedly tested when his colleagues, fresh from the pub and giggling tipsily, arrived in the studio, took out their own cigarette lighters, and set fire to the script he was reading, live on air. This caused the last story to be read rather fast. Charlie heroically made it to the end without burning his fingers, gave a V sign to his beloved colleagues, and said ‘That’s BBC Radio Newcastle news, and now the weather ….’ An embarrassed pause followed, as he realised he’d left the weather script in the pub. So with great aplomb, he looked out of the window and said, with total journalistic conviction, ‘it’s raining’. This at least was accurate, up to the minute reporting.
Those were different times, to be sure, in which Health and Safety had not gone mad, so much as AWOL. Practical jokes were everywhere. The star presenter, a man rejoicing in the name ‘Frank Wappat’, was infamous for arriving late into the studio, just as his signature tune came to an end. He would sit down, pluck a record from a cardboard sleeve, don his headphones, open the fader and turn to the microphone …. which was not there, removed by his producer, to teach him a lesson.
I was a student, taking all the shifts I could to gain experience. Sometimes this meant reading the ‘What’s On’ diary. Alexei Sale used to joke that the West Midlands What’s On was ‘a big piece of paper with ‘sod all’ written on it’, and the Radio Newcastle version was similarly sparse. But it did contain traps for the unwary, such as reports on activities at Biddick Farm Arts Centre, which I once spoonerised on air as ‘The Biddick Arm Farts Centre’. This prompted my esteemed colleagues to rush into the studio, circling the microphone, hands in their armpits, making some. Spooner, incidentally, was a Victorian academic, Warden of my college in Oxford, rumoured to have once rusticated an errant undergraduate thus: ‘you have hissed my mystery lectures. You tasted the whole worm. You will leave by the next town drain’. Quite how he became a globally-renowned adjective is a history no mystery lecture could ever solve.
Most of my subsequent on air work was recorded, including a rather weird period when I was doing ostensibly serious journalism whilst also freelancing as the voice of Dove (‘with one quarter moisturising cream’, I would intone, trying to be as velvety as possible). It’s easy when it’s recorded. Those early live embarrassments left me with eternal sympathy for people who speak into microphones live, for a living.
Though not perhaps for Mike Shaft. He was an American DJ on British commercial radio. (I’m not entirely convinced that was his real name). He seemed to know nothing about music, or for that matter the English language, or Italian cookery, once introducing a song as ‘this is Life is a Mine Stroan, by Eye Ock’. I’m fairly sure 10CC were not in love with him. And last year I heard a BBC presenter, who did not seem all that au fait with classical music, introduce a tune by a Finnish composer she called ‘Cy Beelius’. He sounded like a gangster from Karelia Street in the Bronx. I bet he hung around with other young hoodlums like Jo Pan, Shoe Bert and Mo Sart.
Punctation can be cruel, too. I once heard an American newsreader on a New York radio station - WANK I think was its call sign - who referred to ‘the United Nations Secretary: General Kurt Waldheim’. He probably took good dictation in the Security Council. And I loved the enthusiasm of another newsreader who said ‘it’s three o’clock Greenwich: - mean time, here’s the news’.
Yes, it is indeed perilous, broadcasting live to a grateful nation, whether sober or not. Even in these more serious times, where few radio scripts burn with real flames, all kinds of embarrasment can happen when the red light goes on and the mike is live. Just last night I heard an enthusiastic-sounding arts presenter on BBC Radio 4 – like NPR, with knobs on – introducing an item about the immodestly-named ‘Stone of Destiny’, on which English monarchs have perched uncomfortably for their coronation for about fifteen hundred years. It is better known as the ‘Stone of Scone’. Last night the unfortunate presenter initially called it ‘the stone of skon’ (as if it had jam and clotted cream on it), then had another go with ‘skoan’ (the posh English pronunciation for those baked delights), before introducing a genuine Scottish person, who immediately interrupted, acidly, ‘it’s skoon’. Which I suspect everyone listening already knew, and was shouting at the radio.
Oh well. It could have been worse. My friend John Smithson once introduced Frank Wappat on air, and accidentally spoonerized his name. It took the entire radio station, tipsy news readers and all, half an hour to stop laughing. But nobody called in to complain. The populace was probably too busy biting dogs.
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