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Barry’s archive raid turned the radio into a time machine

Gerard O’donovan

Nostalgia is a strange thing. I’m pretty sure I never heard Jack Hylton’s joyfully upbeat 1930s dance band hit H’LO Baby before it graced the opening moments of Barry Humphries Forgotten Musical Masterpieces (Radio 2, Sunday). But I was totally swept up by it, carried off to warm, happy times. Times I couldn’t possibly remember, or travel back to, as they were three decades or more before I was born.

It was the before 88-year-old Humphries, creator of Dame Edna Everage, was born, too. So, while the show is framed as a wander down memory lane, it can equally be enjoyed as a delight-filled archaeological dig – well worth seeking out on BBC Sounds.

“In this three-part series I’m celebrating the centenary of the BBC – an institution that’s even older than me,” Humphries chortled at the outset, delighting in the “wizardry of wireless” and recalling (over a background track of The Laughing Policeman) how the “wonderful music and funny voices” emerging from his parents’ radio in the 1930s and 1940s inspired him to be an entertainer.

Cue Are You Having Any Fun? by Dick Bentley and his orchestra – another gloriously happy, entirely forgotten confection. Between the tracks, Humphries’ fond recollections of growing up in an anglophile Australia, swaddled in the music and entertainment of the “motherland” thousands of miles away in Britain, spoke volumes about the BBC’S “airwaves of influence” as an arm of the Commonwealth.

Tracks from Flanagan and Allen, George Formby, Noel Coward and Jack Payne followed, as did a particular gem, Dorrie Dene’s hilariously tongue-in-cheek 1933 Twiddling with the Knobs on the Radio – a great find and another brilliant example of “the delectable, albeit now rarely heard artists” who entertained listeners in radio’s earliest days. There were more, too, such as Violet Carson’s youthful recording of Bowton’s Yard, a hugely evocative musical snapshot of smalltown life in Lancashire between the wars (Carson would go on to play Ena Sharples on Coronation Street).

Seduced by the music, it was easy to let Humphries guide us through his “extensive research”, balancing factoids about technical innovation with the first song ever to mention radio in the lyrics, and a pithy explanation of the differences between the development of radio across the Atlantic and here.

“In America selling stuff was far more important than the content of the actual programmes – and seemingly still is” he said, not quite stifling a snigger.

By the end of this first part of three, Humphries had weaved his way to the founding of the BBC and the formidable figure of John (later Lord) Reith, although – fascinating as many of his facts were – there was never any doubting the thing that really mattered here was the music. His closing selection of wonders-i’d-never-heardbefore included Van and Schenck’s After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It and Lew Stone’s foot-tappingly apt I’ll B.b.c.-ing You (In Town Tonight). Every one a winner. I can’t wait to hear what he comes up with in the next two episodes.

The actress Glenda Jackson was born just two years after Humphries, in 1936. But you could hardly believe that she grew up in the same world, let alone at the same time as him. Her life and especially her career, as described to John Wilson in This Cultural Life (Radio 4, Saturday), had an air of absolute modernity to it.

Rising rapidly through 1960s theatre, television and film, she was always in the cultural vanguard, the darling of the great innovators of the era such as Peter Brook and Ken Russell, always looking forward with little or no room, apparently, for nostalgia or sentimentality. For her, the work was everything. Even when she won her two Oscars she was just too busy, she said, to attend the awards ceremonies.

An edited version of the interview was screened on BBC Four on Monday but, apart from being able to actually see the clips played, I’m not convinced the visuals added much. In fact, the radio version, at 15 minutes longer, had considerably more nuance and detail – especially regarding Jackson’s two-decade career as a Labour MP. Here, too, there was no backward glance for the stellar acting career she gave up for the cut and thrust of politics, and which she embraced again in 2017, after 23 years away.

As so often with Wilson, he managed to draw out, with seemingly minimal intervention on his part, not only the essence of Jackson’s personality but also what it is that makes her such a staggeringly good actress. A very fine interview, indeed.

Television & Radio

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2022-10-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/282514367422835

Daily Telegraph