In the summer of 2004 I went to look for Johnny Moran.
I had heard various stories about him. How he was a
drunk, a down-and-out, a charity case. Some time in
the ‘90s, the Sheffield Star even reported his death.
I knew Johnny was still alive, or had been in 1997 at
least, when Paul, a television producer friend of
mine, tracked him down.
Paul wanted Johnny to take part in a programme he was
making celebrating the 30th anniversary of BBC Radio
One, Britain’s first national pop music station. His
idea was to recreate, with the original cast, the
famous photograph taken at the launch of Radio One in
September 1967.
The picture is part of the iconography of Sixties’
Britain, as familiar as those black and white shots of
The Beatles, or Mary Quant in a mini-skirt.
Radio One was an awfully big deal back then.
Especially to teenagers like me, products of the
post-World War Two baby boom. Because of the unique
nature of the broadcasting landscape in Britain,
determined by the foundation of the quasi-governmental
BBC in 1927, there was no legal radio station in the
mid-Sixties that could satisfy our burning desire to
hear Supremes and Rolling Stones records.
We heard their songs on pirate radio and foreign
stations, but on mainland Britain, bizarrely, nobody
more or less was allowed to play them. The BBC
occasionally gave the hit records of the day a spin,
but mostly took its lead from its first, patrician,
Director General Lord Reith, and strictly rationed the
amount of pop music permitted to reach the nation’s
impressionable young ears. The BBC’s idea of popular
music was Hot Diggety, Hot Diggety, Ooh What You Do to
Me? Britain, huh?
So we were more than ready for the first wave of disc
jockeys, and there they were in that photo; the
nation’s disc spinners – young, shiny, over-eager -
arranged on the steps of All Souls, the church
adjacent to Broadcasting House in Portland Place,
twenty-two of them in all; Pete Murray, Ed Stewart,
and John Peel on the front row, Tony Blackburn and
Kenny Everett at the back, Terry Wogan in the middle,
left-hand side, and then a bunch of guys with whom you
are probably less familiar.
Johnny was one of those. Paul and I had worked with
Johnny in the late ‘70s at Radio Hallam, the
commercial station in Sheffield, which hired him to
present the breakfast show (“Johnny Moran is your man,
He’s gonna wake you up every day, Johnny Moran is your
man, He’s gonna get you up and on your way”) after his
Radio One career fizzled out.
By 1997, Johnny, who was reportedly 52 – although that
would have made him implausibly young when he started
- and still living in Sheffield, had, according to
London’s Sunday People who published a feature marking
the anniversary of Radio One’s launch, been unemployed
for four years.
Big tragedy, eh? Unemployed disc jockey. Among the
problems facing mankind in the first decade of this
dangerous new century, a worldwide lack of employment
opportunities for purveyors of music and chat need not
exercise you for long. Who, not to put too fine a
point on it, gives a stuff about an old disc jockey?
Well, I do, because I am one; of which more later.
But maybe I am not alone. Our relationship to the
radio is a curiously intimate one. Think about it.
Unlike cinema, theatre, TV, any other medium you care
to mention, radio is almost always received alone.
Should a second person come into the equation, the
radio will invariably be switched off.
Consider your own listening; in the bath, in the car,
cleaning your teeth in the morning. Just you and the
radio. As the comedian Paul Whitehouse told radio
critic Gillian Reynolds, “There’s a familiarity about
it that I can’t quite describe.”
There was a time when the wireless set was a piece of
furniture in the corner of the room, around which the
family would gather to hear Mr Chamberlain declare
peace in our time, or to laugh at The Goons. But no
more. The radio whispers directly into your ear.
I grew up “searching for Luxembourg,” like Van
Morrison. A teenager, listening on my own,
transistor radio under the bedclothes – in bed with a
tranny, as we used to say in those innocent times -
adjusting the aerial frantically to catch Sunday
night’s top twenty show riding in and out on the
infuriatingly directional medium wave; adjusting my
own aerial as well - solitary pleasures - fantasising
about Michelle from the youth club, the first girl I
was ever aware of. Tall and gawky, with long fair
hair, mini-skirt emphasizing the gawkiness, in the
sixties-style. Squinting behind thick bottle bottom
lenses.
It was the short sightedness as much as anything that
did it for me, giving her an awkwardness and
vulnerability I have always found appealing, and
which, as we shall discover, has got me into some
trouble over the years with one or two of those
listeners in thrall to that indescribable familiarity
of radio to which Paul Whitehouse referred.
A chap called Barry Alldis presented the top twenty
show on Luxembourg. Forty years later I can still
remember his catchphrase, “This is your DJ B.A.”
Clearly, they did not feel the need for teams of top
comedy scriptwriters back then.
It was a different job in those days. A transatlantic
accent and a certain slickness were the main
pre-requisites. Nobody was asking you to be funny, or
interview the prime minister.
Luxembourg was a bizarre station in many ways, heavily
dependent financially on a turgid nightly programme
sponsored by and starring an American evangelist with
the unlikely name of Garner Ted Armstrong.
(I should make it clear at this point that I am not
about to embark on a definitive history of radio in
Britain; there are plenty of those already, written by
chaps with too many biros in their inside pockets)
Garner Ted’s programme (Or should that be just plain
Ted? Who knows?) was called The World Tomorrow, and
went out at 7.30 in the evening around the time
Luxembourg switched from foreign language programmes
to English. There is no evidence that one single soul
was saved, or even that anyone listened.
Johnny Moran, who was a staff announcer at Luxembourg
from 1964 to 1966, his first broadcasting job, once
told me that his duties included playing out the
Garner Ted Armstrong tapes.
“I would listen out for the first ten seconds of organ
music just to make sure the programme was going out,
and then go back to the office to put my own show
together,” said Johnny, “One time I put the tape on,
heard the music, and didn’t return until half an hour
later to find the whole tape had gone out backwards.
We didn’t get one complaint.”
Hardly surprising. Those of us tuning into forbidden
radio signals from northern Europe were seeking
salvation through Motown, rather than the more
traditional channels.
I have no memory of Garner Ted. I suspect I used to
plan my listening to begin once he was safely out of
the way. One voice I will never forget, though, from
my Luxembourg childhood and adolescence is that of
Horace Batchelor, a lugubrious sounding character with
what I now recognise to be a strong West Country
accent - I thought he was Canadian at the time - who
sought to persuade you he had a foolproof method of
winning the football pools, which for a few shillings
he would vouchsafe to you.
He used to pop up regularly during the top twenty
programme, which I believe he sponsored. “My name is
Horace Batchelor,” he would intone in the style of
Alfred Hitchcock’s introduction to his mystery half
hours, which were running on TV around the same time.
Even at 11 or 12 years old, my friends and I
recognised Horace Batchelor’s “infra-draw method” as
bullshit. If this guy knew how to win the pools, we
figured, why did he not just win the bloody pools
every week, instead of spending his time in a studio
recording his spiel about how he could help you win
the money?
Batchelor’s commercials always ended with his
soporific reading of the address to which suckers
should send their money, laboriously spelling out the
location of his post office box; Keynsham, spelt
K.E.Y.N.S.H.A.M.
You will struggle to find a British radio listener
aged 50 or above unable to spell the name of the small
Somerset town. The late Sixties art college group,
the Bonzo Dog Band, immortalized the place in an album
called Keynsham, and included Horace among the list of
characters in their song The Intro And The Outtro,
which was basically a wacky introduction to the
members of the band, including a number of imaginary
members; Adolf Hitler on vibes, big John Wayne on
xylophone, and General de Gaulle on accordion. “What
a team,” ran the song, “Zebra Kid and Horace Batchelor
on percussion…”
Batchelor had actually won the football pools. He
scooped £12,000 in 1947, which needless to say was a
lot of money in those days. Instead of spending the
cash on fast cars, wildly impractical futuristic
houses, and on developing an alcohol problem, as was
the tradition among working class pools winners – and
also suddenly wealthy young footballers like George
Best – Batchelor, who owned a herbal tobacco shop (how
much of a money-spinner can that have been?) in
Bristol, invested his winnings in his infra-draw
method.
His main costs must have been the advertisements on
Radio Luxembourg, which brought sacks full of postal
orders to his door. How could this be, when a bunch
of young boys, most of us barely of barmitzvah age,
sensed his ads were a bunch of hokey? To answer that,
you have to know how central to life in post-war
Britain the football pools were.
Back then, in the early Sixties, the government took
the same attitude to gambling as it did to pop music,
strictly rationing it. There were no casinos, no
lottery, no legal off-course betting on horse racing,
no booming property market. The only way you were
going to make a fortune if you were not born into it
was by winning the pools. The top prize of £75,000
represented riches beyond the dreams of avarice.
Viv Nicholson, a bottle blonde bottom-of-the-heap
housewife and mother from Castleford in the heart of
the Yorkshire coalfield, won the jackpot and vowed to
“spend, spend, spend.” We followed her progress in
the Sunday papers with a smile of grim satisfaction,
as she commenced a whirlwind descent through alcohol,
drugs, broken relationships, and motor accidents, into
eventual bankruptcy, confirming that money – which we
were never likely to get anyway – did not necessarily
bring happiness.
But that did not stop anybody doing the pools, which
involved predicting which of the following Saturday’s
football fixtures would end in a tie. When the
results of all the matches were announced on TV and
radio at 5 o’clock on Saturday evening Britain came to
a halt, fetched its pools coupon and a pencil stub
from behind the clock on the mantelpiece, and marked
an ‘x’ beside each drawn match. It was a
quasi-religious ritual, uniting the nation in a way
nothing had since Mr Churchill.
Winning the pools was everyone’s mum and dad’s dream,
which is why they wanted to believe in Horace, I
suppose. As far as I can gather, his method was to
identify a series of factors that made it likely a
game would end level; a match between local rivals,
for instance, the away team being a number of places
above the home team in the league, and so on – the
details need not detain us - on which basis points
were allocated, thus identifying the eight matches
most likely to be drawn.
It was a painstaking process, and appeared to have
been as successful in producing pools winners, as
Garner Ted Armstrong was in recruiting soldiers for
Jesus, and the various miracle spot creams they
advertised were in clearing up my acne.
Horace did not interest me or my friends. Our dreams
were different; playing for Manchester United, being
one of The Beatles, touching a girl’s naked breasts –
a particularly popular one in my circle – and in my
case, being on the radio.
I took a fairly circuitous route towards my dream.
Towards both my dreams actually, it being some years
before I felt able to broach the matter of naked
breast touching with any female of my acquaintance.
Neither the radio nor the breast ambition seemed
particularly feasible in the prevailing conditions,
although that did not stop me putting in a lot of
practice – for both – in the bedroom on my own.
My dad had a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder, with
little spools of tape, and big clunky plastic
switches, the type of machine you sometimes see in old
British spy movies.
It was largely useless, like many of the devices
around the house destined to end up in the cubby hole
under the stairs. Example: in common with many
households at the time, we had a set of chest
expanders. Pointless, except as some kind of medieval
torture device whose fearsome springs could rip out by
the roots all the hair from your upper body.
In the early 60s everybody seemed to aspire to the
personal style of 007. The ultimate aim was to have
beds that folded up into the walls, and curtains that
opened and closed with a push button – as soon as
anyone won the pools that was almost the first thing
they got – but as those were mostly beyond our means,
we made do with ash trays that whizzed round and
round and swallowed your cigarette end.
Anyway, the Grundig was part of this, and it was on
this machine that I did some of my early formative
work, recording the top twenty, and then inexpertly
dubbing my voice over Barry Alldis’s. “At number one
in the charts for the second week running, it’s The
Beatles.” That was one of mine.
Your dj B.A. was Australian, born in 1930 in
Newcastle, New South Wales. He did some broadcasting
at 4BH, a radio station in Brisbane, before moving to
London in 1955, a journey undertaken by armies of
ambitious Antipodeans around that time. He presented
the Top Twenty show on Radio Luxembourg from 1956 to
1964, and his was the first late night radio voice I
heard.
You heard the odd English voice on Luxembourg on taped
shows sponsored by record companies – David Jacobs,
Jimmy Savile – but the djs out there in what we came
to call the Grand Duchy, who did the late night
announcing, were mostly slick Canadians or Aussies
with experience of commercial radio. I was convinced
Johnny Moran was an Aussie, so when I met him it was
it was quite a surprise to discover he was English,
from the South somewhere, I think. You definitely
could not tell from his accent. He truly was the man
from nowhere.
Alldis went to Radio One and was in the famous
photograph in 1967, alongside Johnny, although he also
was not in its reconstruction, having succumbed to
cancer in 1982. I wondered what had happened to him.
That might seem a callous way to put it, but they
drift into your life, these voices, maybe even become
an important part of it, and then one day they are no
longer there. Quite suddenly in some cases.
Some die, like your d.j. BA. Some are sacked.
Mostly, they are sacked, and then they die. If you
are lucky, you may spot a 500-word obituary somewhere,
giving you a brief summary of how the twenty years
between their removal from the airwaves and their
journey to the great mixing desk in the sky were
passed.
