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-   -   The BBC Light programme (https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=169506)

Malcolm G6ANZ 29th Jul 2020 8:36 am

The BBC Light programme
 
Just heard on R3 that the light programme was launched today 75 years age.
:thumbsup::thumbsup:

David G4EBT 31st Jul 2020 8:53 pm

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Thanks for the memory Malcolm!

A glance back at the programmes of the era through to the late 1950s will confirm that The Light Programme was always 75 years of age! :)

In fairness, the programme content was aimed at adults, and I was only six when the Light Programme started. What little programming there was for children such as 'Children's Hour' was on the Home Service and frightfully middle class. It was from 5-6pm each night and ended with a plummy voiced 'Uncle Mac' signing off with 'Goonight children - everywhere'. 'Goodnight' at 6pm? I don't think so! The programme took its name from a verse by Longfellow: "Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, comes a pause in the day's occupations. That is known as the Children's Hour."

The programme's closure in 1964 following an enormous decline in listenership—by the end of 1963, the number of listeners had fallen to 25,000. I was said that most of them were "middle-aged and elderly ladies who liked to be reminded of the golden days of their youth", and that young listeners had instead turned to watching television, listening to the BBC Light Programme or to pirate radio. There was considerable complaint about the closing of the service and questions were raised in Parliament.

But come 6.45pm - all kids were off the street and indoors to listen to 'Dick Barton - Special Agent' which used to scare us witless:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Barton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zye-tkVotp8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64AZ1IjwzbQ

On Saturday mornings there was 'Children's favourites, with 'Uncle Mac,' whose opening words "Hello children, everywhere!" - a catch-phrase that was a modification of his much earlier closing words "Goodnight children, everywhere" on Children's Hour. Typical children's requests - which are the time seemed to be play every Saturday Morning - were:

'Big Rock Candy Mountain' - Burl Ives:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3lYqTAlnE

'Albert and the Lion' - Stanley Holiday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaw-savyK0s

'Nellie the Elephant' Mandie Miller:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Rh9zRdXxA

I look back with incredulity that there was ever a time when programmes such as these attracted audiences that todays broadcaster could only dream about:

'Worker's Playtime'
'Billy Cotton Band Show'
'Take it from Here'
'Sing Something Simple'
'Have a Go and ask Pickles', with Wilfred Pickles. ("What's on the table, Mabel?" and "Give him the money, Barney").
'Twenty Questions', with Gilbert Harding ('Rudest Man in Britain')
'Life with the Lyons'.

Most bizarrely, 'Educating Archie'.

The said 'Arche' was the ventriloquist's dummy Archie Andrews, the ventriloquist being Peter Brough. Really quite surreal that such a visual act could gain a following on a radio programme, but it did and it had 15 million listeners. Its fan club boasted 250,000 members, and it was so successful that in 1950, after only four months on the air, it won the Daily Mail's Variety Award. It seemed odd to me even as a kid - even odder now. 'What next', I thought - a high wire act or magician on the radio?

The content of the Home Service programmes was even more antediluvian!

Showing my age - how times change.

barretter 31st Jul 2020 9:44 pm

Re: The BBC light programme
 
"Archie's" girlfriend was one Julie Andrews!

Richard_FM 31st Jul 2020 10:29 pm

Re: The BBC light programme
 
I do wonder how many people know of Life with the Lyons from the John Lennon album?

Radio Wrangler 31st Jul 2020 10:39 pm

Re: The BBC light programme
 
My brother and myself were most definitely not fans of sing something simple. It seemed to come on when we were in the family car coming home from Grandma's

"Sing something sinful" we used to croon along with it. (next came the 'just spew and cry' bit)

David

McMurdo 31st Jul 2020 11:20 pm

Re: The BBC light programme
 
I was tuning along the dial on a vintage radio and came across the Steve Wright in the Afternoon show. He did a bit about it and was playing some clips of the opening programme. He was somewhat critical of the presenting style...

barretter 31st Jul 2020 11:32 pm

Re: The BBC light programme
 
But there were good programmes, "Hancock's half-hour" (Hancock too was in "Educating Archie"), "Beyond our Ken", a bit later, "The Navy Lark" and of course there was "The goon show" on the Home Service.
Radio audiences were massive in the early 50s because most people didn't have a TV set.

Ted Kendall 1st Aug 2020 12:00 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by McMurdo (Post 1275513)
I was tuning along the dial on a vintage radio and came across the Steve Wright in the Afternoon show. He did a bit about it and was playing some clips of the opening programme. He was somewhat critical of the presenting style...

He can talk - shouty little man...

Junk Box Nick 1st Aug 2020 12:24 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler (Post 1275508)
My brother and myself were most definitely not fans of sing something simple.

Serenade Radio - 5pm each Sunday.

Junk Box Nick 1st Aug 2020 12:37 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by McMurdo (Post 1275513)
I was tuning along the dial on a vintage radio and came across the Steve Wright in the Afternoon show. He did a bit about it and was playing some clips of the opening programme. He was somewhat critical of the presenting style...

I can find plenty to criticise about Steve Wright's presenting style. "Hate the show Steve."

Had to endure him at a place I was working for a period. Fortunately the 32 year old (I believe that's the age group Radio 2 aims at these days) who used to put him on left. All the other blokes breathed a sigh of relief and we worked to a background of wonderful silence from then on. And don't mention Jeremy Vine...

Uncle Bulgaria 1st Aug 2020 12:46 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
As a thirty year old, I hate shouty radio. I have got a large number of cassettes of the Goon Show, and my brothers and I continue the tradition of my grandfather who, even in his dotage, would still remember his Bluebottle impression!

I suppose it's easy enough to think how unsophisticated radio was at the time, considering all the effort since that's gone into focus groups, the psychology of sound, the compression to keep people's attention...

I recently heard Richard Dimbleby's report from Belsen, and was struck by how rare it is nowadays to have a radio presenter talking really seriously about a subject that matters. There is no unsophistication there. What a presenter.

R3's all right as far as adult programming goes, and the presenters don't sound like infants. I'd be glad to have Sean Rafferty at my ideal dinner party. The man must be the raconteur to end all raconteurs.

Radio Wrangler 1st Aug 2020 4:32 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
You only have to listen to a few old documentary and news reports before you realise just how far modern radio content is 'dumbed-down'. R3 is the exception because it is anchored to a particular sort of music rather than to a particular age group. Other than R3, if you're older than 32 or have an attention-span longer that a 3-minute track, the BBC doesn't cater for you. The people who enjoyed John Peel so much in the seventies get nothing.

Jeremy Vine has chosen to specialise in aspects of current affairs which are so depressing, he must be having a measurable effect on the suicide rate.

Davd

Craig Sawyers 1st Aug 2020 7:37 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
The thing that gets me about the media in general, but the BBC in particular, is that the news coverage is about a single topic only. Brexit/Elections/Brexit/Elections/Winter Storms and flooding/Covid-19. There is no balance, just nearly 100% saturation coverage of the single topic at any one time. It is no longer "current affairs", it is "current affair"

Makes you wish for the simpler radio times of the light programme and the home service, listened to through an open chassis valve radio stuffed in the bottom of a cocktail cabinet in the corner of our room in the 60's.

Craig

Ted Kendall 1st Aug 2020 8:08 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Richard Dimbleby was profoundly changed by his war reporting experiences. He had seen the consequences of war on many fronts, including the Western Desert, the D-Day landings and the subsequent push through Europe, besides flying twenty missions with Bomber Command, whose casualty rate was a hair over 50% (a colleague, Guy Byam, was lost on such a mission). Belsen, however, shook him to the core, and informed his public devotion to the institutions and ceremonies of State as instruments of civilisation, the abrogation of which he had seen at Belsen. The hushed tones he customarily used on State occasions were mercilessly and hilariously sent up in The Goon Show, but, as he pointed out, he was frequently in circumstances where to speak like a station announcer would disrupt the ceremony. Jonathan Dimbleby's biography is well worth reading, as is Richard Dimbleby - Broadcaster, a book of tributes published after his death in aid of cancer research.

As for the current Radio 2, I'm all right with Ken Bruce, who reminds me of Kenneth Horne with his witty but unfailingly polite way with colleagues and guests, particularly some of the exhibitionists who turn up on Popmaster. Otherwise...

Ted Kendall 1st Aug 2020 8:16 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers (Post 1275541)
The thing that gets me about the media in general, but the BBC in particular, is that the news coverage is about a single topic only. Brexit/Elections/Brexit/Elections/Winter Storms and flooding/Covid-19. There is no balance, just nearly 100% saturation coverage of the single topic at any one time. It is no longer "current affairs", it is "current affair"

Makes you wish for the simpler radio times of the light programme and the home service, listened to through an open chassis valve radio stuffed in the bottom of a cocktail cabinet in the corner of our room in the 60's.

Craig

Jeremy Paxman has pointed out that the sole effect of much news coverage is to engender misery and a feeling of impotence in the listener - a flood of gloom and inhumanity about which he can do nothing at all. I sometimes think that "inform, educate and entertain" has been replaced by "berate, bully and bamboozle".

Craig Sawyers 1st Aug 2020 8:39 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Agreed. That is why BBC4 is such a shining light in the ethos of the Beeb's "inform, educate and entertain". It occupies the territory that BBC2 used to own.

Nuvistor 1st Aug 2020 9:40 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers (Post 1275547)
Agreed. That is why BBC4 is such a shining light in the ethos of the Beeb's "inform, educate and entertain". It occupies the territory that BBC2 used to own.

Which always makes me wonder “What is the point of BBC2 now”.
There are a couple of programmes on Radio 2 I like to listen to but very little of the BBC radio and TV suits me, sad to say.
Don Black has a series of about 24 shows a year on Radio 2, I enjoy listening to him. Not to everyones taste but suits me.

turretslug 1st Aug 2020 9:55 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers (Post 1275547)
Agreed. That is why BBC4 is such a shining light in the ethos of the Beeb's "inform, educate and entertain". It occupies the territory that BBC2 used to own.

:thumbsup: +1. Not forgetting the World Service- John Tusa had the courage to shift it along from its "Empire Broadcasting" stasis, it's still somewhat "worthy" but there is quite a bit of cross-fertilisation of material with R4.

Colin

Peter.N. 1st Aug 2020 10:11 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
The light programme and its contents were one of my earliest memories, I was 6 when it started.:)

Peter

PaulM 1st Aug 2020 10:19 am

Re: The BBC light programme
 
The 'Light Programme' was the nearest a Reithian BBC could reach to 'entertain'.

Something which amuses me is the BBC claim to the phrase 'inform, educate and entertain'.
The phrase was actually nicked from David Sarnoff of RCA/NBC!
All Reith did was change the order of the words.

See: https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english.../08_no6_04.pdf

Even the BBC admits that Reith plagiarised it, but you have to look hard. It's here:

https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/...asting-company
See : 'From Company to Corporation', second para.

I find it ironic that the core BBC ethos began in the much derided world of American radio.

Reith did not like the 'Light Programme' (or television) and became ever grumpier as he aged.
A book written by his daughter, Marista Leishman, My father – Reith of the BBC is a very revealing insight into the man's hypocrisy, snobbery and day-to-day nastiness.
He was not all the Corp would like you to believe.

Best regards,

Paul M


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