Paul Hollingdale
Radio 2’s first presenter whose ‘light music’ show Breakfast Special pulled in 19 million listeners
PAUL HOLLINGDALE, who has died aged 83, was the first presenter to broadcast on BBC Radio 2 when it launched nearly 50 years ago. At 5.30 on the morning of Saturday September 30 1967, Hollingdale ushered in the new network with the first edition of Radio 2’s Breakfast Special, replacing the old Light Programme.
With the first track he played, Julie Andrews singing the title number from the film The Sound of Music (1965), Hollingdale set the tone. The network’s controller, Robin Scott, had promised listeners “the great and melodic storehouse of ‘light music’”, which by and large ignored the “latest pop”. In fact much of Hollingdale’s breakfast fare was bland, often featuring “lift music”, arrangements played by various BBC house orchestras to cut down on expensive and rationed “needle-time”.
With its disdain for chart hits and its overt appeal to older middle-of-the-road listeners, the new network struck one critic, Peter Black, as little more than “a kind of meals on wheels service, nourishing the old folk with selections from Ivor Novello and the Grand Hotel Orchestra”.
Nevertheless, with almost no early morning competition from other networks, Breakfast Special – with Hollingdale taking turns at the helm with Bruce Wyndham, John Dunn and Ray Moore – was estimated to be pulling in an extraordinary 19 million listeners daily. As well as vanilla arrangements of popular standards, Hollingdale’s playlist also included light classics. At the microphone Hollingdale had been instructed by Scott to be “not unduly talkative”, but once, after playing an extract from the ballet Coppelia, he allowed himself a humorous nod to Alf Garnett in the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, acknowledging the composer with the words: “And that, ladies and gentlemen, was yer actual Delibes.”
Hollingdale left Radio 2 in January 1970 in what he described as “curious” circumstances. Although popular with listeners, he never hit it off with the new network controller, Douglas Muggeridge, who called him in to tell him he was coming off the programme. There was no explanation, nor was he allowed to return to his old job as an announcer. Officially the BBC complained that Hollingdale had become involved in too many “private business interests” by managing a singer, a pop group and a ventriloquist.
The son of an electrical engineer, Paul Trevor Anthony Hollingdale was born on March 30 1934 in Brighton. As a boy he was enthralled by programmes on the wartime wireless and, encouraged by his mother, an amateur actress, made his first venture into showbusiness as a teenager, appearing as an extra in Brighton Rock (1947).
His broadcasting career began during his National Service, when he was an RAF sergeant at Bruggen in Germany. Having secured a posting to RAF Wahn, not far from the headquarters of the British Forces Network in Cologne, he helped out in the gramophone library before becoming one of the BFN’S announcers on the early morning show Musical Clock. In 1959 he presented the Cologne end of the BBC’S long-running Sunday lunchtime request show Two Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme before returning to London to become a full-time broadcaster.
Hollingdale next became programme controller for CNBC, an English-language service from Radio Veronica, an offshore station broadcasting from the MV Borkum Rift, a former lightship anchored off Holland (“your friendly host off the Dutch coast”). Although the station built an audience along the east coast of England, its one-kilowatt transmitter was not powerful enough to reach London and CNBC failed to attract enough advertising to survive.
From there he moved to Radio Luxembourg, presenting sponsored shows recorded in London before moving to the Grand Duchy itself as a resident disc-jockey. In 1964 he joined the BBC as a contract announcer, reading news bulletins and hosting record shows.
He was a newsreader on Radio Newsreel on the old Home Service (announcing the death of Churchill in 1965) and presented for the World Service. He also travelled around Europe presenting light music concerts sponsored by the Nordring radio syndicate, which were aired on the Light Programme, the network on which, for three years from 1964, he hosted Swing Into Summer.
After Radio 2 and a lean spell delivering leaflets door-to-door, he was taken on by BBC Radio Brighton and in 1976 became the first voice on Radio 210 Thames Valley, the station in Reading. In 1979 he opened Blue Danube Radio, an English-language station in Vienna, where he eventually settled. During the 1980s and 1990s he also broadcast on Chiltern Radio, and presented film reviews on LBC and Radio Luxembourg.
In 2007, Hollingdale took part in a commemorative series of programmes to mark the 40th anniversary of Radio 2.
He was unmarried.
Paul Hollingdale, born March 30 1934, died July 5 2017