SMASHY & NASTY!
Thought Radio 1 – soon to be 50 – was all poptastic jolly japes and Hairy Cornf lakes? No, mate, it wasn’t at all like Smashy & Nicey, it was like totally...
IT’S AN era frequently cited as the ‘golden age’ of broadcasting, a gentler time when no one was more famous than Radio 1 DJs with silly names. Their mission? To channel wholesome BBC fun. It was all cheesy puns and wacky nicknames: a culture that, 20 years later, in a more knowing age, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse would send up mercilessly with spoof characters Smashy and Nicey.
To its vast audience, stars such as Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, ‘Hairy Cornflake’ Dave Lee Travis and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman were one big happy family.
But as the 50th anniversary of Radio 1 approaches, a new book by another of their number, ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton, suggests that for all the on-air bonhomie, the true Radio 1 playlist was, in fact, a medley of petty jealousies, keen rivalries – and, on occasion, the odd thwarted punch-up. It was, according to Hamilton, more Smashy and Nasty than Smashy and Nicey.
‘It was a fairly monstrous festival of egos,’ Hamilton laughs now. ‘A lot of the DJs didn’t like other DJs. People were jealous when someone took over their shows and were convinced they had been stabbed in the back. Sometimes I wonder if any one Radio 1 DJ had a friend in any other.’
It seems that John Peel – one of the longest-serving of the original DJs, broadcasting until his death in 2004 – could hardly bear the sight of Tony Blackburn. And the feeling was mutual, with Blackburn pointing out that the fiercely anticommercial Peel was not averse to doing voice-overs for television adverts.
Blackburn, in turn, resented Noel Edmonds, who joined the station full-time in 1970. Edmonds subsequently had a falling-out with Mike Read, while Steve Wright – who still has his own afternoon Radio 2 show – was irritated by Dave Lee Travis. And everyone, it seems, disliked Simon Bates.
‘When it comes to talent, it’s a matter of opinion, and when you are a broadcaster it is the audience who decide,’ says Hamilton. ‘There was always the danger that the person who filled in for you on your two-week holiday was better or more popular than you.’
Radio 1 had been launched in 1967 in response to the soaring popularity of pirate radio stations such as Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg.
At its peak, Radio 1 had a vast audience of 24million a week, while its live Roadshows routinely attracted crowds in the tens of thousands. Mike Read recalls arriving at one on the back of a Harley-Davidson with David Essex, driving through the crowds and on to the stage.
With the garlands, however, came the huge egos jostling for position.
Take Tony Blackburn. Today, the 74-year-old is still on air, but in Hamilton’s book he emerges as a rather brittle soul. In 1973, Noel Edmonds took over Blackburn’s breakfast show.
‘There is in existence a tape of a handover between Noel and him that is so frosty you can almost see the icicles in the studio,’ says Hamilton.
Twelve years later, Blackburn felt much the same froideur towards Simon Bates, who went on to take over his mid-morning show. ‘There was very bad feeling,’ says Hamilton. ‘Tony was always touchy about people who took over from him.’
Moreover, it seems he was
‘A monstrous festival of egos – people were so jealous’
capable of harbouring a grudge: three years after Bates replaced him in the mid-morning hot-seat, Hamilton, Bates and Blackburn were waiting to be ushered on set for a 25th-anniversary edition of Top Of The Pops when Hamilton recalls Bates and Blackburn squaring up to one another.
‘The next minute, the floor manager was ushering us all on to the set and there we were beaming on camera, all good pals, the happy faces of Radio 1,’ he says with a wry smile.
Hamilton himself considered Blackburn a friend – ‘I was a bit of a shoulder to cry on when his marriage to his first wife Tessa broke down and we had a lot of fun together,’ he recalls.
‘Publicly we made a point of being rude about each other to help promote our shows, but actually we were very good friends.’
Nevertheless, years later Blackburn decreed in an interview that he did not have friends as they ‘get in the way of business’. ‘That came as a bit of a shock,’ Hamilton concedes.
‘When someone comes out with something like that, you do wonder if perhaps you were wasting your time. I haven’t seen him quite so much recently.’
Blackburn had his own detractor in the form of the late John Peel, who disparagingly called him ‘Timmy Bannockburn’ and – more strongly – ‘the Antichrist’.
‘They actually didn’t know each other well, so John’s dislike was probably based mainly on what he thought Blackburn stood for – light entertainment and showbusiness,’ says Hamilton.
Peel and Blackburn had one thing in common, though: they both disliked Simon Bates. The antipathy seems to have been so extreme that Peel later said that, fuelled by drink after a Radio 1 Christmas party, he and fellow DJs Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett had waited in an underground car
park to ‘beat up Bates’. Fortunately he didn’t turn up.
It was not the only thwarted fight: some years later, Mike Read confided to Hamilton that Noel Edmonds had ‘offered him outside’, apparently offended by Read’s decision to appear on a 2004 Channel 4 show lampooning Noel’s career.
The list goes on: Simon Bates hated Steve Wright, who hated him back. They also had a mutual enemy in Dave Lee Travis, although he proved considerably more touchy about Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s Smashy and Nicey skit. ‘Dave got quite shirty and failed to see the joke,’ says Hamilton. ‘He felt they demeaned us all.’
Still, not everyone was a seething mass of insecurity. Hamilton says he managed to get through his Radio 1 years without falling out with anyone – as far as he knows – while some of the show’s presenters come across as all-round good eggs, including the late Alan Freeman and Ed Stewart. Sir Terry Wogan, too, emerges unscathed. Hamilton’s book is a portrait of a very different era – a time when DJs could broadcast in the nude, and studios were festooned with underwear.
‘DJs loved playing tricks on each other,’ says Hamilton. ‘Setting fire to a script someone was reading, dousing a colleague with water, putting a pair of pyjama bottoms over someone’s head in the hope it would make him corpse.’
In this age of YouTube and Spotify, it is easy to forget Radio 1’s astonishing popularity. Modelling itself on the success of the pirate radio stations, where the DJs were stars, it soon made celebrities of its own presenters.
‘I played football with Rod Stewart, tennis with Cliff Richard and knew the Rolling Stones,’ recalls Hamilton, now 79.
‘I compered for the Stones in Manchester and I had a red sports car I was particularly proud of. Someone thought it was Mick Jagger’s car and scratched “I love you Mick” all over the bonnet.
‘We did have a lot of women throwing themselves at us. One woman turned up with her suitcase, saying she had left her husband and children to live with me. I had to tell her I was already living with someone, thank you.’
Broadcasting in an age long before the term political correctness was coined, the culture was relaxed to a degree unimaginable today. ‘Fluff Freeman presented his shows from a studio liberally decorated with bras,’ recalls Hamilton. ‘They had been sent in by female fans who had chosen to respond literally to his decision to launch a slot called “Get it off your chest”. They were hanging everywhere. You can’t imagine that happening today, can you?’
On another occasion David Symonds, one of the original Radio 1 line-up in 1967, chose to broadcast his programme in the nude. ‘He started out by mooning me through the window of our adjoining studios as I was broadcasting live,’ says Hamilton.
‘I burst out laughing and then I had to explain to the listeners, “Either it’s David Symonds or it’s a full moon tonight.’’ Then he stripped off entirely so that all he had on were his headphones.’
The Radio 1 formula worked spectacularly well for more than two decades. By the 1990s, however, a new generation turned their back on the wacky antics of presenters who were as old as their parents.
The BBC responded by clearing out the old names in favour of younger DJs playing new, danceorientated hits – to howls of protest from those who had grown up with the station. These events have now been overshadowed, of course, by what came next. The spectre of Jimmy Savile, who also broadcast on Radio 1, looms over any recollections of the period, while some of the other station stalwarts have provided a decidedly tarnished coda to the golden age of broadcasting.
Chris Denning – one of the original line-up – was jailed last year after admitting abusing seven boys, some as young as eight.
John Peel became immersed in controversy following his death in 2004 when it emerged that in his mid-20s he had married a 15-yearold girl in America.
And in 2014, Dave Lee Travis was cleared of 12 counts of indecent assault but received a threemonth suspended sentence for indecently assaulting a researcher on the Mrs Merton Show.
Hamilton is determined not to let this grim roll call overshadow his memories.
‘Savile aside, it was a pretty innocent time really – things were more free and easy back then,’ he says. ‘For all the egos, it really was enormous fun.’
Fluff Freeman’s studio was festooned with bras
The Golden Days Of Radio 1: Hotshots, Big Shots And Potshots, by David Hamilton, is published by Ashwater Press at £9.95.