He was the housewives’ favourite who interviewed every PM. But Jimmy Young only turned to radio after being saved from suicide by a psychic
AS TALENT spotters go, the anonymous BBC man who first auditioned Jimmy Young ranks with the music label scout who rejected the Beatles. ‘Mr Young,’ declared the man from the Beeb, ‘has no future in broadcasting.’
That was 1945. Forty years later, Young was the corporation’s most senior radio presenter, the mainstay of mid-mornings on Radio 2, and famously Margaret Thatcher’s favourite interviewer – she appeared on his show 14 times.
He was still making occasional broadcasts in his 90s. That voice, authoritative yet chummy, warm but no-nonsense, became the sound of the BBC itself. His death yesterday, aged 95, breaks a link to the era of the Light Programme and the days before pirate radio.
He wasn’t really a ‘Jimmy’: the son of a miner in Cinderford, Gloucestershire, he was christened Leslie Ronald. An only child, he nearly died from bronchitis, double pneumonia and pleurisy.
As a boy, he was a keen sportsman who excelled at rugby and boxing, but his love for music was always stronger and at grammar school in nearby Coleford, he dreamed of being a singer.
He had professional voice coaching lessons, and his mother taught him piano. But two catastrophes interrupted his career: his parents divorced, and war broke out. Within hours of Neville Chamberlain’s announcement on September 3, he had tried to enlist at an army barracks opposite his home.
With typical self-deprecating humour, he later claimed that he only volunteered because the smell of dinner from the canteen enticed him. In fact, he was turned away after he admitted he wasn’t yet 18 years old. Undeterred, he walked to the nearest RAF base and tried again, this time adding a few weeks to his age.
He was posted to India, and he spent four years there, two of them in Karachi (now part of Pakistan) where he joined both the concert party and the dance band.
One of his comrades was a former music agent, who was impressed by Young’s singing and offered to help him get a BBC contract once hostilities ended. The recruiter with the cloth ears intervened, and it wasn’t till 1949 that he got his first radio gig, under his showbiz name, Jimmy – after being spotted as he played the piano at a sports hall. The public loved him, and within a year he had made more than 100 appearances.
That popularity ignited his career as a crooner. He began touring variety halls across the country. His first release, a cover of the Nat King Cole song Too Young, was a huge hit, just a year before the UK Singles Chart was born.
He had his first chart hit with Faith Can Move Mountains in 1953. A string of smashes followed, including the Charlie Chaplin number Eternally, and countrytinged hits such as Chain Gang and Wayward Wind. He became the first artist to have back-toback Number Ones, with The Man From Laramie and Unchained Melody in 1954 and 1955.
‘It’s true I sold more records in 1955 than Liberace,’ he joked, ‘but then he outdid me when it came to the frilly shirts and sparkly jackets.’ His last hit was a release of Unchained Melody, with the Mike Sammes Singers.
That catalogue would be enough to make him a permanent star – but it would turn out to be just a sidenote in his career. The arrival of rock ’n’ roll spelled the end of his double life as a singer, and he would later say that the success of Elvis Presley killed off his singing career. It left him anxious, depressed and increasingly dependent on sleeping pills.
WHEN he confessed to friends that he was beset with thoughts of suicide, one told him to ‘stop being so bloody silly’ and advised him to see an astrologer called Katina Theodossiou. ‘Well I’ll give it a go,’ he thought at the time, ‘why not, I’m depressed anyway.’
He said later: ‘She said I was going to be a great success. I told her I’m really low and considering suicide.
‘She said there is absolutely no way with your chart you can commit suicide. In actual fact you’re going to be around so long they’re going to have to take you off the field and shoot you.’
Ever after, he credited her with
saving his career: ‘She forecast that my future lay in interviewing people, not singing.’
As a presenter, he was soon fronting Housewives’ Choice, a record request show on the BBC’s Light Programme with the biggest daytime audience on radio, and the music programme Flat Spin. Young was a pop DJ, briefly taking to sea with Radio Luxembourg, before the launch of Radio 2 and the Jimmy Young Show in 1967.
In contrast to the non-stop pop of Radio 1, Young and his colleagues were broadcasting to an older audience. That meant recipes, news and above all ‘natter’. He had the gift of talking to listeners as if he was carrying on a personal conversation, a skill that every Radio 2 presenter who followed – including his protégé Terry Wogan – went on to adopt.
For millions of listeners in the Seventies, the badinage between Young and Wogan, who had the breakfast slot preceding him, was a highlight of the day. As Wogan described it, ‘the cheeky old blighter wheeled his mobile commode into my studio’ (the 15-year difference in their ages was a constant point of ribbing) ‘and immediately engaged in mutual recriminations and barely veiled insults, unscripted, unrehearsed’.
Both men relished the verbal challenge. Their thrusts were never nasty but always pointed, fencing with barbed quips. The Queen was said to be an avid fan, and it was perhaps partly at her suggestion that he was knighted in 2002.
AS well as the humour, there was practical chat, with regular guests Tony di Angeli from The Grocer magazine and ‘Legal Beagle’ Bill Thomas to solve listeners’ dilemmas. One listener wrote to tell him that she had been in despair, thinking of taking her own life, until something he said made her laugh – and reminded her that there is always something worth living for. Young, who knew what it was to be at rock bottom, understood.
There were catchphrases too, most famously ‘orf we jolly well go,’ and ‘BFN’ or ‘bye for now’ – his own modification of an earlier catchphrase ‘ta ta for now’. They were on everybody’s tongue, not least the prime ministers’ – he interviewed every prime minister from Harold Wilson through to Tony Blair.
Unlike the current mode for adversarial interviews, Young preferred to be amiable, a style that former deputy Labour leader Roy Hattersley described as ‘courtesy with a cutting edge’.
Young made no secret of his dislike for the hostile style of interviewers who came after him, such as John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman. ‘You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,’ he liked to say.
He did not try to schmooze the politicians away from the studio, however. Despite meeting Mrs Thatcher more than a dozen times, he never spoke to her socially. After every interview, he said, she would get up and leave – they wouldn’t see each other until the next encounter.
This gentlemanly approach was very different even to political journalists of his own generation, such as Sir David Frost.
MUCH of his charm was in his informal approach. ‘The first time I interviewed the Duke of Edinburgh,’ he explained, ‘we had to submit a list of questions to Buckingham Palace. I asked him Question One, and out came a rehearsed answer, and it was terrible. So I went entirely off the script. He just changed completely, he relaxed and I realised then this was how to do it.’
At the end, the Duke – candid as ever – paid him an unexpected compliment. ‘You actually listened to the answers. They don’t!’ The meaning was obvious: ‘They’ were the royal reporters that the Duke regarded as human pests.
When Young, who had one daughter and leaves behind third wife Alicia, was pushed out of the door in 2002 by a BBC obsessed with presenting a youthful image, his millions of fans were so disgusted that the issue was raised in Parliament. Young refused to go quietly. In his final broadcast, he emphasised: ‘It was not my idea to go. I didn’t want to leave you at all. Nothing to do with me, guv!
‘Thank you very, very much for the last 30 years. I’ve loved it all.’
Thankfully, the BBC saw sense and invited him back regularly, most recently to co-present Icons Of The Fifties with his old friend (who retired last month), Desmond Carrington.
It seemed his voice could never quite fade from the airwaves. Sir Jimmy Young... bye for now.