I’M NOT RADIO GAGA!
After 63 years, legendary DJ Brian Matthew briefly fell ill — and the BBC took his show away from him. As his fans mutiny, he tells JANE FRYER...
BRIAN MATTHEW should really be used to being dumped unceremoniously by the BBC by now. After all, it’s happened enough times. First, in 1967, when the BBC told him that, at 39, he ‘wasn’t suited’ for a young audience any more — and gave him the boot from two top shows, Easy Beat and Saturday Club.
Then in 1989, he was axed from Round Midnight — the flagship arts show which he had presented to record audiences four times a week for 12 years — courtesy of an abrupt letter from a thrusting young producer that Brian received on the Saturday before Christmas.
Each time, though, he somehow rose phoenix-like from the ashes, onto new programmes and brighter things.
‘The guillotine keeps coming down, but it’s never quite reached my neck,’ he once said.
But now, a mere 63 years into his BBC career, they’re at it again — apparently trying to winkle Britain’s oldest regular DJ out of his cosy (and record-breakingly popular) berth presenting Sounds Of The 60s in a dismissal which was as cowardly and obfuscated as they come.
It all started last November, when a sudden health scare saw Brian briefly hospitalised.
First, the BBC used up prerecorded shows as he recovered. Then they got Sir Tim Rice, an ardent Brian fan, to stand in, presenting the Saturday morning show.
Then, just as he’d made a full recovery and was limbering up to return to the studio, they went quiet. ‘I kept waiting for them to ask me back, but they never did,’ he tells me in his sitting room in Orpington, Kent.
Instead, on January 27, the BBC released a statement confirming that, due to Brian’s ill health, it had been mutually agreed that it was ‘the right time for him to step off the weekly treadmill of presenting the show’. Brian says he was stunned. ‘Mutual agreement?! That was totally untrue. Dreadful. Complete balderdash. It was most irregular in my view. Because there was no agreement at all, I was expecting to go back.
‘I admit I’m a bit of an antique, but that’s never seemed to matter until now.’
The BBC, for their part, maintain they had discussed ‘the mutual agreement to adjust his workload’ with Brian in letters and on the phone. They say he had ‘acknowledged the demands of presenting a weekly show were becoming more and more challenging’.
But Brian insists he had ‘never agreed’ he was too unwell to go on.
His legion of loyal fans (affectionately known as ‘avids’) were also up in arms — emailing, writing furious letters by the thousand, boycotting Tim Rice’s version of the programme, switching off Radio 2 altogether, and starting an online petition for their well-spoken hero’s reinstatement.
Until the BBC released another statement — again, he says, without his knowledge. ‘We are discussing a series of special Sounds Of The 60s programmes with Brian which we hope to broadcast at Easter,’ it said.
‘Brian will have the opportunity to say goodbye to his listeners.’
‘A farewell programme?’ says Brian. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I’ve been here before so I’m getting used to this sort of treatment by now, but the reaction has really sparked quite a lot of curiosity.’
Brian is 88 years old, but looks more early-70s. He is one of the most enduring, popular voices on BBC2, a ‘radio legend’ who joined the BBC in 1954 and, over the years, has hosted one flagship show after another — Saturday Club (one of the first programmes to broadcast pop music), ITV show Thank Your Lucky Stars and Round Midnight.
He had presented Sounds Of The 60s for the past 25 years. Millions (including Tim Rice) never miss his show. Partly because of his amazing voice, partly because of his extraordinarily eclectic playlist, but mainly because Brian was the 60s.
‘One of the many irritating things about all this is I do actually know what I’m talking about. I was there. I met the bands,’ he says.
He did more than that. He went on tour with The Beatles — at their request. ‘I had an absolutely firstclass relationship with them, but it was George who impressed me the most. He was wonderful.’
He became best friends with their manager Brian Epstein, adored Cliff Richard (‘a lovely, gentle man’) and Dave Davies of The Kinks, and counted Princess Margaret among his most passionate fans. Over the years, he interviewed everyone from Sir Georg Solti to Sonny and Cher — and regularly had the mickey taken out of him by a young, swaggering Mick Jagger.
‘I didn’t like The Rolling Stones,’ he says. ‘No way. I thought they were peculiar and vulgar and they certainly weren’t friendly.’
He still isn’t a huge fan. ‘I don’t like Mick Jagger’s singing, but I am impressed by his performance. Though I’d choose the Beatles music over the Stones straight away — no question,’ he says.
Some pop stars were surprisingly dull (here, The Spencer Davis Group comes in for special mention). Other guests were mindnumbingly stupid. A few, like Muhammad Ali, were a complete surprise. ‘He arrived with two bodyguards carrying rifles,’ says Brian. ‘He was fantastic and funny.’
While Brian avoided parties with horror, guests weren’t always so well-restrained.
Notably Prince Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon, who died last month. ‘I had him in one day for an interview and he was three sheets over, saying, “I had a helluva night at the palace last night!” But I thought he was so lovely. It can’t have been an easy life.’
All of which helped make his Sounds Of The 60s the real deal. A programme by someone who genuinely knew his stuff. And shared it in one of the most wonderful voices imaginable.
Born in Coventry in 1928, in a deeply musical family — his mother was a professional singer and his father a conductor of the Coventry Silver Band — Brian had more hinterland than the average Sixties DJ.
He started in Forces Radio, was a milkman, was classically trained at RADA and met his actress wife Pamela Wickington in a performance of Henry V at the Old Vic.
It was not, he says, love at first sight. ‘Of course not! How would you know?’
‘Some people do,’ says Pamela pointedly from the other sofa. ‘How extraordinary!’ They have been together for 51 years and have a son, Christopher.
In his heyday, Brian bought a 36ft yacht, which he called Round Midnight, built a huge swimming pool in the garden and had a 45-seat theatre built at their home, in which he and Pamela performed, entertaining friends and family.
Meanwhile, he won endless gongs for his radio work, including, in 2006, a Sony Gold Award, the industry’s answer to an Oscar, and a lifetime award ‘in recognition of a truly outstanding contribution to UK radio’.
Today, life is slower. The yacht is long gone, the pool is covered by a dark tarpaulin and the theatre dusty and cluttered. But Sounds Of The 60s had played on.
‘I loved working. I loved being able to work,’ he says. ‘I just assumed it would go on — there was no reason to think it wouldn’t. I always said that if I retired, I’d fade and die.’
In truth, it wasn’t as much work as it sounds, even for an octogenarian. Once a week, a car would pick him up, drop him at the studio where he recorded the programme in two hours flat, as live, with a script — and then bring him home.
Until that day last November when he went dizzy, collapsed on the floor, was rushed to hospital and thrust into this current unfortunate stand-off.
Happily, while his treatment by the BBC sounds rather shoddy,
‘I never agreed I was too unwell to carry on’ ‘I’ve been old for ages, it didn’t use to bother them’
some things have given Brian and Pamela wry smiles. Such as the fact that Sir Tim Rice — widely expected to occupy the 8-10 slot permanently — is apparently no match for the great Brian. One of his ‘avids’ claimed Rice had a voice like a dead fish. Many have similar views.
‘We got that lovely letter, didn’t we Pamela!’ says Brian. ‘Oh yes!’ says Pamela. ‘It said, “Tim Rice is about as exciting as a geography teacher on a Monday morning.” ’
They both chuckle, before Pamela adds: ‘But I’m sure he’s not as bad as that.’
Don’t they know? ‘Oh no, we never listen!’ says Pamela. Who, when pressed, confesses she never listened to Brian, either. And it turns out that, other than the Proms, Brian doesn’t listen to any radio at all: ‘There’s no one I really want to tune in to any more.’
Amazingly, despite what sounds, at best, appallingly clumsy man-management, Brian doesn’t believe the BBC has been ageist.
‘No I don’t. Because it’s never bothered them before and I’ve been old for ages. I know I’m old. We all know I’m old. And the people they’ve got in are just as old as I am. Or nearly.’
So what is it? ‘God only knows,’ he says, but he insists the programme is as good as ever and he hasn’t lost his edge. ‘Nonsense. Total nonsense! I have never, ever felt it was too much for me — though I know these things have been said,’ he adds. ‘I’m sad and it has left a nasty taste, but there’s no point in being bitter, because one grows accustomed to that kind of treatment over the years from the BBC.’
Pamela is rather less diplomatic. ‘It’s disgusting the way they’ve treated him. They’ve taken advantage of his funny turn and now they’re trying to push him out. It’s not fair.
‘He’s perfectly able to do it — just a bit choked because they’ve pretty much already given his spot away without consulting him.’ What a sad chain of events. Granted, the BBC might just like a change. We all do, from time to time. After all, Brian and his mellifluous voice have dominated the BBC airwaves now for nearly 64 years.
But, as always, there are ways and means. Failing to communicate with someone properly does not seem the kindest approach.
Funnily enough, though, Brian is a popular man this particular day. Halfway through our chat, the BBC’s Director of Radio and a senior producer arrive ‘to discuss possible projects’.
But encouraging though it is, it’s tempting to feel this smartly dressed delegation, waiting patiently in the hallway, are too little, too late.