Ross-Brand affair

Lucy’s column for November 18.
Celeblo…1
Assuming the dust has just about settled on the Brand-Ross affair – nothing to do with fish fingers – and the Beeb, can I stick my head above the parapet and give my two penn’orth?
To get it out of the way, until the recent furore, I’d barely heard of the chap Brand, except to gather he was a long-haired, sex-mad, would-be "comedian" with a penchant for puerile behaviour, and not a lot going on upstairs. As regards his oppo, the boy Ross, he was the one whose juvenile Saturday morning programme on Radio 2 – complete with a sycophantic Andy who was forced to titter uncontrollably at his boss’s pathetic attempts at humour – made us switch the off-button on our hitherto happy weekend wireless listening many years ago. To be fair, I shouldn’t really be commenting because I’ve rarely been privy to the pathetic pair. Except they belong right there. In the privy.
But I can. As a wartime baby, I was brought up on the wireless. This was in the days before TV reared its intrusive head. We listened to elections, Grand Nationals, Wimbledon, the news. And if we hadn’t been fortunate enough to have a neighbour with a telly, the Queen’s Coronation would have been heard, and not seen.
Our crackling, Bakelite affair was permanently tuned in to the Light Programme, as opposed to the Home Service, which was a bit more serious.
Friday night was Music Night, with Henry Hall and his Orchestra. There was a daily dose of Housewives’ Choice, which my mother and her four sisters wrote in to regularly with birthday requests, to no avail, though the thought of hearing their names over the airways kept them glued.
Who could forget Workers’ Playtime? - with the presenter visiting office and factory locations all over the country, and the euphoria of Down Your Way, with Franklin Engelman, actually coming to Matlock is embedded in my psyche because we knew most of the people interviewed. And no Sunday dinner and its lazy aftermath was complete without Two Way Family Favourites, the Billy Cotton Band Show, and Sing Something Simple.
It wasn’t just music which raised the wartime, post-war, and rationing spirits. The likes of Al Read, Charlie Chester, Tommy Handley, Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne kept the nation chuckling, and Round the Horn, with its clever innuendo courtesy of Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, may have been a tad risque, but was never the in-your-face vulgarity we hear today.
Compare Have a Go, with Wilfred Pickles, and Violet Carson, who went on to find fame as Coro’s Ena Sharples, at the piano, Twenty Questions, and Top of the Form, with the current offering of brash, garish quiz shows, and you had entertainment without the glitz and the greed.
Way before soap operas, and even The Archers, we had our everyday stories of family folk with Meet the Huggets and Life with the Lyons. Educating Archie made ventriloquist Peter Brough a household name – no, you couldn’t see his lips move – and stars of that cheeky little wooden puppet Archie Andrews’ sidekicks, Petula Clark and Max Bygraves.
This is not to dismiss totally BBC radio’s present-day offerings, though I can’t speak for Radio One because I’ve never actually sought it on my dial. But early morning "Bunty" – Sarah Kennedy, who can be a bit of a hoot, but never vile – Wogan and his TOGs, Ken Bruce, Jeremy Vine, Steve Wright, and Chris Evans, and the occasional dose of deep and meaningful discussion on Radio Four, are the characters and programmes which make for a favourite "Auntie".
Those who need their daily dose of vulgarity and bile should do what I had to when my mother whittered on at me for listening to Radio Luxembourg’s brain-numbing, wall-to-wall music: get under the bedclothes, with a fading battery and a dodgy station.
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