Peel on 208

[Tom Roche]

Here's a Peel Radio Times column from Feb 2000 I had the scanner read, in case you missed it:



Radio Times 2/12 Radio 2 Review "The GREAT 208"

THE GREAT 208

Tuesday - Radio 2

By John Peel

	Somewhere in one of the airless rooms in the north wing of the echoing vastness that is our  prairie home a rests a curious artifact, that, to the untrained eye would, be difificult to identify for what it is, a gramophone record. Portions of the vinyl, or whatever the object is made from, have broken away to reveal the cardboard beneath and portions of other records, next to which it must have been stored, have adhered to its surface. It was given to me decades ago by a record plugger who had come by it through means he was not prepared to discuss with me. He told me that it was the remains one of the propaganda programmes broadcast by Williarn Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) from Radio Luxembourg during the Second World War. In Radio 2's brief history of Radio Luxembourg, The GREAT 208 (Tuesday), Joyce's is one of the first voices we hear after that of narrator Noel Echnonds. Joyce is plainly drunk, Edmonds merely surprisingly diffident. Is it possible that the great communicator is humbled by the task in hand, that of detailing the rise and fall of Europe's most influential radio station?

	From my generation of pop music lovers there will be a nostalgic sigh for the natural spelling of K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M and another such sigh for Ray Orchard's "Well, whaddya know. It's the Capitol Show" and there will be similar memories in The Great 208  for the generations that followed. The introduction to the Capitol Show carried the promise of at least a minute of a Gene Vincent record, for a start. It must be hard for present-day Radio 1 listeners, used to hearing their favourite records played over and over and over and over in Grade-A sound, to imagine how it felt to hear a portion of "Blue Jean Bop" or "Race With The Devil" in frankly execrable sound on Luxembourg, yet the terrible sound quality somehow confirmed that you were taking part in a ritual of almost medieval intensity.

	Founded in 1933 with the modest ambition to provide "good stuff but lightish", Luxembourg provided employment down the years to many broadcasters whose names would be known, if not always celebrated, by most Britons over the age of 30. Jimmy Saville (Sir Jimmy), of course, and Pete Murray, Keith Fordyce and the majestic Alan Freeman, for a start. And there's David Jacobs, too, reminiscing about throwing firuit at members of a studio audience gathered together for a programme sponsored by Fyffe's bananas. Hard to picture that.

	Possibly because little has survived from the early days of the station, the thirties are skipped over pretty quickly, but an early "tune-in" jingle and an ad for Rowntree's jelly from 1935 addressed to "the lady who plans the meals in the house" a re unmissable and it would have been good to have heard more from the era. The Master of Opportunity, Hughie Green, is here, as is Barry Alldis, don of the Top Tweny. DJ BA indeed.

	I missed Luxembourg from 1960 to 1967 while listening to a neo-brutalist form of pop radio in the States, and when I returned Fordyce, Freeman and the rest had given way to Paul Burnett, in his day the funniest man on British radio, the nightmarishly perky Tony Prince and my former rhythm pal, Kid Jensen. I wish there had been time in The Great 208 for some of this trio's recollections of bachelor lifc in the Grand Duchy. Noel Edmonds himself passed through the 208 school on his way to achieving that status to which all DJs at the time were supposed to aspire, that of being famous for being famous, as did Peter Powell, now an entrepreneur but once proud to be part, as he points out, of the exciting teeny-bop scene. These things I knew, but I didn't know that Angus Deayton had been heard on Luxembourg as part of the Pernod Roadshow.

	As I hinted earlier, I would have wished for a longer programme, if not a short series, to include more of the early years, more on the lives lived by the DJs in Luxembourg itself and more on the 208 Magazine. I may have got this wrong, but I remember 208 Magazine for its personal advice column. Most of the letters came, I think, from rural Ireland and from girls who feared a snog outside a dancehall might have left them pregnant. Unfailingly, the advice given to these anxious young women was that they should throw themselves on the mercies of the Janie Sisters of Perpetual Misery or the like. I would've enjoyed hearing some of these letters read, with appropriate gravity, during the programme.

	I have to add, because the fact is inexplicably omitted from The Great 208, that I played a role in the story by being, I think, the only DJ with programmes simultaneously on 208 and on Radio 1. The Luxembourg programmes, recorded in London, ran for a few months in the late sixties and were called, whimsically, Stenbousemuir 2 Cowdenbealth 2. 1 have never yet met anyone who heard one of these outpourings, in the course of which I invited in buskers I had passed on my way to the studio in to play, but I think ground -breaking is the word for them. Terrible would be another.

	Fab 208 indeed. Life would have been unimaginably different without it.