I Should Have Been at Work. Des Lynam

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СКАЧАТЬ to do with the content in their papers. In short, I was using them as an excuse to write a weekly radio essay. Then I branched into comedy – or at least I and my writing partners thought it was comedy.

      Together with Ivan Howlett, still a radio broadcaster, the aforementioned John Henty, Peter Vincent (who went on to be a top comedy writer for The Two Ronnies and others), and a girl singer called Amaryllis, I began putting together and performing in a Sunday half-hour show called How Lunchtime It Is – there was a TV series called How Late It Is that had prompted the idea for the title.

      I could do passable imitations of the two leading politicians of the time, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Actually they were impersonations of Mike Yarwood doing Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and ‘they’ appeared in every show. Incidentally, years later I was invited to lunch at Edward Heath’s majestic home in Salisbury. On entering, Ted wondered if I ‘could abide champagne’ – a curious way of posing the question, but I answered ‘Yes, and plenty of it.’ I asked him who had been the most impressive leader he had met down the years. Unhesitatingly, he said, ‘Mao-Tse-Tung.’ ‘But he was a mass murderer,’ I ventured. ‘You’re typically falling into the trap of misunderstanding his position,’ said Ted, an acknowledged Sinophile.

      I loved being involved in How Lunchtime It Is. We went into the studio on Sunday mornings to record our offerings, having roped our friends in to be the audience. They laughed more at our attempts at being satirists than at the quality of the content, but these were some of the happiest days of my life. I was becoming fulfilled at last. I was a broadcaster. Unpaid, but I was a broadcaster. My hobby was now interfering with my career.

      So, naturally enough, I gave up my career.

      Sue and I had rented a small terraced house owned by her father, a local funeral director. He knew I was not overly enthusiastic about my job in insurance and one day he had sat me down and offered me a junior partnership in his business. I think he was mostly thinking about his daughter’s future quality of life, but it was a very generous offer to make. But ‘Des the Funeral Director’ was never going to be, and I politely refused, with much gratitude for his consideration.

      Soon after this, I bought my first house for £3,750 (the vast majority of it paid for by mortgage). For that I got a four-bedroom Victorian terraced property with a garden in an old but decent part of town. My move into insurance had been yet another career change, but it was only postponing the inevitable and the shocking death of my mother made me realise that there was no longer anything left to lose. Her passing spurred me on to leave the conventions of a nine-to-five profession. I had been helped in my decision by a veteran local journalist and friend, Jack Arlidge. ‘Fortune favours the brave, Des,’ he had said to me. And so it seemed that everything was telling me to pursue my dream of becoming a journalist.

      I discussed it with Sue. I wanted to give up the security of my job, my company car, my preferential mortgage deal and my pension rights, not to mention my income, for a tilt at the windmill of broadcasting. Sue, good girl that she was, was all for it. ‘Time to have a go,’ she said.

      It was a brilliant response, and so I gave in my notice, bought a twelve-year-old Volkswagen Beetle from my new colleague, John Henty, for £140 and turned up each day at my new job at Radio Brighton. I got paid per item in guineas. After a few months, my income had slumped to about a tenth of what it had been. Sue was now paying most of the bills from her job as a librarian.

      Soon I was expecting reasonable broadcasting standards of myself and others around me. One day, a colleague, fed up with my criticism of the poor quality of a sports item, turned on me: ‘Who do you bloody well think you are, David Coleman?’ he bellowed. ‘No, but the listeners have a right to expect professionalism from any broadcaster they have tuned in to hear or watch,’ I pompously replied. I was crossed off this chap’s Christmas card list straight away, but I knew I was right. What I could not have envisaged was that one day I would take over from David Coleman as the main presenter of Grandstand, a decision about which he was none too pleased.

      In the early Eighties I began sharing the programme with Coleman. His period on the show coincided with most of the major events, like the Five Nations Rugby Championship (as it then was), the Grand National and the FA Cup Final. Then I would take over, allowing him to commentate on the athletics championships, his speciality. I had mentioned once or twice that I wouldn’t mind trying one or two of the major outside broadcast events. I had made no firm requests or stipulations. However, after the 1984 Olympics, it was decided that I should be the number one presenter. Coleman remained the athletics commentator and presented A Question of Sport.

      But all that was a long time in the future. For the time being I was happy just simply being in local radio. After a couple of months I had managed to get one or two reports sent up to the network in London and they had been well received. Soon after that, I spotted an advert in the BBC in-house magazine. The sports department in London were seeking ‘Sports News Assistants’. Despite my limited experience, I applied. It would be the last job I ever applied for at the BBC.

3

       TAKING THE MIKE

      It was one morning in the late autumn of 1969 that I caught the train from Brighton to Victoria Station in London, hopped on the tube to Oxford Circus, and duly presented myself at the reception desk at Broadcasting House as requested. I was excited and nervous. I sensed that a few very important hours lay ahead.

      Somebody took me up the three floors to the offices of the radio sports news department, and there I was introduced to a slim dapper man with a thin moustache and slicked-back grey hair. I thought he was pretty old. He was about fifty-eight years of age. He greeted me with a firm handshake and a smile.

      ‘So you want to come and join the big boys,’ he said. His speech pattern and Scots accent seemed to produce a slight menace in the words as he said them. He was Angus McKay, a legend in BBC Radio. Shortly after the Second World War he had begun a programme called Sports Report, the five o’clock show that is still going today on Radio 5 Live and which is the longest running sports programme in the world. Its familiar signature tune, ‘Out of the Blue’, remains to this day as well. Angus had started with Raymond Glendenning, the most famous sports commentator of his day before television got into its stride, as his presenter, but soon found a young Irishman with a mid-Atlantic style of speech whom he would mould into a star. That young man was Eamonn Andrews, who of course went on to television fame with This is Your Life.

      I noticed that Angus worked from an easy chair and in front of him was just a low coffee table. I learned later that he didn’t like desks. ‘If you have a desk, people put bits of paper on it,’ he would say. For Angus, everything was dealt with there and then.

      He had heard one or two of my reports from Radio Brighton and apparently thought that my voice was OK and that if he put me through my paces I might make the grade. ‘First though,’ he said, ‘you’re a bit old to join the department [I was just twenty-seven]. We normally catch them younger. I want to make sure you know your sport, so we have worked out a little quiz for you.’

      I was put in the hands of his number two, Vincent Duggelby, and asked to fill in the answers to a list of thirty-six sports questions. I got thirty-five right. I must have been a bit of an anorak. Anyway, things went pretty well and I was allowed to apply formally for one of the vacancies as a sports news assistant. The job might involve some broadcasting or production work or writing, or most likely all three. Some weeks went by before I was back at Broadcasting House for a voice test conducted by Bob Burrows, who in due course would take over as boss of the radio sports news department. I passed that test СКАЧАТЬ