Radio 2 Remembers Steve Wright (Radio 2) | BBC Sounds
The Grand House: Boom Or Blight? (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
I had mixed feelings about Radio 2’s bank holiday Monday offering: a five-hour celebration of the late Steve Wright, made up of a station tribute hosted by Vernon Kay, a fan tribute with Liza Tarbuck, and Steve Wright in His Own Words, which delved into the BBC archives. Wright was a hugely loved Radio 2 staple, and the shows were the correct combination of warm-hearted and slightly cheesy (though, lest we forget, he’d been moved on from his afternoon show just over a year before he died in February).
The Kay programme featured some interesting comments from celebrity fans: Stewart Lee made a clever point about how Wright’s 1980s on-air characters, such as Mr Angry, foreshadowed catchphrase-driven sketch shows such as The Fast Show and Little Britain (Lee: “A character comes on and says that thing, and how long can you delay the gratification of them saying that thing?”). I also loved the unexpected variety of music and pop star appearances that the archive show gave us: the Beatles chatting casually; the Bee Gees giving a spine-tingling impromptu acoustic performance. “He was always there for us,” said Barry Gibb. “We’ve done other interviews, but the only ones we really remember are the ones with Steve Wright.”
The fan show was full of love, which is fine. And I enjoyed hearing Wright discussing his personal audio influences, sharp as a tack on presenters and what they were good at. Tony Blackburn, he said, was a comedian, in the manner of a northern club comic: he’d play a track, set up a joke, deliver the punchline and move to the next.
Aside from all of that, I found much of the tribute madly uncomfortable, mostly because of the era it evoked – the 1970s and 80s, when Radio 1 was huge. Around 19 million people tuned in every week; crowds of up to 80,000 people turned up to the Radio 1 roadshows (including, we heard, a young Jeremy Vine, who went on stage for the Bits and Pieces competition. He came second). I’m old enough to remember those times and those shows and, God, they were awful. The golf club joviality that passed for humour; the casual bullying that also passed for humour; the revolting outfits on Top of the Pops; the naffness. In those days, the DJs were the stars and the public their minions.
Steve Wright was by no means the worst of those egomaniacal hosts. In fact, he never stopped thinking about the listeners, and worked hard to create the most entertaining show possible. But he was the boss in the studio. There, he created his own world, supported by a sycophantic “posse”, which people, when they phoned in or were interviewed, had to join. And if you didn’t fit in, well, that was your fault. That legacy, handed down to less generous hosts, wrecked pop broadcasting for years.
On Radio 4 last week, in The Grand House, the V&A’s director, Tristam Hunt, took a wander around Britain’s country piles. The former Labour MP and one-time shadow education secretary, who sounds weirdly like Keir Starmer, was following in a predecessor’s footprints. Roy Strong, director of the V&A during the 1970s and 80s, created an exhibition about country houses in 1974. Strong did this because so many houses were having to close because of “death duties, capital gains tax, wealth tax, value added tax, the selective employment tax”. (Strong’s words: his disdain is palpable.)
We hear from lots of lovely posh people who’ve worked out ways of keeping their places going: “We have weddings, we have private groups who come here for parties,” said one. “A group of Japanese people who want to have two nights in a historic house and some instruction on British etiquette. So I bought a book!”
Mostly, they’ve found uses for the grounds: safari parks, funfairs, mazes. Hunt looks at how to get visitors into the actual houses themselves, whether through immersive experiences or selling to billionaires. He makes a case, as Strong did, for the houses to be preserved in some way, as “sites of incredible privilege and colonial enrichment”, but also part of the country’s fabric. “When we do lose them,” he said, “we also lose part of the complex identity of Britain.”
