Another little glimpse of Angela Rippon doing the news in that clip - think that's the third clip she's shown up in here in the last few days, so she must have stood in pretty regularly for Peter Smith.
I guess the studio behind the house went prior to the Olympic site being built. Indeed initially I think the house was supposed to be demolished as well.
That Challenge Anneka clip is probably the most exposure Richard Orford ever got in his career. Watching him, one is reminded that although the task of replacing Chris Evans was virtually impossible, Orford wasn’t remotely close to doing it.
He was known for being difficult in those early days of his fame. A lot of that was being a perfectionist, but also the inexperience of having the sudden fame and success and of course in later years he owned the companies he worked for
His ego didn't get any better of course until he went off into his wilderness years and returned.
Funnily enough I was reading the other day the first interview with Chris Evans in the Radio Times, just a few weeks after the Big Breakfast began in October 1992, where he is featured as very much a star of the future. And in it they talk about the fact he already had a reputation for being difficult to work with, and he says that at BSB he was always telling the directors how to direct and so on. He says in it that a few months before the interview he'd had a party at his house and when he was in the toilet he could hear two of his friends outside, drunk, slagging him off, saying he used to be an absolute dick but was alright now, and he was agreeing with every word.
The piece was also about his GLR show, which is how he first became well-known of course, and was still doing for the first few months of the Big Breakfast, it was a hugely successful show and there's a clipping in his autobiography from a review calling him "London's best DJ". It mentions how he did it in front of a live studio audience, and the features he used to do like Personality or Person (which he took with him to Radio 1, of course) and Billy, where he'd get people to phone up on their car phones and just shout "Billy?" at passers-by to see how many people they could confuse. There used to be on YouTube, maybe there still is, a video of the show filmed by someone in the audience one week.
One thing I would have loved to have done was live in London when GLR was in its pomp, not just with Evans but with Danny Baker and Chris Morris and the rest. In fact the whole London media landscape seemed impossibly exciting around that time, with Capital having loads of famous DJs and LWT coining it in. Such a shame when I did come to live in London it was all exactly the same as everywhere else in Britain.
In any case, I'm on his side in that snowball business, as a glasses wearer myself I know it would have been impossible to carry on after that.
I guess the studio behind the house went prior to the Olympic site being built. Indeed initially I think the house was supposed to be demolished as well.
The house was initially a part of the compulsory purchase order, but survived intact. The old P24 building was demolished in 2007 and there's now a school behind the house.
Ironically the house has better road access than it ever had before, with its own rear entrance for vehicles:
There was next to no road access during the BB days.
There was next to no road access during the BB days.
There was road access as soon as the Carpenters Road Industrial estate was built around 1994 - as evidenced in the clip above.
On the contrary, the clip proves just how little road access there was to the house. They had to use the tunnel which connected the back of the garden to the Planet 24 building, run through the whole building and into a car in the industrial estate.
On the contrary, the clip proves just how little road access there was to the house. They had to use the tunnel which connected the back of the garden to the Planet 24 building, run through the whole building and into a car in the industrial estate.
The top of the tunnel had level access to the road - you didn't need to go through the industrial unit.
The piece was also about his GLR show, which is how he first became well-known of course, and was still doing for the first few months of the Big Breakfast, it was a hugely successful show and there's a clipping in his autobiography from a review calling him "London's best DJ". It mentions how he did it in front of a live studio audience, and the features he used to do like Personality or Person (which he took with him to Radio 1, of course) and Billy, where he'd get people to phone up on their car phones and just shout "Billy?" at passers-by to see how many people they could confuse.
Yep and a game that was played by couples in bed - 'Tickle Your Trout' I'll leave the rules of that to your imagination. There was a game for kids too: 'The Kids are Right but Only if They're Wrong' which was an interesting contrast.
Such a great show and was never quite the same when he tried to take it elsewhere. His Radio 1 Sunday shows were very flat without an audience and he often just used stuff he'd done that morning.
There's a lot of his final GLR show here including some of the regular features:
A lot of stuff on there that only makes sense if you were a regular listener. The second song was always 'Smoke From a Distant Fire" by The Sandford Townshend Band for reasons never explained.
His producer was Andy Davies, later best known for Jonathan Ross' Saturday Morning Radio 2 shows. I think they were kind of the successor to Round at Chris's... Chris left GLR and took the show to Virgin, then Ross took over the slot there, later moving to Radio 2 and taking Andy with him
Quote:
There used to be on YouTube, maybe there still is, a video of the show filmed by someone in the audience one week.
There's three of them starting here.
Such fascinating videos showing just how good he is at radio and how hard he worked at those shows.
An insight into the old way of doing things - echo on an open reel, stack of carts on the desk, and how many of the current generation of DJs would you find climbing over a table to fiddle with a patch bay?
They always said that they just left the back door open and let whoever wanted to come in to be in the audience. Imagine the vetting and security that would be needed now. Also, at the beginning of the second video I'm sure the choice of drinks wouldn't be allowed either
Last edited by Inspector Sands on 12 October 2020 6:08am - 3 times in total
TBF that sounds like the way Evans always has been in some way, Wasn't there loads of stories about him being a grumpy diva on set? I think Gabby takes more direct hits before the one that gets him anyway and she's much more relaxed about it.
He was known for being difficult in those early days of his fame. A lot of that was being a perfectionist, but also the inexperience of having the sudden fame and success and of course in later years he owned the companies he worked for
His ego didn't get any better of course until he went off into his wilderness years and returned.
I think it was him in the early days taken to one side and explained to that everyone they worked with was only there for one thing, and that was to make them look good on TV. Things did improve after that, and it's a valuable lesson to work
I have no direct experience of him. I know folk who worked with him in the 80s at radio stations, during the 90s on Toothbrush, and during the last decade on his ill fated involvment on a BBC Sunday night show. They all say much the same thing about him, which I can't repeat coz I'll get a TVF ASBO
His first autobiography that chronicles the early years and the big breaks is fascinating, the second one after he’s become wildly famous is less so (him and Billie Piper calling each other ‘babes’ all the time and going house shopping in the States, which is less interesting than he thinks it is)
