TV Cream

Radio 1: The Jocks

GOODIER, Mark

"There is a light that never goes out..."/"Sing it, Morrissey!"THE MAN, or so the jingles had it, Who’s Got The Best Music, inevitably rechristened Mark Goodybags for assorted stints in various timeslots – including Saturday night’s Club 2200 – which led to early-evening Teatime Show, with features such as the Music Jam (teatime = jam, see?), before unexpected relocation to The Evening Session, where he was heard to vociferously champion the likes of Carter USM, Gary Clail, Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream and those ones that did that Pattern 26 thing, along with introduction of the Collins & Maconie double-act with their Back To The Planet-mocking ‘Eyewitness Reports’. Also helmed the inexcusable six o’clock chartfest Megahits, of Alan McGee Ride-hyping phone-rigging scandal infamy, and the full-blown Top Forty show.

11 Comments

11 Comments

  1. Matthew Rudd

    January 13, 2010 at 5:44 pm

    He was the best user of talk-up jingles I’ve ever heard, and had to be, as they were used in both the Top 40 and the Megahits countdown and it’s unrelentlessly shit if you mistime them. He got so good he used to use them into the news jingle too during normal shows. Slick as they come.

  2. Paul

    December 26, 2010 at 9:35 pm

    I once got selected as a winner on Megahits after spending God knows how much on entering. These were of course the days of the 0898, 36 pence a minute off peak, 48 pence a minute at all other time numbers. I think I was supposed to be the reserve but they transposed my name and number with someone else and as they’d called me first they let me win. As a naive radio obsessed youth I was confused as to why they phoned me at about 4pm rather than 7pm but then realised it was pre-recorded. I was also puzzled as to why I couldn’t hear the mega hits bed in the background when it was being recorded and it was only when I heard it played out that I realised they’d spliced it together to make it sound tight and slick before playing it out. Oh, and I won £100 of record vouchers and a nice Sony walkman.

  3. THX 1139

    September 12, 2012 at 9:27 pm

    My abiding memory of him is when he was on the weekend breakfast show with Liz Kershaw (pre-Bruno?) and Liz had snagged an interview with Bros. Mark was pretending the Goss brothers were live in the studio even though it was only Liz we heard asking questions, until he got clever and tried to make it sound as if he had asked them something. Unfortunately the tape wasn’t quite cued properly and Bros started off slow then sped up to normal speed, revealing his ruse as the sham it was. A sham, I tell you!

  4. Jamstaz

    October 26, 2012 at 7:20 pm

    I remember he had two versions of his name jingle….Firstly the shrill jingle singers anounced his as Mark Goooodear……..then eventually over time they annouced him as Mark Gooody-arrrrrrrr

  5. Glenn Aylett

    December 4, 2020 at 5:44 pm

    He survived Bannisterisation by being far more cutting edge than his contemporaries and for being a decent Top 40 host.
    Speaking of Top 40, or Top 20 back then, hosts, surprised there’s no mention of Tom Browne on here, who created the modern style chart run down in 1972, and managed to sound like a hip version of James Mason. A shame he did little else beyond the Top 20 as Browne was a consummate professional.

  6. Richardpd

    December 4, 2020 at 11:45 pm

    It helped that he managed to navigate the stormy sea that was early 1990s music by successfully championing Grunge and early Britpop when some of his fellow younger Radio 1 DJs still had a foot in the 1980s.

    • Glenn Aylett

      December 5, 2020 at 12:06 pm

      Also you still had people like DLT raging about faceless rave music and singer songwriters hiding in a bunker. Fair enough, I couldn’t stand this music either, but surely Radio 1 was about promoting current music, rather than some ageing sixties throwback moaning about music not being like it was when he was 20. No wonder DLT and his ageing friends were chased away, while the hipper element like Goodier and Mayo, whose large following and ability to move with the times, would see out the nineties. However, still can’t get why Jakki Brambles was sacked as she was quite contemporary in her tastes.

      • THX 1139

        December 5, 2020 at 2:56 pm

        Was Jakki sacked? I thought she moved to America. She’s back on the Beeb now anyway. And not called Jakki anymore.

      • Richardpd

        December 5, 2020 at 3:57 pm

        Part of the problems Radio 1 had in the early 1990s was Radio 2 still trying too hard to appeal to pre-baby boomers and not wanting any of the older R1 DJs.

        While some of the 1980s intake of DJs I could take or leave, some seemed to be a bit surprising to be shown the door during the Bannisterisation.

        • Glenn Aylett

          December 5, 2020 at 4:31 pm

          I think some of the best known of the eighties old guard like Gary Davies and Bruno Brooks, while popular, just didn’t fit into the cutting edge Radio 1 that John Birt and Trevor Bannister wanted. Obviously the even older generation of DJs like DLT and Simon Bates had no credibility and they were the first to leave, and then the eighties generation either moved on or were sacked. However, this did mean some unpopular presenters came along such as Emma Freud and her deadly serious lunchtime show, and Danny Baker never worked in DLT’s old slot. Yet by 1997, admittedly with a smaller audience, Radio 1 had reinvented itself and the old naffness had gone.

          • Richardpd

            December 5, 2020 at 10:37 pm

            It was an odd transitional period at Radio 1 until the Britpop era DJs settled in.

            I can understand Bruno Brookes being shown the door in the early 1990s, but Garry Davies being a bit more musically savvy didn’t seem to be a guarantee being kept on. I guess he was too wedded to the 1980s.

            Steve Wright was lucky to last until 1995, when he left to join Talk Radio for a bit before moving to Radio 2 which was now being run as should have been 10-15 years earlier.

            Danny Baker seemed to be better suited to 5 Live than Radio 1.

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