TV Cream

Radio 2: The Hosts

HAMILTON, David ‘Diddy’

A hairstyle that needs no humorous captionBACK in the seventies and eighties, the self-proclaimedly Diminutive David Hamilton divided his time between his Radio 2 afternoon show and Thames continuity duties, ably assisted by a splendid tonsural concoction – a suspiciously toupee-like middle bit, with lustrous side-ramparts on either wing of his face, and all of it bright yellow. Madness did jingles for his Radio 2 show, and indeed his love of the ‘new’ bands later led to his famous quitting over a regime chance-related insistence that he should stick to playing ‘golden oldies’. And that’s possibly the only time on these pages you’ll read about someone leaving a radio station in a huff for a laudable reason.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Glenn A

    September 6, 2010 at 10:06 am

    His short lived successor in 1987 was Mr Opportunity Knocks himself, Hughie Green, who played a distinctly anti diluvian set of records from the forties that even David Jacobs would find bizarre. Definitely no Madness or Phil Collins in Hughie’s record box and proving the point that Hamilton made about Radio 2 being ” geriatric”.

  2. Glenn A

    April 24, 2015 at 10:24 pm

    On a more positive note, I’m not sure if it was 1979 or 1980, when The Beach Boys had a Top 10 hit with Lady Lynda or when they headlined Knebworth, that Mr Hamilton decided to devote an hour of his show to the story of surf music. Anyway his show made me a lifelong fan of this band.
    I wonder, though, what an interview with either the band’s reclusive founder,Brian Wilson, or Dennis Wilson would have been like at this time.

  3. Glenn A

    April 24, 2015 at 10:26 pm

    Should have added, a stoned and drunk Dennis Wilson would have been a very interesting interviewee.

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