TV Cream

The Others

Talk Radio UK

Possibly the second most dated thing in Brass Eye, after Jas Mann of course.JUST sneaking in under the Cream-Era radar courtesy of initial incarnation as round-the-clock provider of actual genuine ‘talk’, much of it provided by unusually ‘talk’-friendly roster that included Terry Christian, Tommy Boyd, Anna Raeburn, Dale Winton, Samantha Meah, Simon Bates (at last unencumbered by having to fit those pesky ‘records’ into his rants) and Jeremy Beadle, reviving his revered LBC days with a show that involved a demented jingle that rhymed ‘disagreeable’ with ‘Beadle’, and a phone-in quiz about falling down a hole or something. Commercial ownership meant that before long tampering was on the agenda, and it duly mutated into TalkSport, like some nightmarish radio-personification of the 1978 Scoop Sports Annual.

9 Comments

9 Comments

  1. Dominic Small

    September 1, 2009 at 5:12 pm

    Also worth pointing out is that TRUK took up the old ‘meejum-wave’ freqs of Radio 1 – though I’m of the FM generation myself, much of the TVC-endorsed chicanery of the pre-1FM era dallied across 1053 and 1089…

  2. Chris Hughes

    September 1, 2009 at 11:40 pm

    The thing that sticks in my head about the launch of Talk Radio is the test transmissions, which featured the presenters talking about themselves (“Vanessa Feltz, Sundays 10 till one!”), which were subsequently parodied by Kevin Greening on Radio One (“The Shah Of Iran, Saturdays one till three!”) which struck me as possibly the most obscure parody of all time.

  3. Lee James Turnock

    May 24, 2010 at 3:21 pm

    The most memorable on-air barney I ever heard was when a very well-refreshed Arthur Smith was a guest on the ‘Caesar the Geezer’ show and proceeded to wind him up something rotten. Callers joined in and it all got a bit too gruesome for comfort, with a female victim of racism bursting into tears on the phone and Smithy accusing Caesar of being “such an arsehole”. After the news break, the titular ‘Geezer’ grumbled “I am very angry…very, very angry…I am so cross, I just can’t tell you how angry I am. I had a studio guest who was drunk out of his mind…”

    • Joanne Gray

      April 13, 2017 at 5:00 pm

      I liked Caesar the Geezer. He actually did one of his shows (could have been his final one for Talk Radio) from the pavement outside the studios after management refused to let him inside to talk about his subsequent sacking. I heard he went back to local radio after that, but he really needs to be heard nationally.

  4. Richard Davies

    July 30, 2010 at 10:06 pm

    Steve Wright was on in it’s early days, after leaving Radio 1 because the playlists were too restrictive.

    The early TV & print ads featured a talking kettle mascot, along with the slogan “Let Off Steam With Talk Radio”.

  5. Glenn A

    August 28, 2012 at 8:55 pm

    Anyone remember that surreal five minute soap that appeared twice a day, The Bradshaws, that was set in Manchester? Also in the late nineties Talk Radio was where it was at with presenters like Peter Deeley, Nick Abbott and Mike Dickin.
    Now sadly turned into a laddish, football talk station that has all the appeal of a dead dog to football haters like me. Why couldn’t they have kept the original, excellent format?

  6. Richard Davies

    August 29, 2012 at 1:49 pm

    The Bradshaws was a staple Picadilly Key 103 for years, I was thinking about it only the other day.

  7. Glenn A

    March 28, 2015 at 6:03 pm

    @ Richard Davies, thankyou, it always sounded like a surreal Coronation St, probably what Corrie would have been if Harold Pinter wrote it. Also one day they decided to do the news headlines in German for no apparent reason. Talk Radio was a godsend for those of us who wanted a talk station that wasn’t pompous like Radio 4 or laddish like 5 Live.
    Of course, it couldn’t last, someone decided to turn it into Talk Sport, where sport largely means people rabbiting away about Premiership football. Had someone like Nick Abbott presented a sports show in the nineties, it probably would have featured Ross County fans discussing chess.

  8. James

    August 4, 2020 at 8:18 am

    Classic story about Jeremy Beadle told by Tommy Boyd –

    https://soundcloud.com/tommy-boyds-human-zoo/beadle-trashed-bathroom

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top