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Bagpuss |
Between 1993 and 1996, Danny Baker hosted the weekend breakfast show on BBC Radio 1, based around his love of obscure trivia and ability to prise fascinating stories out of listeners. Common 'wisdom' holds that the show was some kind of "embarrassment" that caused the network to lose listeners at a rate of knots every week. Yet those who actually listened to it can confirm that it was an exciting, inventive and above all hugely entertaining show.
One of the most sonically startling features of the show was when Baker, a noted lover of vinyl records, invited listeners to try and destroy compact discs live on air... My strongest memories are of someone microwaving a CD, and then trying to play it afterwards. - Ronnie Bookless The classic mode of CD destruction had to be loading them into a clay pigeon launcher and shooting them, but I also recall someone attacking one with a sander (which they then attempted to play!), and someone who affixed lashings of cheese, tomato, pepperoni and anchovies to the top of one, and put it in the microwave to make the world's first pizza CD (NB putting CDs in the microwave is probably highly dangerous and is not recommended). The noises that these stunts made on air was ridiculous - you really did have to hear them to believe them. - TJ Worthington
Danny Baker is notorious for having scant regard for the ways in which radio presenters are 'supposed' to behave, and took a particularly dim view of being asked to play requests and dedications. On one occasion a woman caller wanted to "say hello to everyone that knows me..." and he let her do it until she ran out of people and dead air ensued. - Ronnie Bookless
A significant proportion of the in-studio humour derived from good-natured, affectionate joking at the expense of old progressive rock records, and eventually a competition was launched for listeners who were able to play the main riff from Deep Purple's 'Smoke On The Water' on any unlikely instrument.. The best rendition of 'Smoke On The Water', beating all those played by gargling, running a finger across the top of wine glasses etc, had to be the man who was chopping wood, and found that as the pieces of wood fell they 'played' that famous riff - and he even sent said pieces of wood in to the studio so that it could be demonstrated on air!. - TJ Worthington
A major obsession of Baker and his co-presenter Danny Kelly was football - not just the specifics of the game, but also the absurdities of the culture that surrounds it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were eventually given their own foorball-based show. I used to always listen to the Baker/Kelly football show- even though I'm not a great fan of the game they made the show's subject extremely accessible and hilarious, with phone-in items on ex-footballers jobs after their careers were over - some of them spotted now serving burgers etc. There was also a story about the Dundee United fan making a wooden bow-tie for his son to wear to their matches. Brilliant. - Ronnie Bookless
One of the most unlikely successes of the show was a very visual item called "The University Of Turmoil", during which Baker would describe composite pictures that Danny Kelly had made by cutting up the day's newspapers and mixing and matching random headlines with inappropriate photographs. Suprisingly, this came across very well on radio, and was frequently sidesplittingly funny. There was an animated discussion earlier in one show between Baker and Kelly about a BBC2 documentary series named "Holy Men", which that week had featured an Indian gentleman who one day decided that he had to roll across the landscape continually in order to lead a good and holy life. Describing it as the most entertaining programme of the year, they had postulated on all manner of bizarre theories connected to the Holy Rolling Man, including the likelihood of him being given his own lane on the approach to a ferry and whether the addition of a trad jazz outfit marching behind him would have added to or detracted from the overall effect (they then played some music to gauge this, with Kelly remarking "what a great job, being the man who just goes 'pahrrrr' occasionally"), and how his agent might pitch his 'act' to Hollywood. Later, at the climax of an already chaotic instalment of turmoil, the final mixed-up headline and image featured... the Holy Rolling Man! Needless to say, Baker was virtually incapable of speech for the remaining few minutes of the programme. I once read an article where the editor of "Loaded" described Turmoil - which had me almost in genuine tears of laughter every weekend - as an 'insult' because it required listeners to use their minds and think visually while listening to the radio, and went on to spout out the same tired old story of Baker representing a 'decline' in the standards of Radio 1 since the good old days of Batesie and Adrian Juste etc. The ironies of his stance were not lost on me. - TJ Worthington
Eventually, Baker's idiosyncratic and adventurous show was deemed to be too avant-garde to suit the needs of the unimaginative mainstream audience, and his airtime was gradually cut back... The gradual reduction of his airtime was ridiculous, being nothing more than a knee-jerk response to typically scaremongering tabloid stories about 'declining popularity' by journalists with nothing else to write about. It is true to say that Baker's style was something completely new for Radio 1, and that some sections of the audience needed time to become acclimatised to it, but at the same time the only way to allow them to become acclimatised would have been to perservere with the show in its original slot, rather than continually shaving off an hour here and there. Caving in to the 'pressure' of the Radio-1-was-better-with-The-Dave-Lee-Travis-on-the-roadshows lobby, most of whom probably never listened to Radio 1 anyway, was a sign of acceptance of defeat, and with such negativity going on the unconvinced were never going to be won over. Baker himself used to refer to the shortening of the shows as being "like Boxing Helena", which was presumably intended to sound casual and flippant, but in fact appeared to be masking genuine dissatisfaction and contempt. - TJ Worthington
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