While working in sales at Southern Television’s London office, I got a call from Dave Cash (as he was initially also in charge of commercial production) asking me to do some voiceovers for him. Just after the first VO session in May 1974, Capital invited me to be on the sales team to help run the national advertising department.
Although I was just doing national sales and voicing commercials for about 6 months or so, Capital’s programme controller Michael Bukht (known to many as Michael Barry the crafty cook on TV), popped his head into sales and asked me to see him in his corner office on the first floor of Euston Tower.
“Why the heck are you not on my on-air team Davidson?”… There really wasn’t much free space to be a broadcaster on air, but eventually he gave me a Night Flight slot and said see how it goes. First show in February 1975 was from 11 PM until 6 AM (!) but I recorded the initial 2 hours earlier in the day so I could practice on the main panel. The handover was again with Dave Cash and he introduced me. Cashman was a real gent, a dedicated broadcaster with a lilting and calming voice and the Kenny and Cash shows on Big L Radio London (and later on Capital) have gone down in radio history. As you will hear he put me at ease especially as I was down to do over a seven hour shift and the format was, shall we say, quite laid back in those early days!
Michael was truly a genuine and lovely guy as were all the senior management. In fact, he, John Whitney and Richard Attenborough (Sir Dickiepoos) all insisted I became full Capital staff and not just be freelance, indeed because of this I still get a good Capital pension today.
Working on Night Flight with such a captured and dedicated audience in London was great, but it also could be frustrating, well musically at least. The Musician Union and the record companies (supported with relish from the IBA) enforced that no more than 6 hours of commercial music on disc could be played (needltime), so we had to be creative. Capital recorded cover versions of hits in our own multitrack studio downstairs with local bands and session musicians, some were OK, some not so OK. That meant library tracks aplenty, until I discovered the loophole of soundtracks – these were considered non-needletime so if any film or TV soundtracks featured even chart hits as part of the album they were fair game. Despite it being the early hours, nobody else was on air in the entire country and Luxembourg went off at 2AM. Back then the original temporary 539 m (557 kHz) from Lots Road (radio clothes-line) went very much further across the UK than it should have and we had listeners as far north as Manchester and even Newcastle at night time.
I was actually on air at the time 194 m (1546 kHz until 1978) was first switched on for testing and remember Dave Christian from Luxy calling up from the Grand Duchy and asking me “what the hell are you doing this end of the dial and why is is as strong here as we are on 208?!”. Because of the high power and special directivity of the TX site (to help protect other smaller UK ILR stations that were either on or to be given the same frequency), it could be heard all over Europe, especially at night and not hear a whisper past Luton – even had reception reports from Hong Kong once!
I stayed at Capital for over 5 1/2 years and while sharing Night Flight duties on different days of the week, eventually I became the face of the “Fun Bus”, broadcasting and promoting the station all around London and the Home Counties, sometimes linking up live with the station into programmes like Michael Aspel’s morning show, while trying not to fall foul of the very restrictive IBA’s advertising/sponsorship rules in… ahem… creative ways “Michael, I have Miss Jones here who’s won herself a Fluffy Floral Knox Tee-shirt from Wondermash!”.
Later I was offered the London Link programme on a Saturday afternoon in addition to Fun Bus duties. I broadcast dedications to commercial radio stations around the Commonwealth and BFBS forces networks from Australia to Canada, Hong Kong to the Caribbean. In 1977 I did a trip all over Australia and New Zealand (thanks to Mr QANTAS) to visit affiliate stations and record local inserts. Simon Booker produced.
Eventually London Link was moved to 2-6 AM Saturday mornings, but it was still extremely popular despite the time (nobody else was broadcasting in the UK after 3AM then still) so it had hundreds of thousands of listeners and we could sometimes link up live with the affiliates, depending on timezones!
Hear a recently discovered set of tapes from London Link below, this includes segments from 3UZ Melbourne, Radio Antilles, Commercial Radio Hong Kong, Radio 1xi Aukland, 2UW Sydney, 4BC Brisbane, Barbados, 2CC Canberra, CJBV Vancouver, Radio Trinidad, RJR Jamaica, 4BK Brisbane, 3KZ Melbourne, a host of Jingles and more. The first sections were from a presentation reel-reel I did, can’t remember what for, then a few trails and pointers from other stations – quality is really excellent given the age of these tapes!.Finally a section from a crusty old snoop cassette tape when on air (start and stop was triggered by the mic channel fader).
more to come…