主播大秀

The latest in our series where Sounds of the Sixties presenter Brian Matthew chats about his career to writer and musician Bob Stanley

Al Meek & His Rio Ranch Boys on the Skiffle Club in 1958

I said I don't even know what skiffle is!

Brian Matthew

Last time I caught up with Brian, he told me about his first break in broadcasting, when he was with the army in Hamburg. After demob, back in Britain, he returned to his first love - acting - and went first to RADA, then to the Old Vic which is where he met his wife Pamela; they married in 1951, and are still together. One of their colleagues at the Old Vic worked for Hilversum, in the English department of Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, now called Radio Netherlands Worldwide. He gave Brian his number.

"When work was thin on the ground" remembers Brian "I called him and he said 'Please go along to HMV on Oxford Street and record an audition, we want you to read some news. HMV will send us the disc, we've got an arrangement with them'. So I did, and we lived there, in Hilversum, for two years. It was the centre for all Dutch radio. It was a funny old set-up, short wave only, and we broadcast the same 40 minute transmission three times a day to different areas - America, and the far east.

"We were there during the time of the enormous flood in 1953, large areas in a terrible state, loads of people killed. The American army came in. They gradually rebuilt the dykes, and came the time they were going to fill in the last block, it was quite a historic event. I was covering it so I learned everything I could about how it had been done. Needless to say I was repeating myself, but they put a copy of the recording in the Dutch Radio archives."

Brian and Pamela came back to Britain in the mid fifties and lived with his parents in Coventry. Unable to get a job in broadcasting, he found work as a milkman. "Then I worked in the dairy doing all the pasteurising, stacking up the next day's delivery in bottles and crates. It was pretty horrid!"

While he was at the dairy, Brian wrote to the 主播大秀 "and asked if I could do a programme on Dutch jazz - they had a programme called World Of Jazz - and they said yes. The people in the dairy were very impressed, they said 'bloody hell, we've got a star working with us now!' and all that rubbish. The producer liked it and asked me to do a programme on English traditional jazz. Within weeks the 主播大秀 offered me a job as a trainee announcer. They put me straight on to announcing, on all services - in those days it was 主播大秀 Service, Light Programme and Third Programme. You were usually associated with one of them, but I did everything, I went from one to another quite happily."

The 主播大秀's principal jazz producer was Jimmy Grant and in 1957 he was briefed to launch a programme called Skiffle Club; he asked Brian to introduce it. "I said I don't even know what skiffle is! He said that's alright, we'll manage. And it was an unbelievable runaway success, getting enormous listening figures. Management thought 'ullo, and asked Jim to do a two hour programme that would include skiffle but also has other elements of all this pop music that's emerging".

The programme's name changed from Skiffle Club to Saturday Club, and Brian Matthew's regular Saturday morning radio slot began.

The Radio Nederland Wereldomroep building, where Brian worked

The programme's name changed from Skiffle Club to Saturday Club, and Brian Matthew's regular Saturday morning radio slot began.