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.

Last week, Brian told me about , in 1960, on board the Queen Mary. It was a thank you from the 主播大秀 for the runaway success of Saturday Club. He was only in New York for 24 hours but managed to cram an incredible amount in. "I arranged through a music publisher to do an interview with Pat Boone, and he happily invited me to his private recording studio at his home in New York. We did a massive long interview and he was tremendously friendly, it was super to meet him. Because he was very big at that time - well, just stopping being so big. He'd had all those hits in the fifties of course, and he was a lovely guy, so that was exciting."

Brian recalls the novelty of multi-channel television in his hotel room, and eating soft-shell crab for the first time. With help from his bank manager, he had taken his wife Pamela along for the trip. "We got to a jazz club and saw a tremendous band who at the time I'd never heard of, the Herbie Mann Octet, and Chris Connor, a wonderful singer. They were very good. Classy performers. We also got in to see a performance of the musical Gypsy, with Ethel Merman playing the lead." Brian remembers that he was sat directly behind "the beautiful British actress Greer Garson" to make the whole event even more glamorous.

The city that never sleeps held a rude surprise for Brian and Pamela the following morning. "We got up early and thought we'd do some Christmas shopping before we went back to the Queen Mary. To our horror, we found nearly all the shops in New York didn't open til 10 o'clock in the morning! So we wandered around in the not-too-warm weather, and we did a quick trip on a boat round the harbour. And at the last minute we got into Macy's and managed to get some presents, then rushed back to get on the Queen Mary for the return trip to Southampton.

"It sort of sums it up that at the end of the trip we were sat at a table, a dozen of us, with (singers) Rosemary Squires and Don Rennie, and Jimmy Grant the inventor of Saturday Club. We were having a joyous, riotous time, making a lot of noise in the first class saloon. And we noticed that there was a bishop at the adjacent table." This turned out to be the Bishop of New Jersey, with an accent straight out of The Sopranos. "He kept looking over, and I thought he looked, quite reasonably, rather miffed at this noisy crowd. So as we arrived in New York I went up to him and said I'd like to apologise for upsetting you on the way over. None of us have ever been to New York before and we're totally excited by it. He said, 'Oh that's alright. I was just jealous. I wished I was sitting at your table - you seemed to be having such a good time!' I thought wasn't that nice? We must have been a pest.