Thank You for the Days by Mark Radcliffe

Author:Mark Radcliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When I met John Walters, he was unlike anyone I’d met before. He was an unbelievably witty raconteur. You couldn’t really say good morning to him without the riposte, ‘Well, is it?’ This would be followed by a fifteen-minute tidal wave of reasons why it might not be. In departmental meetings this approach didn’t meet with unanimous approval. Those of us too young to have experienced music hall relaxed back in our chairs and listened with glee to his meticulously constructed epic grumbles. Longer-serving inmates, particularly management, would raise their eyes and emit long breaths, accepting that the meeting, though to all intents and purposes over, was going to last another twenty minutes. On one occasion I remember the controller asking if anyone had any comments about the lift at Egton House, which had recently been redecorated and branded with the station’s colours and logo. And mirrors. Walters launched into a ten-minute tirade on the pointlessness of the whole exercise and saying that it now resembled ‘a Maltese businessman’s idea of a discotheque’. And he was spot on. You knew exactly what he meant. It was the specific identification of the businessman as Maltese that somehow made it all perfect. They should have given him his own show. Well, in fact, they later did. Not soon enough though.

Coming into contact with Walters made me believe utterly in the BBC. He was the kind of one-off who wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in a commercial operation, and therefore it had to follow that the BBC was a wonderful place because it was home to colourful mavericks capable of original thought. That had to be great, didn’t it?

Walters, it seemed to me, had it all worked out. He once told ZigZag magazine: ‘From what I’d seen of the BBC studios, they seemed full of people doing nothing at all, and it looked like money for old rope.’ Wise words, mate.

He regarded his primary function as dealing with all the bullshit and politics so Peel could get on with the programmes uninterrupted. Outside of that, he entertained the rest of the department with limitless anecdotage, got up the noses of the bosses and, on a Friday lunchtime, played his trumpet in a jazz band in a grimy bar owned by the Beeb on the ground floor of what is now the Langham Hotel. It seemed the perfect life really.

John Walters died of a heart attack in 2001, and I’m not sure Peel’s life was ever quite the same again. Not at Radio 1 at any rate. They just seemed so perfect together. I often think of a moment early in my London life where I was sitting at a pavement cafe just up from Oxford Circus, having coffee and croissants with the pair of them, watching the world go by and gently taking the piss out of anyone we could think of as a suitable target. It was just another day for them but for me, I felt like I was at the centre of the universe.

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