00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. It's always
00:06 a fantastic pleasure to speak to Gary Richardson, especially about this Radio Live. Now Gary,
00:11 you've got Radio Live coming to Chichester Festival Theatre on January 20th next year,
00:17 2024, and you're promising a hilarious romp through broadcasting history. Now Gary, yours
00:23 is a voice that we all know, but a few people possibly won't have seen you before. Tell
00:29 me, what is the show all about and how did it happen?
00:33 Well Radio Live, and I am so lucky because when I come to Chichester on the 20th of January,
00:38 I'm going to be there with Sir Richard Stilgoe, who goes back to the home service days. I'm
00:45 there with Alastair McGowan, the country's, in my view, best impressionist. He did things
00:51 in the early days, like Dead Ringers. I'm one of radio's best loved broadcasters, Sherlock
00:57 Green. So basically what we do, Phil, we come along and we talk about our lives on the wireless
01:04 and I go back to sort of 1976. I've been extremely lucky to do so many interviews, so many different
01:12 programs and it's really anecdotes. It's funny and amusing stories, but when it comes to
01:20 Richard of course, it's very much about music. And one of the very best things that he does
01:25 on Radio Live, he makes a song up on the spur of the moment. And I know guests that will
01:32 be coming on the evening will say, we've seen him do it. Every time he does it, it's just
01:38 sensational. So for example…
01:39 It's phenomenal, is it? Whatever you suggest gets subsumed into the song, doesn't it?
01:44 Yeah. So if you say to him, you know, if you call out 'telephone box', 'elephant',
01:48 'cruise liner', 'Father Christmas', 'Prime Minister', he goes off and 20 minutes
01:52 later he's written a song. And that's the sort of the magic of our live theatre show,
02:00 Radio Live.
02:01 But underlying the whole thing is the magic of radio, isn't it? And what is that magic?
02:06 You were saying that you were hooked on the magic of radio as a young boy and you haven't
02:10 lost that.
02:11 I was. No, I am obsessed by radio and I listen to sort of radio all over the world, stations
02:18 in America and all over, at all hours of the day. Growing up in the 1960s, it was the radiogram
02:25 then. It was a box in the corner. And I suppose on Sundays, it was Jimmy Clitheroe, the Clitheroe
02:33 Kid, which I think in those very early days was the home service before it moved to Radio
02:39 2 in 1967. I don't know whether you remember the Clitheroe Kid. There was Family Favourites.
02:45 I remember talk of it, yes.
02:48 There was Sing Something Simple. There were programmes like the Jack Jackson Show. He
02:53 was a great DJ. He was the forerunner for Steve Wright, I think, on the radio and Kenny
02:58 Everett. And he used to have clever little sketches and clever little jingles. And that
03:04 for me is the magic of radio. I love listening to plays on radio. There's a great series
03:10 repeated many times, Sherlock Holmes, where you'll hear Sherlock Holmes clip-clop along
03:16 the dark alleyway and then he'll strike a match to light his pipe. And that's as good
03:21 as the pictures. So I love radio plays.
03:24 But how come we're in such a highly visual age now, aren't we? With such wizard technology
03:29 around so much is possible. How come it hasn't been superseded in your mind? Why has that
03:34 magic of the radio stayed, do you think?
03:37 Well, I love the television. And in my very early days in the 1970s, I was very fortunate
03:43 to go to television centre and see them record programmes like Dad's Army, The Two Ronnies,
03:49 Porridge, Are You Being Served? I was in a lift one night with Arthur Lowe and John
03:56 Lemaitre, which was quite astonishing because I was only 17 years old, you know, and there
04:01 they were in the lift with me. But it is that magic of the radio. And I think in a way,
04:07 it was possibly because it was there and it was the radiogramme. And my dad used to record
04:13 programmes on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and we listened to them back. And so, you
04:19 know, that happened from when I was five, six, seven, eight years old. And in a way,
04:24 it was brainwashing me. And I've loved it ever since.
04:27 And it's so interesting just now you used the word 'wireless', didn't you? Deliberately.
04:32 Yeah, well...
04:33 It's the nostalgia, isn't it?
04:36 It is nostalgia. And nostalgia really is a great word to describe our show. It is nostalgia
04:43 because we look back at all the things we've done. And I think, you know, Richard and Alastair
04:49 and Charlotte and I would tell you, you know, we've been very, you know, very, very, very,
04:54 very lucky. I've made programmes about my heroes like, you know, Sir Ken Dodd. And,
05:01 you know, to work with Sir Ken Dodd, absolutely fantastic. I made a programme about big band
05:06 music and got to interview Buddy Greco, a great American singer, who sang with Sammy
05:12 Davis and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And we sat in his house and he told me stories
05:18 about being with Marilyn Monroe and they would all have weekends together. So that's why
05:23 I feel so lucky having worked on the wireless for so long.
05:27 That's the heritage you'll draw on. And it sounds a fabulous mix of people that you'll
05:31 be bringing to Chichester Festival Theatre, where the show began, first began, and you'll
05:35 be there on January 20th. Gary, really, really lovely to speak to you. Thank you so much.
05:41 Phil, lovely to see you. And we hope to see everybody in Chichester on January 20th.
05:46 Fantastic. Thank you.
05:48 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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