Radio Live offers a hilarious romp through broadcasting history with Sir Richard Stilgoe, Alistair McGowan, Charlotte Green and Garry Richardson with special guest Dame Joanna Lumley on Sat 20 Jan 2024. Matinee and evening performances - tickets on https://www.cft.org.uk/events/radio-live#dates
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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]