We don’t need to see radio DJs’ faces |
In a week in which embarrassing and damaging revelations about past misdemeanours are very much in vogue, let me reveal one of my own. When I was seven years old, I wrote in to Jim’ll Fix It. My request was to play a giant Wurlitzer organ, preferably the one in the Blackpool Empress Ballroom. To my retrospective relief, Savile didn’t respond to my letter. But I did purchase a second-hand, two-tier Hammond organ when I was at university, which I played as part of an acid jazz group. No tapes of our band’s songs or gigs survive I am delighted to state.
I was reminded of my rather strange and atavistic early love of organs last week when I read of the death of Nigel Ogden, the presenter of the long-running Radio 2 show The Organist Entertains. It ran for donkey’s years and was axed only in 2018, depriving listeners of hearing vintage Wurlitzers, Mortiers and Christies being played in dancehalls around the country (although every time I tuned in it always seemed to be coming from somewhere in Llandudno).
It was only after he died last week that I finally got to see a picture of Nigel. A Morris Minor enthusiast based in Lytham St Annes, Ogden never seemed to have any ambitions to use radio as a........