Hello again, fellow Bookworms!
I had thought I had this all sorted… Valentine’s Day Blog, bit of a tradition on here. Tell my followers that I blog on 14th February to say that I am in a long-term loving and committed relationship with books? Check. Find the “Voldemort” ecard? Check. Celebrate the fact that Valentine’s Day is also the anniversary of Torvill & Dean winning gold at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo? Check. Do the usual book stuff like any finished books and updates for the Ongoing Concerns? Check.
Yeah, the usual stuff prepped for… and then yesterday afternoon I got the bombshell that another chunk of my teenage years had gone. Disc jockey, Steve Wright, had died suddenly at the age of only 69.
It was only a month ago, two blogs into the new year, that I was mourning the loss of Annie Nightingale! Recalling the time, somewhere around either 1987 or 1988, when I accidentally discovered her request show on a Sunday night after the Top 40 as I had left the radio on after the charts and she’d started that night’s show with the Pet Shop Boys! It was the Disco Mix of “It’s a Sin”, the 12” version of the song, so I ended up listening to the entire show and Annie had a new listener!
At least Annie had had a decent innings, she was 83. Steve Wright was only 69. That’s no age, is it? I will return to this in a bit with my own personal memories of Steve Wright in the Afternoon on Radio 1 in the late 80s and early 90s as I went from my teens into the early years of my adult life, but I need to mention some other stuff, including one book read and another book that’s at least half-read.
Before we get onto the books, though… today, Wednesday 14th February 2024, is the 40th anniversary of Jayne Torvill & Christopher Dean winning gold for Great Britain at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, skating to Ravel’s Bolero. Still my favourite sporting moment from the Winter Olympics, and I was 10 going on 11 when Mum and I watched the ice dance final on telly four decades ago! My final year of primary school.
The reason they start on their knees was that the abridged version of Bolero was still a little bit too long to skate to by about 18 seconds. Christopher Dean looked at the rule book and it said the routine could be 4 minutes 10 seconds. Their music was 4 minutes 28 seconds long, but Chris noticed that the “skating” didn’t start until blades were on the ice! So he told Jayne and they came up with the swaying start to kill a bit of time!
I do have a biography, Torvill & Dean, by John Hennessy, which I have had since I was a kid, so I may have a long-overdue reread of that this year. But I DO have a finished book for this month… one of those souvenirs from my wine-tasting in Lanzarote…
Discover La Geria With Nico, by Ismael Lozano Latorre, is now finished! It wasn’t an Ongoing Concern as the book is too short for that, but it is my first February finish and my fourth overall for this year.
The only other book that has seen progress has been Hey Hi Hello! by Annie Nightingale on my Kindle. That has passed the halfway mark and is currently 60% read, so the next milestone will be 67% – two-thirds read, which won’t be too long off. Not made any progress with the other OCs so they are as you were.
So, as promised, back to Chief Bookworm’s radio days… we’re going back to the late 80s and early 90s here and yours truly was a teenager. As a younger kid, I’d watched the children’s programmes on telly when I got home from school, but when you’re a teenager, most shows are a bit too young for you, you need something a bit more grown up, but still a bit daft and very funny… and that’s where Steve Wright in the Afternoon came into it! Steve interspersed his chat and the latest chart hits with a huge cast of silly characters! Mick & Keef, Mr Angry, Sid the Manager, Mr Mad, Dr Fish-Filleter, Diamond Geezer and Linda Lust…
Back in the late 80s, in the UK, there were a lot of premium rate phone lines, i.e. expensive to ring, and while some of these were for other stuff like football gossip and transfer rumours, quite a lot of these phone numbers, which all started 0898, were… how shall I put this? Adult Content would be the best way to describe it. X-rated stuff.
So, Steve Wright and his team created this character called Linda Lust, to take the piss out of these phone lines by reading out a load of nonsense in a suggestive tone of voice with made up 0898 phone numbers! Linda Lust’s Lusty Lines! Bloody hilarious!
He was mostly on radio, Radio 1 when I was younger, before migrating to Radio 2 later, but when he was a Radio 1 DJ he was on the rota to present Top of the Pops every so often. He was even on TOTP as a performer in 1991! With the film “Terminator 2” on at the cinema that year, Arnie Schwarzenegger was hugely popular, and Steve and friends came up with a novelty song “I’ll Be Back” under the name of Arnee and the Terminaters! It actually got to number 5 in the charts!
I was reminded of it last night when looking for tributes to Steve on YouTube and remembered just how brilliant it was. “It’s not that I’m ill-mannered, or a psychopathic hater. I just like to be treated right like any Terminator! If I thought I’d get results, I’d act a whole lot sweeter, but people always respect an Uzi nine milimetre!” That’s just a sample of the lyrics!
I think I’ve mentioned Radio 1 Roadshows in past blogs, even if it was a year or so ago now, possibly around 2020 or 2021 I think? Anyway, those used to go around the country in the summer, July and August, and I went to a couple of them in the 90s, the second of which was hosted by Steve Wright! It was at the Floral Hall Gardens in Southport.
I’ve chosen some more videos to “watch later” which are tributes to Steve – his passing has hit a lot of people in broadcasting hard, there have been loads of tributes, even from disc jockeys on other stations – in the early hours of the morning, Bill Overton paid tribute to Steve Wright on his show on Classic FM and said that Steve would give a mention to DJs on rival stations! Rest in Peace, Steve, you will be greatly missed! Thanks for the memories and giving me a good laugh when I was a teenager!
On a more happy note, there have been a couple of Big 50s this week, with the 50th anniversary of the first episode of “Bagpuss” and then the 50th birthday of Robbie Williams yesterday! Only 13 episodes of Bagpuss were ever made by Oliver Postgate and his animation company. Peter Firmin’s daughter was the Emily in the show, who owned the shop which didn’t sell anything. She found oddities and nick-nacks, often in need of repair, and brought them in for Bagpuss and his friends to sort out!
Bagpuss was, of course, a saggy old cloth cat. Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams. But Emily loved him.
I know I have already mentioned that this year is 200 years of the RNLI, and I am pretty sure the anniversary is not far off, some time in March. However, I have also discovered that another national institution started in 1824 and is therefore also 200 years old this year… Cadbury’s chocolate! Yay! I have stuffed my face with plenty of that in my 50 going on 51 years on Earth, lol!
I know I’ve not mentioned that many books in this blog, but it is only a few days after the previous one. I will probably leave it a bit longer before the next blog so I can get my arse in gear on the reading front and have a bit more to tell you about the Ongoing Concerns. For now, though, that is about it for now, so until next time, take care and Happy Reading!
Joanne x x x
Books mentioned in this blog entry…
- Torvill & Dean – John Hennessy
- Discover La Geria With Nico – Ismael Lozano Latorre
- Hey Hi Hello! – Annie Nightingale
Joanne's Bookshelf 