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Radio review - light programme

Published Monday 10 November 2008 at 17:30 by Nick Smurthwaite

Apart from an unhappy childhood, the other spur to success as an entertainer is to have, as Little Richard did, 11 siblings.

“I wanted attention,” squealed the 76-year-old singer with some feeling on 50 years of Little Richard.

The underlying message of the programme seemed to be that it was Richard and not Elvis who merited the title King of Rock’n’Roll, even though they both rose to fame in the same year (1956), and Elvis had far greater chart success, not to say adulation.

It was like comparing a mango to a peach, both equally delicious, just different. Who could deny that Tutti Frutti, Good Golly Miss Molly and Lucille were rock classics, or that Little Richard was dynamite on stage?

Richard didn’t do himself any favours by cutting off his trademark pompadour hairdo and renouncing rock’n’roll in 1957 to concentrate on God and gospel singing. Despite the horse’s mouth testimony, we never did discover exactly why he made this choice, only to resume his rock persona five years later.

Given that Little Richard is still around and fully compos mentis, there is still a revealing documentary to be made about his place in the rock pantheon and the choices he made in his relatively short recording career.

In The Afrobeat Revolutionary, we heard how the cultural rebel Fela Kuti fell foul of the Nigerian military junta in the seventies, leading to multiple arrests and beatings. Kuti was a law unto himself, setting up an alternative commune with its own morals and values. Had Kuti and his followers kept themselves to themselves, the authorities might have ignored them, but the political nature of his music, pouring scorn on the junta, provoked them into increasingly brutal raids on the commune, culminating in a bloody purge in which Kuti’s mother was thrown out of a window and a number of the women raped. Kuti survived it and lived on for another 20 years.

There was good news for country music fans last week - 143 songs recorded by Hank Williams in the early fifties were recovered from a rubbish skip in Nashville, Tennessee. On BBC World Service’s The Strand, Mark Coles interviewed Hank’s daughter Jett, also a country singer, about the find. What emerged, more interestingly, was that Jett was born five days after Hank’s death in 1953, making the informality of these rediscovered recordings, in which he joked and swapped banter with other musicians, especially poignant for the daughter he never met.

In his recently published memoir, Clips From a Life, the great Denis Norden describes June Whitfield as “a gifted actress whose talents have rescued more comedy half hours than the commercial break”. She is also, it transpired in her readings of her own autobiography, And June Whitfield, on BBC7, strangely circumspect about her comedy colleagues. Peter Sellers was summed up as “a strange chap, not easy to get to know”, Tony Hancock found life “difficult to cope with”, while Kenneth Williams considered “no biological function a taboo subject”.

Drafted in to Carry on Abroad to play Kenneth Connor’s frigid spouse, Whitfield had visions of an exotic location in the Bahamas, or at least the Costa del Sol. She hadn’t reckoned on the producer’s legendary cost-cutting. Half a ton of builder’s sand had been tipped into a cold and windy corner of the car park at Pinewood Studios.

DETAILS

50 Years of Little Richard - R4, Tuesday, November 11

The Afrobeat Revolutionary - R2, Tuesday, November 4

The Strand - BBC World Service, Friday, November 7

And June Whitfield - BBC7, Wednesday, November 5

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