Petticoat Line
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Petticoat Line
''Petticoat Line'' was an all-woman panel show on the BBC Home Service (from 1967 this became BBC Radio 4) chaired by Anona Winn which discussed listeners' letters and problems. It started on 6 January 1965 and ran for 11 years. It was devised by Anona Winn and Ian C. Messiter. The panellists always included Renée Houston (who was rationed to saying "bloody" no more than three times per show); Sheila van Damm and Katharine Whitehorn also appeared quite often. Winn originally proposed a more serious show called ''The Ombudswomen'' but this lighter and funnier show came into existence instead. Signature tune The music which introduced and ended each edition was "Fluter's Holiday", by Bert Kaempfert Bert Kaempfert (born Berthold Heinrich Kämpfert; 16 October 1923 – 21 June 1980) was a German orchestra leader, multi-instrumentalist, music producer, arranger, and composer. He made easy listening and jazz-oriented records and wrote the musi ... and his orchestra.BBC Gramophone R ...
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Panel Show
A panel show or panel game is a radio or television game show in which a panel of celebrities participates. Celebrity panelists may compete with each other, such as on ''The News Quiz''; facilitate play by non-celebrity contestants, such as on ''Match Game'' and ''Blankety Blank''; or do both, such as on ''Wait Wait Don't Tell Me''. The genre can be traced to 1938, when ''Information Please'' debuted on U.S. radio. The earliest known television panel show is '' Play the Game'', a charades show in 1946. The modern trend of comedy panel shows can find early roots with '' Stop Me If You've Heard This One'' in 1939 and ''Can You Top This?'' in 1940. While panel shows were more popular in the past in the U.S., they are still very common in the United Kingdom. Format While many early panel shows stuck to the traditional quiz show format in which celebrities tried to get the right answers and win, the primary goal of modern panel shows is to entertain the audience with comedy, with the ...
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BBC Home Service
The BBC Home Service was a national and regional radio station that broadcast from 1939 until 1967, when it was replaced by BBC Radio 4. History 1922–1939: Interwar period Between the early 1920s and the outbreak of World War II, the BBC developed two nationwide radio stations – the National Programme and the Regional Programme (which were begun broadcasting on 9 March 1930) – as well as a basic service from London that include programming originated in six regions. Although the programme items attracting the greatest number of listeners tended to appear on the National, the two services were not streamed: they were each designed to appeal "across the board" to a single but variegated audience by offering between them and at most times of the day a choice of programme type rather than simply catering, each of them exclusively, to two distinct audiences. 1939–1945: World War II On 1 September 1939, the BBC merged the two programmes into one national service from Lon ...
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BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House, London. The station controller is Mohit Bakaya. Broadcasting throughout the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands on FM, LW and DAB, and on BBC Sounds, it can be received in the eastern counties of Ireland, northern France and Northern Europe. It is available on Freeview, Sky, and Virgin Media. Radio 4 currently reaches over 10 million listeners, making it the UK's second most-popular radio station after Radio 2. BBC Radio 4 broadcasts news programmes such as ''Today'' and ''The World at One'', heralded on air by the Greenwich Time Signal pips or the chimes of Big Ben. The pips are only accurate on FM, LW, and MW; there is a delay on digital radio of three to five seconds and ...
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Anona Winn
Anona Winn (born Anona Edna Wilkins, 5 January 1904 – 2 February 1994) was an Australian-born actress, broadcaster and singer, who spent most of her career in the UK. Career Born in Sydney, she studied at the Redland College For Girls in Sydney She then studied piano and eventually opera at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Melba Memorial Conservatorium of Music, which the latter was possible due to a scholarship from Dame Nellie Melba. Melba, who convinced her to change her name to Winn, also called her a "human flute" due to her massive range. She became disillusioned with the training, calling it the "strait-jacket of opera training", though she was thankful for Melba's guidance. She would join a touring company of ''The Merry Widow'', but after finding it hard to be a successful singer, she would become a journalist. After playing parts varying from pantomime to Shakespeare in a repertory company, she moved to England. She played the leading part for 8 weeks in "Hit T ...
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Ian Messiter
Ian Cassan Messiter (2 April 1920 – 22 November 1999) was a BBC Radio producer and the creator of a number of panel games, including '' Just a Minute'', ''Dealing With Daniels'' and '' Many a Slip''. Messiter brought the successful '' twenty questions'' format to BBC Radio and was programme associate for ''Family Fortunes''. Messiter was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, and educated at Winton House School, near Winchester, and Sherborne School in Dorset. In his autobiography, ''My Life and Other Games'' (1990), Ian Messiter described how an incident during a history lesson at Sherborne School became the inspiration for the ''Just a Minute'' radio panel-game. Ian acted as whistle-blower on ''Just a Minute'', and its predecessor ''One Minute, Please''. He appeared in the first series of BBC science-fiction quiz show ''The Adventure Game'' in 1980 as the Rangdo, the leader of the alien Argonds, and contributed ideas for puzzles in the series. He published his autobiography ''My ...
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Renée Houston
Renée Houston (born Katherina Rita Murphy Gribbin; 24 July 1902 – 9 February 1980) was a Scottish comedy actress and revue artist who appeared in television and film roles. Biography Born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, into a theatrical family who performed as James Houston and Company,Roy Hudd and Philip Hindin, ''Roy Hudd's Cavalcade of Variety Acts'', Robson Books, 1998, , pp.84-85 she toured music halls and revues with her sister Billie Houston (born Sarah McMahon Gribbin; 1906–1972) as the "Houston Sisters". They became a leading variety act in the 1920s, sometimes performing as two children in over-sized furniture; Billie played the part of a boy. In 1926, the sisters made a short musical film, the script of which Renée had written. It was produced by Lee De Forest, whose process, Phonofilm, enabled a soundtrack to be played alongside the film (a year before ''The Jazz Singer''). The sisters ended their working partnership in 1936, when Billie reportedly became i ...
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Sheila Van Damm
Sheila van Damm (17 January 1922 – 23 August 1987) was a British woman competitor in motor rallying in the 1950s, and also the former owner of the Windmill Theatre in London. She began her competitive driving career in 1950, and won the Coupe des Dames, the highest award for women, in the 1953 Alpine Rally. The following year she won the Women's European Touring Championship and, in 1955, the Coupe des Dames at the Monte Carlo Rally. Biography She was born in Paddington, west London, the daughter of Vivian Van Damm and his wife, Natalie Lyons. Her upbringing in a Jewish family was certainly unconventional but then her father was an automobile enthusiast and had been a mechanic with Clement-Talbot in the early days of motoring. He encouraged her to learn to drive, at well below the legal age, and her first journey with him was to drive from London to Brighton. In the Second World War she had more conventional training as a Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) driver. While in th ...
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Katharine Whitehorn
Katharine Elizabeth Whitehorn (2 March 1928 – 8 January 2021) was a British journalist, columnist, author and radio presenter. She was the first woman to have a column in ''The Observer'', which ran from 1963 to 1996 and from 2011 to 2017. She was the first female rector of a university in Scotland. Her books include ''Cooking in a Bedsitter'' (1961). Early life Whitehorn was born in Hendon on 2 March 1928. Her family was on the left of the political spectrum and nonconformist, with her father being a conscientious objector and her mother having secured a place to study at the University of Cambridge. Her maternal great-grandfather was the final person to be charged with heresy by the Church of Scotland; he was ultimately acquitted. Whitehorn was educated at the private Roedean School near Brighton, and Glasgow High School for Girls. She went on to read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. After graduation, she worked as a freelancer in London, before moving to Finland to ...
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Bert Kaempfert
Bert Kaempfert (born Berthold Heinrich Kämpfert; 16 October 1923 – 21 June 1980) was a German orchestra leader, multi-instrumentalist, music producer, arranger, and composer. He made easy listening and jazz-oriented records and wrote the music for a number of well-known songs, including "Strangers in the Night", “Danke Schoen” and "Moon Over Naples". Early life and career Kaempfert was born in Hamburg, Germany, where he received his lifelong nickname, Fips, and studied at the local school of music. A multi-instrumentalist, he was hired by Hans Busch to play with his orchestra, before serving as a bandsman in the German Navy during World War II. He later formed his own big band and toured with them, following that by working as an arranger and producer, making hit records with Freddy Quinn and Ivo Robić. Kaempfert met his future wife, Hannelore, in 1945. They married a year later, on 14 August 1946. They had two daughters, Marion and Doris. Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra ...
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1965 Radio Programme Debuts
Events January–February * January 14 – The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland meet for the first time in 43 years. * January 20 ** Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in for a full term as President of the United States. ** Indonesian President Sukarno announces the withdrawal of the Indonesian government from the United Nations. * January 30 – The state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill takes place in London with the largest assembly of dignitaries in the world until the 2005 funeral of Pope John Paul II. * February 4 – Trofim Lysenko is removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union. Lysenkoist theories are now treated as pseudoscience. * February 12 ** The African and Malagasy Common Organization ('; OCAM) is formed as successor to the Afro-Malagasy Union for Economic Cooperation ('; UAMCE), formerly the African and Malagasy Union ('; UAM). * Febr ...
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