It’s quite disconcerting to have your hero bellow questions at you, as I found out this year
I’m on the radio on Sunday. For the third time in as many months, my voice will come out of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. I first applied to be on the music quiz Counterpoint in 2021, and I was not chosen as one of 27 contestants for that series, or 2023’s, or 2024’s.
I was promised I would definitely be on the 2025 series, the 38th, questions for which have been set by Stephen Garner (pictured below), whose fiendish mind thinks up 67 per show, 14 of which are unused. Somehow, in 28 minutes of valuable audio real estate, 53 questions are asked in full or in part. Because it’s a music quiz, there are also clips to play; in my heat, I was given the love theme to the movie Up and three pieces of music by Wham! You can hear the show here as a podcast.
You will discover what Stephen has thought up for the three finalists on Sunday afternoon at 4.30pm, when there is no Premier League football on 5 Live. Rather humorously my two fellow finalists – Jim from Northern Ireland, and Sarah, who describes herself intersectionally as a ‘Cornish Australian Mancunian’ – are former Mastermind finalists, while in 2022 Sarah reached the Counterpoint final and won Brain of Britain. She was wearing a t-shirt of her favourite band The Divine Comedy, which was a nice conversation starter as we waited for the quiz to begin (we recorded it a month ago yesterday).
In the semi-final, I had gotten lucky when Country in the 21st Century came up as a bonus round. I was asked a septet of questions that ranged from the artist who covered Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, to which trio were ashamed that George W Bush was from Texas, to the Californian country festival that happens every April. In case you want to test your knowledge, here’s the link to the show.
The final round is on the buzzers, the same dot buttons used by Just A Minute contestants to interrupt hesitators and deviators; the show is recorded in the same BBC Radio Theatre on a stage where pretty much every great British entertainer of the past century has trodden upon. The green room in which contestants mingle and where they leave their belongings during the recording, Stephen told me, has held Joanna Lumley, Michael Palin and Sir Elton John, whom Stephen chaperoned at a recording of Paul Gambaccini’s celebration of his 40 years on the BBC.
Photo credit: Christopher Sykesud
Segue: Paul Gambaccini (pictured left) is my hero. I used to stay in on Saturday evenings, even when I could listen back to the show on the pre-Sounds iPlayer, to hear America’s Greatest Hits, a two-hour programme that played rock, country and R&B ‘then and now’. The show always ended with the number one song of the moment. It’s the first place I heard Just Dance by Lady Gaga, I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry and Fence Post by Aaron Watson, a country artist who lamented that an executive didn’t believe he had ‘commercial appeal’.
I wrote to the man everybody calls Gambo to borrow the format for the show when I did my own version of it in 2015, and he graciously sent me a letter back giving me his blessing. I had attended that BBC celebration, which meant that Stephen called me over to the questioner’s table before the recording of the heat. Weren’t we close to the 50-year hootenanny, I asked. Yes, Paul Gambaccini from the radio told me, and that’s not all: if he, who turns 76 on April 2, held on for a few more years he would break essayist Alistair Cooke’s service record of 58 years.
In a media landscape where the BBC have to serve every possible audience in every possible way – news, current affairs, drama, music documentary, children’s programming – there is room to give Gambo a two-hour Sunday night show on Radio 2 show called The Paul Gambaccini Collection. In the first year, he has broadcast tributes to Quincy Jones and his Radio 2 colleague Johnnie Walker, and in February, either side of a Valentine’s Day special, the themes were Comic Books and songs with Happy or Sad in the title.
The critic David Hepworth once remarked that the man possessed a ‘discographic memory’, perhaps because alongside Mike Read and Jo and Tim Rice (yes, that Tim Rice), Gambo wrote the literal pop discography. That’s why they call him the Professor of Pop, which is befitting a man who studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship in the 1970s and settled in London after becoming Rolling Stone magazine’s man in Rock’n’Roll London, in a country which had just begun to put the genre on the air with Radio One in 1967.
Across half a century, in a broadcasting career which included a spot reviewing the movies on breakfast TV, Gambo has presented for every one of the main BBC networks and several commercial stations including Jazz FM, Classic FM, LBC and Greatest Hits Radio. The last of these stations is where America’s Greatest Hits now lives, broadcast from 5-7pm on Saturday afternoons. He records it in his West London home with ‘studio manager Chris Sherwood’ on hand to push the buttons as he reads the script, as I was told in the green room after the final recording.
He has published two books of essays, Masters of Rock and Track Records, based on hour-long profiles written for Radio One in the early 1980s; the Michael Jackson essay begins ‘I don’t want to talk about the llama’. Only a man used to Oxford tutorial essays could have taken on such an assignment, one which had a ‘hideous deadline pressure’, in a time before Google and digital search capabilities.
In 1996, Paul published a memoir called Love Letters, which I am duty bound to say took its name from a copyright which was a UK top ten hit for three artists: Ketty Lester (number 4, 1962); Elvis Presley (number 6, 1966); and Alison Moyet (number 4, 1987). I had to look that up, but I bet Paul would not needed to do so.
In Love Letters, Paul wrote about seven men he loved. One of them was David Carroll, who fell victim to the AIDS virus that struck down so many gay men in the 1980s: ‘We both suffered to come to terms with a sexuality that was first impossible, then inadvisable and finally a blessing’. When Gambo marked the 80th birthday of his mate Tim Rice in November 2024, he closed the programme with Anthem, written by Rice for the musical Chess, in which Carroll originated the role of The Russian, Anatoly Sergievsky.
Gambo’s achievements in broadcasting and discography rather bury the lede: a few years before he came to England, the Sexual Offences Act was passed; one of the clauses legalised homosexuality between consenting adults over 21 in private. Alongside his close friend Elton John (more on whom next week), Gambo has been a high-profile gay figure in British life; Elton might have sold millions of records, but Gambo was the one who played them on air and introduced people to Elton’s magnificent songwriting.
Who will replace Elton, or Gambo, when they are gone? Well, who can.