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This is a new page, where I will add little interviews and snippets of gossip from time to time as they come along. The first covers a recent find on my local commercial radio station 'Spirit FM' based out of Chichester, and covering West Sussex.
Idly listening whilst trying to work (I work from home mostly) an ad' came on for a company selling an online "Holiday Money Transfer" service. You know, roubles, shekels, yash-maks, euros, that sort of thing, but what caught my ears was the 'sound' of the advert itself. To paraphrase;
A Major General type voice: "Where's me holiday money gone?"
An idiot in reply: "I don't know but I got mine…"
A spotty herbert schoolboy: "ye-hee, I got some o' dat money too"
The Major General voice: "I must've dropped it in the channel"
A small child: "It has fallen in de water…"
And as you can imagine I wanted to find out more. Several phone calls later and a chat to the radio station revealed the owner of the holiday money company and the man behind the ad' to be one Bob Jenkins, and his company is called Intercash. He also owns a second-hand bookshop in his home town. (The company is based in the Southampton / Portsmouth area).
Bob kindly phoned me back and the following story unfolded. Born in 1949, by the end of the 60's he was a junior reporter on the Portsmouth News and was sent one evening to interview a certain Spike Milligan who was appearing at the Kings Theatre down in Southsea. In the dressing room after the show Spike noticed that he looked like a pretty impoverished junior reporter and wondered if they paid him enough to eat. Not waiting for an answer Spike announced he was hungry and was there a decent chinese restaurant anywhere nearby that they could go to for a meal, his treat, and they could carry on the interview there. Well, Bob duly obliged (knowing the area well) and Spike did indeed pay for the meal for the young lad.
Now, this story rings a bell somewhere with me, I'm sure I have heard Spike tell the tale of a ragged reporter interviewing him and then taking him for a meal, "as he looked like he needed feeding up" either in a TV interview or in one of the books. Pauline Scudamore's wonderful autobiography maybe...
Anyway, in the meantime I'm currently trawling through the Portsmouth News archives of 68-69 looking to find a copy of the write-up that Bob wrote and when it's found I'll post it here as an addition.
Through the years Bob had various businesses, publishing his own magazine for one, and then came into Intercash. He tells me that his ads' are always comedy and that he writes them himself "and it's quite a task getting something across in under 30 seconds and yet still make it funny." He's done a Dad's Army spoof as well, but he is most proud of the Goon Show spoof as it won a Radio Award. He plays Goon Shows incessantly to the staff in his office, some of whom had never heard of the show and they were amazed at how funny it was and have all now become addicts, so even now it's still catching.
Do you remember that 'Room 101' show that Spike did, where he wanted to put Portsmouth into the room, well that came about from the appearance in Southsea one night when as Bob put it, "a bunch of drink-sozzled matelots' were in and they heckled Spike continuously and ruined the performance" for which Spike never forgave them. So now you know.
By the way, as the copyright owner of the advert, Bob is thinking of letting us have a copy on MP3 so that we can hopefully add it to the web site for all to hear. He's also going to find out from the Agency who made the ad' as to the 'voice' performers who actually created the sounds.
In the meantime if you can't wait and you live down here in the South, then you might still catch it either on Spirit FM 102.3 or Quay Radio.
Happy listening,
Les
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