Now and again I put the words “Alan Plater” into YouTube on the off-chance that someone has uploaded something by him that I’ve yet to acquire. I’ve managed to fish out a couple of things over the last few months, including some that were very quickly deleted – or embargoed by the YouTube copyright police. As pleased as I was to snaffle these programmes, this was mostly to do with convenience – as otherwise, my best bet for accessing them would have been via a jaunt to the BFI archive (quite a schlepp when you live in the provinces).
But then something fantastic happened. Somebody uploaded The Rainbow Machine, an extremely early radio play by Plater. I had assumed there was no copy in existence, and thus it was something I’d never, ever hear, let alone chance upon on YouTube on an ordinary January morning. What’s more, the gist of the play was not unfamiliar to me, as I had read admiring newspaper reviews that summarised its intriguing premise of a radio DJ revealing his inner thoughts whilst spinning records for a popular request show. I knew too that it was essentially a thirty-minute monologue by Bernard Braden – an actor/presenter/interview whose career has admittedly never quite come into clear focus for me. And I was aware that The Rainbow Machine was subsequently presented in 1963 as a stage play at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, in a double bill with Strindberg’s Miss Julie; both were directed by Alan Ayckbourn, who also played the DJ character on stage in The Rainbow Machine.
So, you can surely imagine my excitement when I hit the play button and settled down to listen. The first thing that struck me was the similarity of the overall concept to that of ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ (1972), the subject of my previous blog. Both plays pull back the curtain to expose the ‘machinery’ behind light-entertainment formats. In the case of ‘The Reluctant Juggler’, we go behind the scenes of an Edwardian music hall, whereas The Rainbow Machine takes the form of a real musical request show. We hear Braden as the DJ Steve Jordan introducing records that then play in the background as he delivers an increasingly drunken and unhinged stream-of-consciousness rant - which nobody can hear outside of his radio booth, or possibly his own head.
Bernard Braden
Either way, things aren’t going well for him. The record requests – which include Stan Kenton, ‘The Laughing Policeman’, Gene Kelly singing Gershwin, Judy Garland warbling ‘Over the Rainbow’, an RAF march, and higher-brow excerpts from Puccini and Tchaikovsky – trigger reflections on the frustrations of his personal and professional life, and hostility towards the tastes, attitudes, and motivations of those writing in with their dedications to neighbours, family members, lovers and friends. The records chosen by the great British public give Jordan full scope to vent spleen at the police, the military, and organised religion, but this is also a direct assault on the passive listener: ‘Yeah, listen to the radio, and find inner fulfilment sitting at the fireside in between taking the dog out and doing the pools’.
Exposing the phoniness and misanthropy of a glib, transatlantic-voiced radio DJ may seem like Plater making a grab for the lowest-hanging fruit. But if the tradition of satirical DJ-bashing is well established today - thanks to decades of Smashie and Nicey, Alan Partridge et al - I wonder how evolved it was back in 1962. Likewise, the familiar ‘presenter going crazy’ trope: how novel would this have seemed to audiences then, I wonder? I’ve found a review in The Observer that implies that the fresh aspect of The Rainbow Machine was not so much the idea of an unhinged DJ, but the way the programme adopted the familiar format of a standard request show, and included the kinds of records that you’d typically hear.
I think my favourite moment is when Braden’s DJ character is obliged to play something ghastly by The Chipmunks, and it’s just too much for him to take: the whole phoney thing about people knowing that they’re not actual chipmunks, but pretending that they are. What’s that about? We hear someone being mean to the chipmunks on the record, and he leaps to their defence: ‘now that big fella’s shouting at them – you big bully – they can’t lay off those animals’ etc. Braden’s interactions with the records is a joy throughout, whether singing along to Frank Sinatra, or telling Stan Kenton to quieten down because the jazz is too much for his migraine. The synchronicity of music and blabber is so clever, I’d love to see Plater’s original script, to ascertain how specific he was in his timings and direction.
By the end of the half-hour, the character has entirely lost his ability to pivot to his slick DJ persona whenever the records run out, and is now spouting free-form gibberish out of viewer names, addresses and record choices, and comparing himself with an endlessly rotating disc. Braden skilfully cranks up the intensity, showcasing his talent for whip-lash accent changes. The drama ends abruptly with the sound of a sticking record, and an RP voice informing us that the programme has been discontinued, so we’ll hear some more music – which turns out to be ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’.
As well as being a sharp satire of popular radio formats, The Rainbow Machine portrays the personal hell of someone forced to introduce and listen to music they actively hate. For a writer with such musical sensitivity as Plater, this must have been a horrendous prospect. Although you’d often hear him presenting and speaking on radio programmes throughout his career, I don’t think he got to be a DJ as such until he deputised for Humphrey Lyttleton on his Radio 2 jazz programme sometime in the 1990s (I think so, anyway, I couldn’t immediately find evidence of that online, but am pretty sure I read it somewhere).
Now if only someone would post some of those shows to YouTube. As proved by the sudden, unexpected, but delightful appearance of The Rainbow Machine, anything is possible!
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