Bt Robert McNeil

Blood on the Carpet: Walking With Disc Jockeys, BBC 4
Natural World, BBC 2

Widespread grief at the recent death of John Peel demonstrated how disc
jockeys have become big personalities in public life. It wasn't always thus.
In the 1920s, when it all began, the BBC instructed its DJs (meaning, in
this context, dinner-jackets) to keep themselves out of it and just offer
polite introductions to the music.

Blood On The Carpet: Walking With Disc Jockeys** (nice half-pun on Walking
With Dinosaurs; oh, you'd noticed that yourself?) traced the rise of the DJ
from plummy-voiced poltroon to slavering scruff.

Christopher Stone was the BBC's first DJ, or presenter of music, playing
shellac discs designed to discourage foot-tapping and similar instances of
physical hedonism. Christopher and his successors had to submit their
scripts in advance to the "presentation controller" (a fat bloke, we
presume), who would excise any mention of the presenter's name. "Uncle" Rex
Palmer must have sneaked in a bit of personality, mind you, even if only an
avuncular one.

In the United States, meanwhile, commercial radio had to be more lively - by
which I mean crass - to attract listeners and those who prey upon them, by
which I mean advertisers. Here, in 1954, Alan Freed was reputedly the first
person in the world to say the dreaded words: rock and roll. How dare he!
Didn't he realise there could be women listening?

Back across the pond, Radio Luxembourg was emitting evil airwaves from the
continent, promising in dreadful mid-Atlantic tones "pops-a-plenty and top
20". On the ocean wave, too, the pirate station Radio Caroline offered
non-stop pop and gibbering from DJs with no script.

Peel was an exception to this trend, with his show, The Perfumed Garden
(didn't the Sixties spawn such lovely names?). He said: "I didn't see the
need to say anything. What was important to me was the music." How ironic
that, of all DJs, he became the best loved for his personality.

The BBC was still offering "jolly music to help you through the day" when
Alan Freeman arrived from New Zealand with his interesting and amusing
catchphrase, "Not 'arf".

When the Government banned the pirates, pop-pickers feared the worst. One
mini-skirted burd said: "The BBC? It's bound to be dead." In fact, the Beeb'
s corpse was twitching to the beat, and the newly funkified corporation went
to the opposite extreme, making stars out of its DJs, who found themselves
chased down the street by girls with poor self-control. Never mind
dinner-jackets, this new breed of chap would sometimes present his show
half-naked. Honestly, you didn't know where to look when you were listening.

By the 1990s, if I haven't got my decades in a dither, new pirate stations
were promoting raves and music with lyrics about jacking one's anatomy or
shaking one's booty, which one presumes is a corruption of the perfectly
respectable word "bottom".

DJs were also performing in front of thousands, scratching records back and
forth, and effortlessly mating Tom Jones with Kraftwerk. Dance jocks became
household names, though not in any household I've ever entered. I make an
exception of Fatboy Slim, mainly because his name has often intrigued me.
How interesting, therefore, to learn that he was really called Norman Cook,
which may explain why, far from being "cool", he always looks uncomfortable.

Being uncomfortable is a classic sign of civilisation, so all may not yet be
lost. Lost, though, is John Peel. *Blood On The Carpet was part of the
admirable Time Shift series, a televisual chronicle providing the right
amount of information at the right pace. Unfortunately, time had caught up
with its inadvertantly poignant caption for John Peel: "DJ 1967-present."

I'm not a big fan of death, which means I tend to avoid nature programmes,
where Bambi is murdered nightly. Death, of course, is a way of life for
lesser species (such as the Countryside Alliance) and there's nobody more
adept at dishin' it oot than your average lion. He's never happier than when
he's got his gnashers in something else's neck. However, as **Natural World
explained, he now faces extinction himself, with numbers perhaps as low now
as 16,000.

Part of the reason for this is that they've started to attack cattle, which
has angered the farmers, and if there's any creature that knows more about
dishin' oot death than your lion it's your farmer.

In South Africa, a Dr Vartles has set out to redress the balance by setting
up a lion sperm bank. I can't tell you how this works because, frankly, the
very mention of the s-word made me look away. See what I mean? Nature
documentaries are not for the squeamish.

http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1274662004