Alan Keith
The biggest shows on radio inevitably start out with modest ambitions. Back in December 1942, Roy Plomley came up with the modest idea for a programme where guests would pick their favourite tunes. Expected to fill the schedules for a season or two, Desert Island Discs is still going 65 years later. Meanwhile the BBC were unsure whether to recommission The Archers after its initial five-episode pilot run back in 1950.
So when East End disc jockey Alan Keith came up with the simple idea of playing his ‘hundred best tunes’ he was probably optimistically hoping to get to the end of his 13-week run (with many of the hundred remaining unplayed), rather than still be hosting the show 44 years later.
By the time Keith took the DJ’s chair in November 1959, he already had a long career in broadcasting behind him, and had been a fixture in BBC radio since the mid 1930s. He had been born in the East End on 19 October 1908 to Russian-Jewish parents as Alexander Kossoff. His younger brother David followed 11 years later, and was to find fame as an actor and anti-drug campaigner.
The young Alex, with newly Anglicised name, took up a scholarship at RADA in 1926, graduating in 1928 with the Silver Medal and quickly becoming a stalwart of the West End stage. He debuted in The Moving Finger at the Garrick Theatre and went on to feature in hits such as Magnolia Street, Dinner at Eight and Late Night Final. He went on to work as a stand-up comedian. But by the mid-thirties he had moved into radio, any trace of a cockney accent firmly concealed beneath mellifluous and polished tones that made him a hit both as a performer and a presenter. There were countless radio plays, all now lost and most of them forgotten and interviews for news magazine shows. He worked as a reporter at large for the hugely popular In Town Tonight (a chat show which ran from 1933 to 1960).
He made a shortlived return to drama in the late fifties, with big screen performances in The Long Knife and Yesterday’s Enemy, but radio was his passion, and he was continually coming up with ideas for new programmes for the BBC. So it was in 1959 that we came up with ‘Best Tunes’ for the Light Programme. The menu was a mix of light classical and the more restrained end of popular music. So the duet from The Pearl Fishers, Bruch’s Violin Concerto, Pachelbel’s Canon and Elgar’s Nimrod would rub shoulders with O Sole Mio and Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.
To critics who complained that the mix was unadventurous he offered no argument. “Nothing far out, you know,” he agreed, but throughout applied his basic standard - that “a tune must be popular, and it must be good of its kind - even if it’s only a Cockney ballad it must have class.” And if the critics sneered … well what did they know. On starting the programme he modestly hoped that “people write and tell me their favourites in case I’ve missed anything”. They did so in their thousands, and it became a necessity as the show quickly exhausted Alan’s own supply of 100 tunes. The name was thus changed in February 1960 to ‘Your 100 Best Tunes’ and the show ran, and ran, and ran.
It was eventually to run for a remarkable 44 years, switching from the Light Programme to the new Radio 2 in 1967 … and staying there. Sunday night audiences loved his style which he likened to “a one-to-one conversation - I really try to create an intimacy on the show.” He saw his listeners as “thoughtful folk sitting round a fire on a winter’s evening.” Augmenting their choices, he would spend hours in the listening room at the BBC gramophone library, selecting tracks and devising the playlist for the show. He eventually called it a day in early 2003 at the age of 94, and died just a few weeks later.