91Èȱ¬

I am tempted to apply for tickets, but given the fact that I have contacted the Nolan show and Talkback in the past and though I've asked to come on air and been turned down, given the fact that David Dunseath once made a comment on Talkback that Protestants weren't welcome on Talkback on Fridays and that I sent in an email to Nolan and an email was sent back to me to phone another number [Personal details removed by Moderator] and when I phoned they said they would phone me back and never did would I be successsful this time?

I was a teenager in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and fascinated by the 91Èȱ¬ radio newsreaders: Frank Phillips, Alvar Lidell, Robin Holmes, Colin Doran, Wallace Greenslade etc. I used to rush to the radio every time Frank Phillips read the news. He had it all: a great baritone voice, effortless fluency, meticulous pronunciation and gave the news a great sense of importance.

I remember the death of Kennedy in 1963. We watched it on TV, read by Richard Baker on Friday night. It didn't have a great impact and it didn't mean much to me as a teenager. But Frank Phillips read it on the radio on Saturday morning (and again on Monday morning after Oswald's death) and you could have heard a pin drop in our kitchen. He made it sound as if the world had come to an end.

His voice, along with Alvar Lidell's (also a great voice, but not quite as fluent or wide ranging), was identified as one of those snooty 'English' upper class ones. Yet the Sea Captains Club of Liverpool raised £140 for a retirement present in 1964 because Phillips was the one who wished them well by saying, 'Good night, gentlemen, good sailing', at the end of the shipping forecast.

He wasn't exactly an establishment figure at all. He was somewhat mischievous in occasionally pressing the cough button and throwing in asides which were sometimes heard, like the time where he read: "The thieves escaped in a fast car", and added: "Did they think it would be a slow one?".

His voice can be heard at the end of the 'Dam Busters' reading the news of the bombing expedition, and he is also the narrator of, and appears in, 'I'm All Right, Jack".

Ah, those great voices of the past. Where are they now. All long, long gone.

Ah, those great voices of the past. Where are they now. All long, long gone.

Indeed Brian.

My favourite was the late W.D. Flackes, former NI political correspondent. He was personified by the late James Young as W.D. Flex in a very funny skit, if I remember correctly.

Those were the days.

I find nostaligia repellent. If anyone thinks that there is truth in these dreams, they are delusional. Derrida argues that a true "center" of excellence or meaning is always problematically posed in the terms that give such a body meaning in the first place, because the way something is understood enables the only language with which it can be critiqued. The center is arbitrary and our perception of it only exists for our convenience. The necessity a perceived "center" involves "an ethic of nostalgia for origins" and the desire for hierarchy of manufactured difference enabled by a "neutralization of time and history." Nostalgia is the opposite of history, and a true history is impossible. We should rather search for the convenient. Or at our convenience. "Every Little Helps" is the watchword of our age.

Humphrey Lyttelton was a great radio icon for me, along with Clement Freud. I guess there are fewer characters like that in circulation as time goes by, but of the current crop, Sandi Toksvig always makes me laugh