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by Bob Stanley

The Moody Blues

Thank Your Lucky Stars was an ITV pop show, presented by Brian Matthew, that ran from 1961 to 1966. Over coffee and biscuits - Rich Tea, if you're wondering - Brian tells me about filming it in Birmingham, and a few adventures he had travelling to and from the studio. "There were local groups on Thank Your Lucky Stars but only in that quite a lot of groups were starting to emerge from Birmingham - don't ask me who they were! But I remember the Moody Blues. They were all on it. But it wasn't aimed at Birmingham, it was a national programme. We had all the name acts."

Almost every episode of Thank Your Lucky Stars has been wiped, though Brian thinks "one or two episodes were kept in archives. There's one in particular, one the Beatles did. They did the whole show, with Cilla and Gerry - it was a Liverpool version of the show. I've seen that since, so it must still exist."

One of Brian's colleagues at the commercial Radio Luxemburg was Kent Walton who, like Brian, was sponsored by Pye Records on his shows. He was mainly known as ITV's chief wrestling commentator. A rainy Saturday could be spent listening to Brian on Saturday Club in the morning, then watching Kent present the wrestling in the afternoon, a job he had landed in 1955 and kept for 33 years. He also presented two short-lived TV pop shows, Cool For Cats and Honey Hit Parade - unlike Brian, Kent Walton got his face on a couple of record covers too, an EP of Cool For Cats and a full-length album of Honey Hit Parade.

"We used to record Thank Your Lucky Stars on a Sunday" recalls Brian, "and after the show we all wanted to go out and get a drink. But there was nowhere you could get one. The pubs were closed in Birmingham. One day, Kent was a guest reviewer on the show. We started driving home, and we came to large pub between Birmingham and Coventry that we used to stop at for lunch on the way up. We went in there and had a drink, just one, and that was it - it was closing time. But the guy behind the bar said 'would you gentlemen like another one?'. We said yes and he said 'come with me...' We went behind the bar, through a door, and into this big room - it was packed. And they did this every week! We could stay there as long as we wanted, and they gave us a meal, and a bottle of wine. So I passed the word round at Thank Your Lucky Stars and every week the people who had been on the show started to stop off at this pub, after hours! I got quite friendly with the landlord. I asked him 'Aren't you worried about staying open after hours?' He said 'See that fella over there? He's the assistant commissioner of police. So I think we're all right.'

"One one occasion we had about 200 people in there, because it got to the stage where the people on the show were quite happy to come in and do a number. We had Kenny Ball's band, Dusty Springfield came in and sang... oh, everybody sang and played guitars, and of course you can imagine how that built business up even more. There were hundreds of people stopping by to see a free show, in the middle of the night."