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Some of you might be aware of the BBC Genome Project that’s recently gone live – basically a searchable database of all BBC TV and radio listings since the 1920s.
This is what you get if you type ‘Jake Thackray’ into the search engine:
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?q=jake+thackray&order=asc
Lots of tantalising stuff is listed – obviously it doesn’t tell you whether even half of it is still in the archive, but some of it must survive. In particular I’d love to hear:
– December 1967 interview with Ken Syorka
– 5 instalments of ‘People Singing’ on Radio 4 from 1968
– Fanfare – Jake live at the Camden Theatre in 1969
– 1969 Radio 1 ‘Night Ride’ session backed by the Roger Webb Trio
– 1971 ‘Strings by Starlight’ session
– 1972 ‘Sounds of the 70s’ session
– Innumerable editions of Braden’s Week from 68 to 72It goes on and on… right up to a doubtless fascinating interview with Don Black in 1996. Someone must have tapes of some of this stuff?
Thanks for flagging this up, Mark. The Archive page on this site has a list of BBC performances which apparently still exist in the BBC archives, but the Radio Times archive lists many other appearances for which official recordings would appear to have vanished. The RT archive solves a mystery for me – I have a BBC Transcription Service vinyl LP with the 1972 ‘Sounds on Sunday’ radio show on it, and the archive confirms my theory about the likely date of the programme. The BBC Transcription Service distributed shows to radio stations around the world, so there may be more recordings of this sort around, hidden in radio station archives, although I have only ever come across one for Thackray (I acquired it from Australia via eBay). Getting into archives is the great challenge.
John Watterson and I recently unearthed the lyrics of two lost songs from 1969 Braden’s Week shows – The Ferryboat and God Bless America – it would seem that the lyrics were preserved as part of the script for the show. I have written new tunes for both, and performed both at the New Brighton Jakefest. I shall transcribe the lyrics shortly for this website.
A video recording of Jake’s 1984 appearance on ‘The Time of your life’ exists and has been featured on this website. It segues from Jake performing ‘Ladies’ Basic Freedom Polka’ on Braden’s Week in 1970 to Jake and Alan Williams performing the song with updated, more serious lyrics. There follows a couple of minutes of amusing interview.
I believe that the July 1988 Radio 2 programme with Brian Matthew may well be the source of live recordings of Our Dog and Lullaby My Daddio which used to be available on Edmund Chattoe’s Unofficial Jake Thackray Homepage.
The performances from The Camera and the Song certainly still exist.
Urgh, Basic Freedoms Polka – the one Jake song that I really can’t stand!
If any of those ’80s / ’90s radio performances still exist in the archives, that might be a nice project someday – there are just about enough songs there to make up an imaginary fifth studio album.
I know that a lot of ’60s / ’70s TV stuff was junked, but maybe there are things still hidden in the archive not specifically flagged as Jake? Has anyone tried searching for the programme titles as given in the listings? And hopefully some more of the radio stuff will survive as off-air cassettes in people’s collections?
Freedom Polka is not my favourite either, and very much a point number, although there are some clever lines in it. The version from 1984 has these additional lines at the end:
Even though 13 years have passed
Same old capers, same silly farce,
Same old cliques, same old shrieks,
Same old piercing pains in arse.The ladies of the neighbourhood,
Fighting the fight for womanhood
By taking what they feel to be
Their fundamental liberties.13 years and much the same,
Women are everywhere in chains,
And the escapades of the daft brigades
Dismay, deride, demean, defame.They are the ladies of the neighbourhood
Who fight for the rights of womanhood
By taking what they feel to be their fundamental dignity.I have tried doing some searching for the programmes identified, but with no luck so far. The Radio Times archive is also not exhaustive – I have a recording of Jake singing A L’eau du claire fontaine on Radio 4, but that does not seem to be listed. There will also be BBC local TV and radio performances omitted and, of course, performances on ITV.
Along the same lines my first introduction to Jake was when “Lah di dah” was used on Woman’s Hour as the music at the beginning and end of the daily serial. I think Woman’s Hour was broadcast in the morning in those days, and I’ve browsed through the Radio Times archive but can’t find any reference to it.
I can pretty much date it to late 1970 or maybe early 1971; we lived in a flat for a short time then and I can clearly remember changing our sheets there as I listened to the serial every day. I can’t remember what the serial was, but I can remember Lah di Dah!
Pam
I would be very surprised were there not other things lurking. There is a very brief clip in “Jake on the Box” of him performing a song about a council workers’ strike on Nationwide. The makers of JOTB didn’t have funds to dig any deeper for it as per the following message I got from the director:
[i] … the piece of archive you mention was a lengthy and frustrating problem for me. As you’ve seen, there is a VHS of this, made from a 16mm telerecording of that edition of ‘Nationwide’. However, any enquiries searching for this piece result in an “inserts tape” for the programme which contains filmed reports, but nothing of the studio presentation which, of course, included Jake’s song.
Twice we asked for transfers of this; and twice, on the DigiBeta tape, came back the filmed inserts to the programme, full of exciting stuff like scrapyards, earthmovers and Hugh Scully testing Harold Wilson’s bed (very ‘Nationwide’) but nothing of Jake who performed only in the studio.
Its details are:
Song “Where have all the municipal workers gone”
from tape PL58877 from Nationwide tx 7/10/70
Please copy from 1:29:00 which is the large “NATIONWIDE” captionTwice, Ian, this brought back only the inserts. I didn’t have any more money to pay for transfers after this, and the BBC were howling for the programme which, as you know, then took several more months to make it to air.
[/i]Ian
That does sound like a terribly frustrating tale. The archive status of Nationwide is apparently complex – the Beeb have the outside broadcast film reports but, not, generally speaking, the full programmes, except potentially some off-air copies on a decaying obsolete format – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_%28TV_programme%29#Archive_status
Did Jake appear regularly on Nationwide or was that a one-off spot?
Here’s one that might have some unseen Jake content::
Radio Times has the date as 6th April 1975 (“A special concert performance starring the versatile actor and singer with words and music ranging from Shakespeare to Coward and Gilbert and Sullivan to Jake Thackray”), the page above says 5th April. Likely to be the same show, surely?
Oooh, and apparently the 1973 George Hamilton TV show featuring Jake has recently been found:
http://missingepisodes.proboards.com/thread/6231/6-confirmed-finds
Anyone know anything about the Talkabout radio shows from 1966 that apparently are still in the archive? These would be interesting as they must be the earliest known recordings of Jake.
Hi Mark. Over the years we managed to identify a number of video and audio recordings of Jake in the BBC archive using a variety of sources. It meant that when the quest to release the “And Songs” material first began we knew more than the BBC–specifically we had the library references for the shows which, at the time, the Beeb thought were lost. We also tracked down a lot of other material lurking on old cassettes, off-air Betamax recordings and others. The Jake in Germany cd was a professional remaster of an off-air recording that a fan had made from a British Forces radio show, part 2 of which has never been found. And there are recordings of shows done for hospital radio and assorted audience recordings of gigs.
The BBC themselves were very helpful to me, originally, then Paul Thompson when he took on the work of getting “And Songs” released, but there are difficulties, the main one being that unless you have an inside track to the archives then it will be expensive to sift through the masses of material that is either unindexed or badly indexed.
We are still in the early days following the release of “And Songs” but there is an open question about what to do about the other material we know exists – eg do we try and do a further release on a smaller scale since these are likely to be of interest to only a few people? There is merit in that, but there is also expense in licensing, remastering, etc. and the time needed to put agreements in place and ensure royalties are properly paid etc. This includes radio material. One of Jake’s songs that is a personal favourite – The Cenotaph – crops up only on a Radio Show and on the “The Camera and the Song” with slight variations in the lyric. But there would be a lot of work involved in getting even just that one song out and at present it is only public in the sense that there is a video of the song being performed at the Scarborough Jakefest on YouTube.
And then there was a fellow who emailed me once to say Jake had given him a cassette of some unrecorded material to see what he thought. Unfortunately the tape had disappeared and the fellow couldn’t remember what was on it and he has since, I think, passed away.
Finally, back in 2002 we had a provisional list of songs that we thought were lost. Over the years those marked with an asterisk have cropped up, so nil desperandum. This was the list with those now known marked with an asterisk:
I’m just a dog*
The Cake
Tonton Georges
The Shabby Little Shepherdesses*
The Policeman’s Jig*
The Appalling Mr Kinnell
Lady Penelope
Fiffi Golightly
When I Get Filthy Rich
The Lonely American
The Immortals
The Prisoner*
Freda*
Kirkstall Road Girl*
A ripe old age
Uncle Arthur*Ian
and as a follow up to the last, my correspondent in 2005 wrote:
Hi Ian,
I will search for -(no promises after 3 house moves)- for a couple of
cassette tapes that Jake gave me at Easter 1997 which were titled –
‘Masters – Jake In The Studio’ or something similar. He stayed with me for
the week-end during a gig I promoted at the Theatr Gwaun, Fishguard and
generously presented me with the tapes on the way to the station. I gathered
they were drafts for ‘a new album or two’. I made a copy and enjoyed a very
eclectic mix of songs. If I find them I would be glad to make a copy and
send you the originals.Alas, he didn’t find the tapes and passed away last year. That Easter ’97 date looks a bit late but it’s all I have
Paul, please can you post a link to the transcription you did of The Ferryboat as I can’t find it. Thanks!
Words of Ferryboat:
If you ever seek to find us and you don’t know where to search
You could try the local prison or the back row of the church,
Ten to one we’re in the Ferryboat with cronies of our ilk,
Men of our kidney who’ve been boozing ever since they came off mother’s milk.Big Frank, Sailor George, Sidney and me –
Drinking at the Ferryboat neverendingly;
We won’t be in the Duchess’s Arms, nor in the Prince of Wales,
We’ll all be in the Ferryboat unless
We’re all in jail.Come and join us in carousal as we sing and dance and flirt,
But your stomach best be deepish and your loins had best be girt,
When we leave the Ferryboat we’re always cock-a-hoop,
And we never have the whirling pits or get the dreaded brewer’s droop.Big Frank, Sailor George, Sidney and me –
Drinking at the Ferryboat sentimentally;
We won’t be in the Duchess’s Arms, nor in the Hare and Hounds,
We’ll all be in the Ferryboat unless
We’re in the ground.The local bishop thought the Ferryboat was where his sheep got lost,
So he paid us all a visit on the Feast of Pentecost,
And he’s still there at the Ferryboat, always toasting one more toast,
And we’re full of Hallelujahs – all the drinks are on the Holy Ghost!Big Frank, Sailor George, Sidney and me –
Dancing at the Ferryboat not ungracefully;
We won’t be in the Duchess’s Arms, nor in the Crown Hotel,
We’ll all be in the Ferryboat unless
We’re all in Hell.And when the Day of Judgement comes, when we answer for our sins,
We’ll go nipping down the Ferryboat to get a quick one in,
And when the Angel Gabriel has blown his final Trump
We’ll be in the taproom singing hymns and clinging to the pumps.Big Frank, Sailor George, Sidney and me –
Drinking at the Ferryboat everlastingly;
We won’t be in the Duchess’s Arms, we won’t be in the Goat,
We won’t be up with Jesus
We’ll all be in the Ferryboat.
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