My Greatest Mistake: Tony Blackburn, Capital Gold DJ
'I gulped and said: "You're not Dionne Warwick, are you?"'
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Your support makes all the difference.More than anywhere else, a lot of the disasters I've been part of happened when I was working for BBC Radio London. At one stage, I was doing a show there, interviewing people, and I had a producer who wasn't too aware of people who were current. One day, we had Dionne Warwick coming in. I hadn't thought she was in the country, but it seemed that the producer had managed to book her. She sat down and I thought, gosh, she looks different. I started asking her about music and she didn't seem to know much about it. I quickly put on a record, and while it was playing, I gulped and said: "You're not Dionne Warwick, are you?" She said: "No, I'm the publicist for the Bajan tourist board." I said: "Oh God, I'm sorry," and she went away. When the record finished, I said, "I'm sorry, but Dionne had to leave to get to an engagement." So much for a celebrity interview.
Still at Radio London, I had to do a programme where I introduced a woman who did astrology. All I had to do was say, "Hello, here's the astrologer", and she would go through every star sign for the week. I found it boring: once she started, she didn't leave one gap for me to say anything. I made it through most of them, but once I was so bored I fell asleep. I was woken by a huge prod and a gap in the radio transmission, which didn't go down too well.
Another series of disasters happened on Radio Caroline. It went to ground because we had transmitter problems and someone had to go on shore for help. I was left on board, manning the station on my own for a couple of days: it kept working and then not working, on and off. I got so frustrated that at one stage I said into the microphone, "Hello, and welcome to Radio Bullshit." The transmitter chose that moment to work and I got about 50 or 60 letters about it. When the transmitter started to work, I found to my horror that it wasn't turning off. I was on air for 16 hours, speaking DJ nonsense while the crew brought me in meals. I had to keep shoving on LPs (that shows you how long ago this was) when I ran out of things to say. I was exhausted.
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