The English girls were quite taken with the clean-cut Crickets on their first visit to the UK, and a tabloid came up with this rather brilliant headline: "Crickets Bowl Maidens Over."
If this from the Bright Lights show broadcast live on the West Midlands home service on a Friday then it must have taken place on Friday 7th March when The Crickets played Wolverhampton.
Yes I agree. One of the main reasons for doing an interview on a regional BBC station was to help ticket sales in the area i.e. at Birmingham and Worcester later In March.
The reference to Birmingham has led some Buddy experts to suggest this was recorded on March 10th when the Crickets and Norman Petty visited the Austin Healey car factory at Longbridge. Could there have been a factory radio station which interviewed the boys during their visit? Perhaps 'Bright Lights' is a good title for a feature on a 'car radio' station? Perhaps there is a Buddy Holly and the Crickets radio jingle somewhere for the British Motor Corporation!?
UHU is a glue. I think The Bright Lights Show was on the Midlands Home Service on Friday afternoons. It was advertised in either the Birmingham Post or (more likely) the Birmingham Mail. However, the BBC Genome Project, which reproduces old Radio Times listings, has not yet tackled regional variations. I may have got the broadcast date wrong, a week either way. The Crickets performed in Birmingham on Monday 10th March. Des O'Connor may also have been in town. fyi: www.bradfordtimeline.co.uk/mindex58f.htm At around that time, Bill Haley was interviewed on the Bright Lights show, but I suppose no recording survives. I realised, not so long ago, that the BBC tapes must have been wiped. Your recording is from a tape which is in secure storage. I don't know who the presenter was. Does anyone recognise his voice? Why don't some of you enterprising fans tweet the Crickets for more information? They know what the controversy was all about, and can speak freely now. Something to do with the tour producers using British musicians?
The genome does now include this (it's listed as Home Service, but mentions no region). The presenter was Leslie Dunn. See: genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?adv=1&q=bright+lights&media=radio&yf=1958&yt=1958&mf=3&mt=3&tf=00%3A00&tt=00%3A00&fri=1#search
Sound corrected, it does sound like Buddy, but there is no record of a Bright Lights show at that time in the UK. So that raises the question 'is it genuine'? . Only was to be sure is trace its history. Where did it come from after all this time? Over to you Archiveperson.......
I've checked various copies of the Radio Times (BBC TV and radio programming magazine, for those not familiar with the UK, now or then) for March 1958 and the Bright Lights radio show did indeed exist. It was broadcast on Friday evenings between 18:45 and 19:00 on BBC's Midland Home Service, so it wasn't transmitted nationally. The full title of this short programme was 'Leslie Dunn Introduces The Bright Lights Record Show.' Mr. Dunn was a British actor who spent well over 20 twenty years in the British radio soap-opera The Archers. Many thanks to archiveperson for posting this lovely little interview with Buddy.
