Young people today don’t know how lucky they are. They imagine that Chris Moyles is as bad as it gets.
So it is up to us old dogs to remind them that in the 1970s and 1980s, Radio 1 was filled to the brim with disc-jockeys like Simon Bates, Gary Davies, Mike Read and Bruno Brookes, all blessed with the rare ability to spout self-regarding gibberish for hours on end.
But one of them was, it is widely agreed, even more irritating than the others. Some time between DDT (Dichloro Diphenyl Trichloroethane) and BLT (Bacon Lettuce Tomato) came DLT: Dave Lee Travis.
DLT, known as ‘the Hairy Cornflake’, dominated Radio 1 in the 1970s and 1980s. He also made frequent appearances on Top Of The Pops and Celebrity Squares, generally waving a lot and sporting an unusual badger-streak in his hair.
Unlike most Radio 1 DJs, he never managed to develop a stable of catchphrases, though a novelty synthesised voice, perhaps his own, would say ‘Quack-Quack Oops’ from time to time. It will probably be chiselled on his gravestone.
More... Aung San Suu Kyi tells how happy memories of Oxford University ‘upheld’ her during house arrest The day the brave Lady of Burma met the Hairy Cornflake: Aung San Suu Kyi meets Dave Lee Travis who helped her survive years under house arrest with his BBC World Service broadcasts
DLT never lacked self-confidence. In a television interview in 1993, he voiced his fears for the future of broadcasting. ‘It worries me that none of the younger disc jockeys have come up to me and said, “Dave, teach me how to communicate.” ’
In a rare instance of satire making a difference, DLT’s career on Radio 1 came to an end soon after Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse started performing their hilarious spoof DJs Smashy and Nicey. At the time, DLT expressed his annoyance. ‘That Smashy and Nicey cr*p — is that funny?’ he said to Q magazine. ‘It doesn’t raise a smile with me.’
'Hairy Cornflake': Dave Lee Travis dominated the Radio 1 airwaves in the 1970s and 1980sBut he was the only person who didn’t get the joke. Overnight, it was as though British eyes had been opened to the bullish blabbermouths who had been allowed to dominate the airwaves.
Within months, DLT had been shown the door, though he chose to flounce out before he was forcibly ejected. Regarding himself as the Alexander Solzhenitsyn of Radio 1, he protested live on his show: ‘Changes are being made here that go against my principles and I just cannot agree with them.’ And with that, he played his final track. Was he, even then, entertaining dreams of revenge?
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Now, I am something of a connoisseur of unlikely encounters. In my last book, One On One, I presented a daisy chain of 101 true meetings, among them Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell and Sarah Miles, Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, and Terence Stamp and Edward Heath. But Tuesday’s meeting between DLT and Aung San Suu Kyi surely takes the biscuit.
For most of us, to be locked in our homes while the sound of Dave Lee Travis was piped in, morning, noon and night, would constitute a particularly insidious form of torture. Had the detainees at Guantanamo Bay been subjected to the incessant sound of the Hairy Cornflake they would have been begging for mercy in a matter of hours.
It says a lot for Aung San Suu Kyi’s sheer force of character that she withstood a torrent of DLT for year after year. But what is more surprising is that she went even further, emerging from her house-arrest singing his praises.
On hearing this news, my first reaction was to wonder if, over the past four decades, I had been blind to some hidden virtue in DLT. Had Aung San Suu Kyi spotted something beneath that beard and badger quiff that had escaped me?
I have thought about this long and hard. But on reflection, it seems more likely that, during her years of captivity, Aung San Suu Kyi developed a pernicious strain of what the experts know as Stockholm Syndrome, whereby prisoners begin to identify with their captors.
Aung San Suu Kyi meets former Radio 1 DJ Dave Lee Travis as he kisses her hand during her visit to the BBC Broadcasting House in London on the first day of her visit to the UKMy fear is that she is now like Damian Lewis in Homeland — on the surface, perfectly normal but, inside, a bubbling cauldron of Radio 1 jingles and jargon, ready to erupt at any moment.
With this in mind, I was half-expecting Aung San Suu Kyi to disrupt her own Nobel Peace Prize speech by calling for the immediate installation of DLT as Secretary General of the UN. But the fact that she did not should not allow us to relax our guard.
When Dave Lee Travis leaned over and kissed her hand at their meeting on Tuesday, did he trigger some top-secret hidden impulse? When Aung San Suu Kyi addresses MPs today, will she surprise them all halfway through by going ‘Quack-Quack Oops’?
