In Janie’s diary for Sunday 14 November, but not mine, the following reminder – presumably based on me saying to Janie, “let’s not forget to listen to…”
The Attractive Young Rabbi. Barry Grossman. 11:30 Radio 4.
Word must have reached me through the NewsRevue community that Barry Grossman’s radio series, The Attractive Young Rabbi, was about to broadcast.
What do you mean, you missed it at the time and now can’t get hold of it?
What do you mean, you heard it at the time but can’t remember it?
It’s there to be heard on the Internet Archive if you now where to look. Click this link, for example, and you’ll find the first series.
Tracy-Anne Oberman was also a NewsRevue (or more specifically, SportsRevue) alum, so this series was definitely a tribute to our NewsRevue “Class of ’92”.
There’s Barry in the Guinness World Record photo, with specs, holding the award.
I enjoyed listening to The Attractive Young Rabbi again. It is quintessentially BBC Radio Four comedy.
Postscript: Barry Grossman Writes…
Thanks Ian, except you and Janey [sic] must have missed it because it was actually on Friday, the 12th of November.
And there were no i-players, BBC Sounds or internet archives in those more innocent times. Perhaps you taped it on your reel-to-reel tape recorder the size of a house and listened to it on the Sunday.
I responded to Barry as follows:
Weird but clearly true that the broadcast was on the Friday not the Sunday, yet the note is unquestionably written in the Sunday section of Janie’s diary.
My guess is that Janie wrote the note there because the Friday page was completely crammed with patient appointments. The Saturday block is covered in notes about something completely different and unintelligible. So the only space for an additional note on that page was the Sunday block.
Quite right that there was no public domain technology to help us listen at an alternative time, but Janie did have a midi hi-fi thing in the maisonette that would enable you to record onto cassette from the radio. I was out visiting clients that day, but she would have been able to press the record button on her midi gadget at the appointed hour. My guess is that the note was a reminder to do that.
No gargantuan reel-to-reel tape recorder available at that time – that device lives in the flat and the flat was being refurbished that autumn. Probably just as well – Janie was reluctant enough to press a “record” button on a bog-standard midi system. My reel-to-reel would have seemed like something out of Mission Impossible to Janie…
… https://youtu.be/4y9NtHlJvbY …
…which would have made listening to the recording on the Saturday or Sunday…impossible.