Whistle Stop

 

Remembering Roger Whittaker (1936-2023)

You had to look pretty hard to find obituaries in the British media for the singer Roger Whittaker, who died last week aged 87. A friend of mine heard it reported on the BBC World Service, perhaps unsurprising given that Whittaker always enjoyed a large following across Europe, where his popularity endured long after his last appearance on the UK charts. What you won’t find in any of his obituaries is much in the way of reference to his career on television. Wikipedia makes no mention of it, and lazy obituarists no doubt rely on that sole source of reference. Even more surprisingly, his own website (which has yet to report on his demise) deals only with his career as a singer. Yet it was on BBC television that I first came across ‘Rog’ Whittaker, back in the mid 60s when he had yet to make an appearance in the pop charts.

Whittaker, raised in Kenya to parents who hailed from Staffordshire, came to the UK in the late 50s to study biochemistry at Bangor University. His first songs appeared on flexidiscs issued with the campus newspaper, and these activities shortly led to his first professional engagements. Folk music was enjoying a spike in popularity in the early 60s, and Whittaker’s style included his unique and very accomplished whistling, a distinctive touch which allowed him to stand out from the crowd of acoustic guitar-weilding troubadours. He was soon signed to Fontana Records, who issued his first single, The Charge of the Light Brigade, in 1962. From here, until the late 60s, he was known professionally as ‘Rog’ Whittaker. It would be seven years until any of his records broke into the UK charts, by which time he was already well established on BBC television and radio. His first BBC engagement was on The Talent Spot, a showcase for newcomers broadcast on the Light Programme on Tuesday 10 April 1962. It was to be the first of many radio broadcasts that year, on programmes including The Monday Show, The Beat Show and Country Club.

In the same year, he secured his first TV spots, on Ulster Television’s This and That, then, in August, BBC Television’s The Saturday Show, a primetime 7pm variety show with an international flavour, introduced by Ted Ray. Whittaker's Kenyan roots were specifically mentioned in the Radio Times billing. In 1964, billed as ‘Roger’, he appeared in Open House on the recently inaugurated BBC2, a programme described in the Radio Times as ‘People – Places – Pops’, on a bill that included Acker Bilk, Vince Hill, Dusty Springfield and The Swinging Blue Jeans.

In 1965, he became a regular contributor to BBC2’s pop/folk showcase Gadzooks! sharing billing on his first appearance with The Byrds and Sonny and Cher. 1967 saw appearances on The Rolf Harris Show, Crackerjack, and a regular guest spot on Now For Nixon, a children’s entertainment hosted by avuncular magician David Nixon and including contributions from Basil Brush. It must have been these appearances on children’s television that first introduced me to the bearded balladeer, with his trademark whistling. His self-penned ‘Mexican Whistler’ became a kind of musical calling card around this time, despite failing to chart in the UK. It turned up regularly on the radio and would almost certainly have been a playlist favourite on the likes of Junior Choice.

'Rog' and his fellow performers on Whistle Stop, 1967

These guest spots on BBC television paved the way for Whittaker to host his own show, aimed at a young audience, which took over the 4.55pm slot from Now For Nixon on Friday 18 August 1967. The new show was called Whistle Stop, its title playing on the host’s trademark performing style. A preview panel in Radio Times summed it up as ‘a fast-moving tour with music, puppetry, quizzing, car-racing and comedy.’ The forty-five minute show was certainly all that. Whittaker, still billed as ‘Rog’, would sing songs and preside over a variety of entertainments, with Richard ‘Mr Pastry’ Hearne and Dodi West as regular contributors. Also on board was puppeteer Larry Parker and his white rabbit glove puppet Theodore – who even received his own billing in the Radio Times. 

The ‘quizzing’ referred to in the Radio Times took the form of a quick-fire contest named, inexplicably, ‘Baddlewat’. ‘The questions are quite simple,’ read the article, ‘ – the accent is on the swiftness of the replies by the two teams of five.’ I can remember this part of the show quite well, but have no clue as to the mystifying title which baffled me then as now. Perhaps it was a call sign like ‘bingo’ that the contestants had to shout out? Either way, ‘Rog’ presided over the game, with assistance from Larry Parker and Theodore. The show also featured a ‘grand prix’ – which to judge from the Radio Times piece was run using slot cars of the Scalextrix variety – and film inserts featuring the misadventures of Richard Hearne in charge of a Scout troop. The show ran for seven weeks, and returned in February 1968, with Whittaker billed as ‘Rog’ in the Radio Times for the first week only. Thereafter, he appears to have settled on Roger for all future performances. For this second series, Dodi West was replaced by Dilys Laye, and Jack Haig’s exploits as ‘Mr Wacky Jacky’ took the place of Richard Hearne’s filmed inserts. This second run lasted an impressive fifteen weeks.

Alongside his TV series, Whittaker was still making regular appearances on radio, contributing songs to The Piano Magic of Ronnie Aldritch during the spring of 1968, and turning up as a guest on various other shows. In April 1969 he hosted a one-off evening show My Kind of Folk on Radio One, and would eventually be given his own mid-morning show on Radio Two commencing in October 1970. By this time, Whittaker had scored his first major chart success with Durham Town (The Leaving), the first of several chart entries that would see him into the early 70s. On BBC television, he returned to guest spots on the likes of Crackerjack and even The Kenneth Williams Show, whilst over on ITV he presented Whittaker’s World of Music, a compilation of which can be seen on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG9q_jYpiJA This was very much of its time, with a studio set that had seen service in many previous pop music productions, and a line-up slanted towards the easier listening end of the genre. It was all a far cry from ‘Rog’’s folk roots. Also on ITV, in 1971, he made a surprising appearance on the soundtrack to an episode of LWT’s Budgie, in which he can be heard singing (and whistling) the songs Two Little Boys and Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, their lyrics illustrating Budgie’s daydream of becoming a ‘have-a-go’ hero. Even further away from his customary territory was Whittaker’s contribution of the title song to Cornel Wilde’s unhinged apocalyptic movie No Blade of Grass. His thoughtful ballad sounds remarkably modern with its warning of environmental hazards and impending natural disaster.

1973 saw him participating as a panellist in a BBC wildlife quiz The Animal Game, which continued into the following year, while the latter half of the decade brought appearances on The Vera Lynn Show, Going For a Song and It’s a Celebrity Knockout amongst others.

Two years later, his chart career underwent an unexpected revival when his song The Last Farewell went to number two in the UK Top Forty. It was only the massive sales of Rod Stewart’s Sailing that prevented Whittaker’s song from topping the charts. It owed its origins to Roger’s Radio Two show, wherein he would invite listeners to send in lyrics which he would then set to music, and had been recorded and released without fanfare on his 1971 album New World in the Morning. The single release came about when the song was discovered by the wife of a radio programme director in Atlanta Georgia. Airplay popularity led to a single release and the song was soon in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. It would go on to become Whittaker’s biggest success, selling over eleven million copies worldwide. Promoting the track on British television saw him make a return visit to Top of the Pops. Aged only 29, he still cut a mature figure amongst the post-glam pop idols of the era, but it was not to be his last appearance on the show. His duet of The Skye Boat Song with Des O’Connor became a surprise chart hit in 1986, reaching number 10 and earning him a final appearance on the iconic pop programme.

Whittaker continued to record until 2012, releasing many albums in German during the 1980s and 90s, a reflection of his enduring popularity in that country. At home, he tended to be consigned to the Golden Oldies/ Where Are They Now category, and his sporadic television guset spots had more or less come to an end in Britain by the beginning of the 90s.

For me, it will always be those early TV spots that I remember, Whistle Stop in particular. Information on the show is scant, and it’s taken several years of trawling through archives to unearth anything useful. His obituaries have nothing to say about his TV career, yet as we’ve seen, it was these appearances that established him as a household name and face, well before his chart appearances. His unassuming, avuncular style made him a natural presenter, and it’s surprising he didn’t do more work of this kind. But music was his calling – he’d given up a potential career in science to pursue his real ambition – and it was music that ultimately made him an international star. Roger Whittaker’s career should serve as a reminder that there was once, not so very long ago, a time when talent and originality were all you needed to make it in the entertainment industry. It was his trademark whistling that first set him apart. Now he’s come to his final whistle stop.