BBC Orchestras

The BBC Midland Radio Orchestra was one of 6 or 7 similar orchestras which the BBC had until the end of the 1980's, based at broadcasting centres around Britain. The Scottish Radio Orchestra was based in Glasgow where I was the BBC's Audio Manager for Scotland (perhaps the title "Head Of Sound" would be better understood in America) until I retired about 6 years ago. The Northern Dance Orchestra was in Manchester, The West Of England Players in Bristol and The BBC Northern Ireland Light Orchestra in Belfast.

In London were the BBC Concert Orchestra, and the 75 piece BBC Radio Orchestra plus a large pool of musicians called The London Studio Players who formed various sized groups from trios to concert orchestras as required. There was also the BBC Big Band but this was actually comprised of members of The Radio Orchestra which was also regularly divided up into smaller groups known as the "A" "B" and "C" orchestras for specific programmes which didn't require all 75 players. (Before someone takes me to task, yes I do know that the Radio Orchestra wasn't formed until the 1970's by the amalgamation of the BBC Review Orchestra and The BBC Variety Orchestra but it's complicated enough as it is!)

For classical music the BBC Scottish Symphony was also based in Glasgow (and still is) and the BBC also currently has The BBC Symphony Orchestra (London), The Northern Philharmonic (Manchester in the North of England) The Welsh Symphony Orchestra (Cardiff in Wales) and The Ulster Orchestra (in Northern Ireland) The 65 piece BBC Concert Orchestra in London remains the only orchestra the BBC has which plays our kind of music since all the other light orchestras were disbanded in the 1980's. This, of course, was but a fragment of the BBC's commitment to popular music at that time and every day there were broadcasts by the likes of Mantovani, Frank Chacksfield, George Melachrino etc. with their own orchestras.

Anyway, back to the BBC Midland Radio Orchestra. This was its final name and, over the years since the BBC first formed an orchestra at its then Midland headquarters in Broad Street in the centre of Birmingham, it has had several formats. The longest lasting was as the BBC Midland Light Orchestra which was a concert orchestra of around 36 players with strings, brass, woodwind and percussion. The leader was James Hutcheon who I knew very well (I was at school with his son) and the repertoire was light classics and what in Britain is known as "Light Music" i.e. the kind of stuff recorded in the 50's and 60's by Percy Faith, Frank Chacksfield et al. It had several principal conductors, the best known being Gilbert Vinter.

In 1971 the BBC decided to re-organise all its light orchestras with some getting scrapped in the process. The Midland Light Orchestra became The Midland Radio Orchestra and was transformed into an all-strings plus rhythm outfit of around 32 players. Norrie Paramor was appointed Musical Director and the "new sound" immediately became popular with the audience that BBC Radio 2 was then aiming at (not, it has to be said, those who enjoyed the kind of music the old orchestra played!). It was based in Studio 2 in the BBC's new Birmingham Broadcasting Centre, Pebble Mill on the outskirts of Birmingham (ironically this is about to be closed and the BBC plans to move into an office building in the centre of the city!) It was a brand new studio and, in the early days, there were a lot of problems, both technical and acoustic. The BBC often had problems like this - in Glasgow, for example, Studio 2 was a totally unsuitable venue to cope with the Big Band plus Strings format of the re-organised Scottish Radio Orchestra!

The main function of the Midland orchestra, like all the others, was to record music to be played on BBC Radio 2, the BBC's then light music station, and it was in the studio several days a week during which there would be seven 3 hour "sessions" during each of which around a dozen numbers would be rehearsed and performed. They were recorded at 15 i.p.s. on individual large NAB centred 5" plastic reels of 1/4" tape known in the BBC as "W" tapes. The agreement with the Musician's Union was that each of these tapes (containing one title) could be broadcast twice and then had to be wiped - if additional performances were required, then the piece had to be recorded again at a new session. These conditions applied to the other light orchestras as well and were strictly adhered to, hence the reason that the BBC has virtually no archived recordings of these orchestras. Of course, individual producers and studio managers (sound balancers) often made an extra copy of items they liked enough to want to keep for themselves so there are still little caches of vintage Radio Orchestra material around for those "in the know".

These "W" tapes were then sent to the London HQ of Radio 2 where their main outlet was the channel's "Strip Shows" - not what the title suggests (!), they were one or two hour segments throughout the day "hosted" by well known personalities and comprised a mixture of news, gossip, phone-ins and, of course, the music which usually made up about half the programme.

The Midland Radio Orchestra also had various regular series of its own over the years, the best known being the long running "Radio 2 Top Tunes" for which many of the arrangements were by, and the orchestra conducted by, Johnny Douglas (of Living Strings fame). During the MRO's annual summer holiday Johnny Douglas and the programme moved up to Glasgow and the BBC Scottish Radio Orchestra took over. This orchestra was first formed in the early 1940's as a part-time orchestra, The Scottish Variety Orchestra; it was enlarged and became the BBC Scottish Radio Orchestra in the 1960's (at which stage it was a light concert orchestra like the Midland) and was transformed into The New Scottish Radio Orchestra in 1971 when it became essentially a big band with a small string section and extra wood-wind. When Top Tunes was recorded in Glasgow's huge Studio One (the home of the Scottish Symphony orchestra) the string section was augmented and we ended up with a 50 plus piece orchestra which sounded rather fine.

BBC Records produced several LP's featuring Norrie Paramor and The Midland Radio Orchestra at least one of which has been released on CD and I'm sure someone can come up with a full list but personally I always found them rather disappointing when compared with the orchestras' radio performances. One reason for this was because some of the records contained pieces which really needed brass and woodwind sections and they really didn't sound right with just strings.

You ask if songs were re-recorded very often. Yes indeed they were! In fact so often that everyone from producers and engineers to the musicians themselves sometimes became utterly fed up with them. I remember a Scottish Radio Orchestra one, Brian Fahey's arrangement of "Little Green Apples", which came up so frequently that eventually, against all the rules and, of course, with the orchestra's agreement (who promised not to tell the Musician's Union!), we simply made copies of the previous week's performance and sent them to London.

In the case of complete programmes such as the weekly "Radio Two Top Tunes", which was based on listeners' votes, the same tune might be in the list for several months and, of course, it had to be performed and recorded every week. The BBC had a vast library of music for their orchestras but very little "back catalogue" was used by Radio Two which meant that arranger/conductors such as Norrie Paramor, Johnny Douglas and Brian Fahey (conductor of the Scottish Radio Orchestra) plus a small army of other arrangers and music copyists made quite a good living from the BBC providing new material every week. Brian Fahey, incidentally, spent years as a staff arranger for EMI Records before coming to the BBC and was responsible for all the arrangements for the amazing set of MGM albums by Cyril Ornadel and The Starlight Symphony. I've never seen this series mentioned in Beautiful Instrumentals but they are well worth looking for. They were made especially for the American market and, in Brian's words "money was no object". They used a 70 plus piece orchestra and if he wanted, say, three accordions for 8 bars of one arrangement, no problem - they were hired.

I hope Norrie Paramor aficionados have noted that Collectables have recently re-issued two of his albums on CD - note that these are NOT with the Midland Radio Orchestra but pre-date this era and come from the time when, together with Brian Fahey and Ray Martin, he was under contract to EMI.

Alan Bunting, May 2001

Photo Source:  Sarah Aston, Norrie Paramor conducting with Harold Rich at the keyboard; PebbleMill.org