Legendary broadcaster Paul Gambaccini celebrates his 45th anniversary in the business at The Famous City Varieties Leeds on 10 April as part of his nationwide tour. An Evening With The Great Gambo – The Professor of Pop will see the current BBC Radio 2 Pick of the Pops presenter reveal for the first time how he started out life as a boy in the Bronx and wound up as The Professor of Pop in Great Britain. .
Gambaccini’s radio career began at Dartmouth College in the US where he was General Manager and top rated DJ of WDCR, America’s largest radio station run by students. It was whilst studying at Oxford University that he got his big break when he came to the attention of John Peel’s producer John Walters, who took special note of a Rolling Stone cover interview Paul had conducted with Elton John.
Gambaccini was asked to give a weekly talk on Radio 1 beginning in the autumn of 1973. This assignment expanded into doing interviews for Peel’s programme Rock Week and reviews for Radio 4’s Kaleidoscope. Paul was given his own show of the American hits in 1975, a programme he continued on Radio 1 until 1986 and then on commercial radio and later Radio 2.
With a break of six years, America’s Greatest Hits lasted for 41 years, the longest single-presenter single-format popular music programme in British radio history. Gambaccini remains the only broadcaster to have had regular series on BBC Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4.
An Evening With The Great Gambo – The Professor of Pop will see this accomplished broadcaster, journalist and author share his unique lifetime experiences and stories, amongst which will be clips of some of the great artists he has known and worked with. Gambaccini will share tales of growing up with the phenomenon of Elvis Presley as a child and the Beatles as a teenager; how he got into radio; his early experiences with Rolling Stone magazine; his fascinating years as a radio and television broadcaster and of course lots of behind the scenes tales.
Hear him discuss the three great crises of his life – coping with the Vietnam War’s challenge to his American generation, enduring the era of AIDS and surviving an encounter with the Metropolitan Police. The show will also include a Q&A and Pop Quiz in a nod to Counterpoint.
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