Much more than a Talent to Amuse
Collating the recollections of Pete Myers
By Jonathan Marks, Programme Director Radio Netherlands 1991–2003
Today, April 19th 2019, my late friend and broadcast colleague Pete Myers would have been 80 years old. Sadly, he passed away on December 15th 1998. His passing robbed listeners of one of the most innovative and magnetic broadcasters to grace the international airwaves in second half of the last century. At just 59, he was much too young to enjoy retirement.
There is a tribute programme to him on the Media Network archive podcast site. But now, in a year when the Dutch are celebrating 100 years of radio, I think it is important to remember the contribution Pete made to changing international broadcasting from Europe
There’s an old unwritten rule in international broadcasting called the “rule of sixes”. After 6 weeks off the air, the audience will start to forget you. After six years they may even deny you were ever on the air. But if you knew him, you could never forget the deep velvet tones of Pete Myers.
Recalling Pete in his Prime
Former colleagues of the Radio Netherlands English Department are gradually sorting through their personal collections of programmes. We realise that radio stations are generally poor at saving their treasures. But we collectively managed to save some important examples from the skip, just after the English language broadcasts ceased in 2012. Fortunately, we are finding more examples of Pete at his best. These are being added to the Radio Netherlands archives project, a volunteer effort which began in 2018.
I’m concerned that if you Google Pete’s name today, you now only come up with obituaries in the UK Guardian and the Independent. I think the tribute in the Independent by his former BBC World Service colleague, Mike Popham, most closely reflects Pete’s early days at the Beeb.
But now it is time to build on those recollections to produce a permanent Wikipedia tribute so that more of the Pete I was proud to know for 18 years is not forgotten.
So allow me to cherry pick from the newspaper tributes to build the story of his early days.
I note they got his birthdate wrong in both publications. That may have been Pete’s fault. I remember him showing his scrapbook of newspaper cuttings at a birthday party. In those early days in broadcasting, being a presenter was not a secure career move. Pete said you have around 7 years on the air before you either changed direction or faded into oblivion. So, as his own self-publicist, he would make up all kinds of stuff to add to the mystery surrounding himself –“born in Caracas, Venezuela” according to one article.
In fact, Pete Myers was born in 1939 in Bangalore of Anglo-Indian parents but as he grew older enjoyed shrouding his origins in mystery. Consequently, and much to his delight, few people knew whether he was a Latin American, or an exotic blend of English, German, Jewish, Lebanese and Chinese. His father had in fact worked on the Indian railways.
Career Began in West Africa
Having arrived in Ghana just before its independence in 1957, when he was 17, Pete Myers had been introduced to radio by a friend Smokey Hesse who presented the regular 50-minute “Jazz Club” on Radio Ghana. While it went on air, Smokey let Pete sit in the studio.
But one day, with minutes to go, the presenter realised he had left the script at home, dashed into the street, and was tragically knocked down by a bus and killed.
Unaware of what had happened, the studio producer asked the waiting teenager to present the programme instead. Myers did it with such panache that he took over the job, becoming a professional radio presenter and disc jockey. He went on to become the favourite radio voice of the country’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a break that launched Myers into consecutive phases of celebrity in Ghana.
Away from the microphone, Myers pursued a parallel career as one of the founders of what subsequently became Ghana’s National Theatre. He began to organize Friday discotheque sessions at the Metropole nightclub in the center of Accra. The club rapidly became the centre for rock-and-roll and teenage fashion and even inspired mothers to write to the papers that their daughters were being misguided by the “decadence”. He directed Africa’s first ever musical Obradzeng with sculptor musician Saka Acquaye and Beryl Duodu, the Anglo-Ghanaian ballet dancer and choreographer
As Pete liked to recount, the high spots of his thespian activity were taking the part of Elvis Presley in a musical called Pick Me a Paw-Paw. During the Congo crisis, he and his companions risked their lives entertaining UN troops in Katanga. Once back in Accra, he graduated to Shakespeare. After its initial dismissal by President Nkrumah, the whole orchestra and 85 dancers were taken to Moscow, where Myers played Hamlet to Duodu’s Ophelia. ‘He was dreadful, I was even worse, but we couldn’t look at each other without fits of laughter,’ said Duodu.
Pete at the Beeb
Leaving Accra for London in the mid-1960s, he was snapped up to become the first presenter of the controversially revamped breakfast programme, Good Morning Africa, on the BBC’s External Services’s African Service. Myers was an immediate hit with the huge new audience which had just been opened thanks to the mass- marketing of shortwave transistor radios. The start of the BBC’s Atlantic relay station on Ascension Island meant that the BBC’s signal was particularly strong in West Africa. Pete’s mixed heritage identified strongly with his Ghanaian associates. He loathed the way that British expatriates conducted themselves in the newly independent country.
He arrived at Bush House just when the BBC Africa Service was changing its emphasis from worthy and educational to informative and fun. As first anchor-man of its modern flagship, Good Morning Africa, he anarchically scattered jokes, competitions and fictional guests like the American Vietnam commander ‘General Wastemoreland’ between the ‘pop, politics and personalities’ of the programme’s sub-title. Within months, he was being accorded pop-star treatment whenever he arrived on tours to meet his fans in person.
In stark contrast to what had gone before, his resonant baritone and slick mid-Atlantic informality soon made him a household name throughout the African continent. Pete would record the programme late in the evening, often making outrageous continuity links to the newsreader on the night shift. “Now over to the newsboy” Myers quipped. “Thank you Peter for that introduction — on tape” responded the newsreader before reading the live news bulletin. But it was style very different to the rest of output on the BBC External Services at the time. I remember him saying that he was hoping his work at the BBC would change its “colonial mentality” and “the way it talked down to the audience”. His efforts were rewarded, and the audiences responded to him.
A year or so later, while increasing his workload at Bush House, he became one of the founding presenters of Radio 1’s Late Night Extra. But with a restricted playlist, and without the freedom to indulge his sometimes-anarchic sense of humour, he failed to make the same impression on his domestic listeners. At the beginning of the 1970s, as a result of his spectacular success with African audiences, Myers was entrusted with transforming Good Morning Africa into a flagship breakfast show for the world.
He presented the Good Morning Show, with its mixture of pop, politics and personalities, four days a week, and at the weekends hosted PM, his own show-biz interview programme. His treatment of celebrities like Peggy Lee, Shirley Bassey and Ingrid Bergman — his favourite — heralded that of Michael Parkinson on BBC TV. I wonder whether any of those tapes survive?
So successful was he that whenever listeners heard he was going to visit them in person, fans would gather in their thousands at the airport. Working simultaneously as one of the inaugural presenters of Late-Night Extra on the new Radio 1, Myers made less of an impact largely because the reins were too tight. But on “PM”, his eponymous Sunday evening slot on the BBC Africa Service, he was free to indulge his passions for interviewing big names Bassey, Bergman, Channing, Lean, Loren, Sondheim at length.
In the studio he would remove cloak, signature shades and Bob Dylan cap and, immediately he got behind the microphone, according to an ex-PM producer, ‘summon up pure radio magic.’
Exhausted by presenting more than 10 programmes a week for nearly 10 years, and with less than his usual exquisite timing, Myers left the BBC to manage a nightclub in Beirut, within weeks of Lebanon being convulsed by civil war. In the tribute programme Pete revisits Lebanon with Radio Netherlands’ Ginger da Silva to recall that experience.
Pete Myers last visited London in 1987 for the 30th anniversary recreation of the original Radio 1 group photograph on the steps of All Souls’, Langham Place.
Briefly from the BBC to Beirut
Having broken the mould of broadcasting at Bush House, Myers felt he needed a change of scene and went to Lebanon to become the manager and resident impresario of a nightclub, the Crazy Horse Saloon. Unfortunately, he arrived just before the outbreak of the civil war.
Bombed out of Beirut, he returned to London to find that The Morning Show had been relaunched as Network Africa. A new presenter, Hilton Fyle from Sierra Leone, had taken his place. Former colleagues at the BBC advised him of an opening at the Dutch external broadcaster, Radio Netherlands, in Hilversum.
Pete Myers at Radio Netherlands
In 1976, having briefly tried a similar venture in Turkey, he joined Radio Nederland, whose English-language output for Africa and Asia he helped re-style, and whose documentaries and features he revolutionised, both as presenter and producer.
Myers was recruited in 1976 to revamp Radio Netherlands African service with a show called Afroscene. The station was trying to change its diet of music programmes, and Myers was given free reign to develop the new magazine formats. When I first came to Radio Netherlands Worldwide in 1980, he showed me the ropes, always advising his students to adapt what he was doing — NEVER to copy. He later went on to start Mainstream Asia and Asiascan, as well as produce countless documentaries both on fact and fiction.
He worked with several colleagues who later went to do great things themselves. One was Mike Bullen (yes it is he — the screenwriter of Cold Feet) who recalls on his blog what is was like working with Pete.
That’s Pete on the extreme right edge, within touching distance of the legendary John Peel. I love this picture. Pete seems ever so slightly disconnected from the rest, as though he’s not quite with them. His own man. That was Pete. Oh, and the dark glasses. He wore sunglasses indoors long before celebs made it their thing. The celebs were jumping on a bandwagon that Pete had already got rolling.
Pete asked me to work with him because he’d heard a programme I’d done for Radio Netherlands called “That Reminds Me” in which the station’s presenters played songs that had been important to them and told the stories behind them. It was basically a rip-off of “Desert Island Discs”. On this show, God knows why, I’d told the story of how at university, some friends and I had filled a condom with water to see how much it could hold before bursting. (As far as I can remember it was about six litres, a much greater capacity than a condom would normally be called upon to accommodate.) Pete had heard this show, and sensed in me some raw talent that he could mould. And so he became my mentor.
I learned a hell of a lot from Pete. How to distil a report down to its most important elements, how a cue wasn’t just an introduction but a shop window to sell the accompanying story, and most importantly, how to breathe — from the diaphragm. Pete had the most beautiful voice. You know how when you have a sore throat, the soothing sensation you get when you trickle honey down your gullet? That’s what listening to Pete’s voice was like. A balm. My girlfriend’s mother rang me at the office one day. Pete answered. Knowing he was talking to my girlfriend’s mother, he schmoozed her over the phone, shamelessly flirting. (He was a shameless flirt, with men and women.) And even though she knew he was gay, she later told me that she’d been so affected by his voice, that after she rang off, she’d had to pour herself a glass of whisky. Pure Pete.
God, I loved working with him. I’d tend to get to the office first, even though I lived much further away. (I was in Amsterdam, Pete in Utrecht, the office in Hilversum, which is the Dutch word for ‘drab’.) Thirty years on, I can still remember the anticipation I felt when I’d hear him approach along the corridor. The clip clop of his horrifically uncool two tone shoes, then his peels of laughter as he gaily bantered with the Indonesians in the next office, or Maritska, our PA. And before he’d even crossed the threshold, a smile would have started at the corner of my mouth.
I left Radio Netherlands to go and work at Bush House, for the BBC World Service. I still saw Pete quite regularly. When he retired his friends threw a party for him, along the lines of “This Is Your Life”. My wife, Lisa (who isn’t the girlfriend referred to above) and I travelled over from the UK to be surprise guests. I’d miscalculated how long it takes to drive from Cambridge to Harwich (it’s further than you think, or than I’d thought anyway) and we only caught the ferry by driving the last few miles at speeds that were wildly irresponsible (but just within the limit in case there’s no statute of limitations in regard to speeding). But I had to be there. It was for Pete.
He contracted AIDS. I think he was in his late fifties. (Pete was always cagey about his age.) Friends told me the end was approaching and so I flew over to say goodbye. In his hospital bed he looked like those last pictures of Freddie Mercury, a desiccated husk. I sat at his bedside and fed him soup from a spoon. At one point he gestured that he wanted to say something to me. I leaned in close to his ear (he could only whisper by this stage), expecting him to say something meaningful about how much my friendship had meant to him. “You’re drowning me,” he rasped.
I held it together while I was with him, but when I left the hospital, I fell apart. I cried like I have never cried since.
So what can you remember about Pete?
I’m glad that we are still re-discovering more of those great documentaries that Pete Myers produced and presented.
- History of Radio Netherlands: what is probably the most comprehensive audio compilation of what was achieved in the first 50 years of the Dutch external radio broadcaster. You can still listen to all of them online here: The series of 8 half hour programmes was recorded in November 1996 and broadcast in February 1997. Pete wrote the series together with translator and researcher Luc Lucas. They used material from the Radio Netherlands sound archives, as well as recordings that I found in the Media Network broadcast collection. It contains the voices and sound fragments from Guillermo Marconi, PCJ-tune “Happy Station” and Eddy Startz, Radio Oranje , Radio Herrijzend Nederland, Lou de Jong, Henk van den Broek, (the station’s first Director General), hr. Van Dulken, (the first Head of the English department), Joop Acda (Director General in 1980's), Bert Steinkamp (Programme Director), Lodewijk Bouwens (Director from 1994) and myself, Jonathan Marks (Director of Programmes 1992–2003). I was talking back then about the need for Radio Netherlands to modernise and embrace new technology including the Internet. I was also concerned that the reason for international broadcasting was about to change — and that we were not moving fast enough to address the “why”. In the end, they didn’t — so these recordings lasted longer than the station!
- Tributes: Here is the show we made as a tribute to Pete — it was more of a celebration of his genius, rather in the style of BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives. It’s a 47 minute tribute to a great man. You can find it here or in iTunes as a Media Network podcast. We also included tributes in Media Network on December 23rd 1998.
- Pete Myers on Media Network. Pete helped me change the media show on Radio Netherlands from a hobby programme into something that reflected the development of radio and TV broadcasting across a large part of the 20th century. We did historical documentaries but also covered international broadcasting news like this edition from November 1988 in which Pete was talking about the move of the Aspidistra transmitter from Crowborough, Sussex to Orfordness. You can find more of programmes featuring Pete here.
- To be continued….. I would like to keep this post as living document. And we should also use it as a basis for the Wikipedia entry which still needs to be written. In the meantime, use the comments below to post your own recollections of this international treasure. And don’t forget to explore the Radio Netherlands archives.