Golden oldies well worth a spot of restoration

Malcolm Laycock

Radio 2, Sunday.
The David Jacobs Collection
Radio 2, Sunday.
Vanished Gardens
Radio Scotland, Monday

Ghosts seep out of the radio, spreading cobwebs round your room. Slowly the air begins to shake to the sound of ancient tunes.

Yes, welcome to late-night Sunday on Radio 2 where, back to back, two distinguished gentlemen bathe us in nostalgia and heal our psychic wounds.

The first gentleman is Malcolm Laycock, who sounds kind. He’s a big band man and he brings us tunes from the 1930s onwards. Here be trumpets with funny hats, plinky-plonky banjos, vamping guitars, wonderfully innocent (but clever) lyrics, and saxophones that coil round your legs coo-cooing to you.

Malcolm introduces Jack Payne leading the BBC Dance Orchestra through a "hectic rendering" of My Baby Just Cares For Me. Anarchy in the UK this ain’t, and it’s followed by a bird-style wummin singing "How am ah doin’/Tweet tweet tweet twah twah." Splendid stuff, and I never missed a tweet.

Other amusing sounding artistes adduced here include the RAF Squadronaires, Freddy Slack and Adelaide Hall (a singer, not a building).

Jauntiness abounds, and the subject of most songs is lurve (just like today, only less twisted). Harken to Peggy Lee singing Frank Lesser’s I Believe In You: "You have the clear blue eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth/Yet there’s that up-(pause)-turned (pause) chin, and the grin of impetuous youth."

Malcolm’s diary warns us that the Ian Pearce Band is playing Hitchin; Bookham Big Band Society is hosting a quiz; Big Band Week is getting under way at Potter’s Leisure Resort, Norfolk; and I daren’t tell you what is planned for the Majestic Hotel, Harrogate.

This gives rise to a strange feeling that all is well with the world, though I am disappointed in Malcolm’s sign-off, a tres moderne "Take care!", an expression which, with its implications of urban danger, I have never liked.

I don’t suppose anyone has ever been mugged by David Jacobs (do write in if you have; it could be the scoop I’ve waited for all my life). He sounds like a civilised man, but with slightly loose dentures, and his mission is to bring us what are known in the schmaltz trade as ... arrangements. Coo.

Here be the sort of muzak that drove the hero of American Beauty (a man with a midlife crisis) nuts. Velvety strings glide on dancefloors of glycerin and Brylcreem, as kissing lovers pass yoghurt from mouth to mouth.

Not that I’m knocking it. There’s a place for this period stuff, some of which is cozily splendid, and there’s an audience out there whom David tells: "This is our hour - yours and mines; an hour dedicated not only to our pleasure but to our kind of music."

This means songs by Frank Sinatra, Alma Cogan and Fred Astaire, who could sing as well as dance. Here, he does justice to the Irving Berlin song Steppin’ Out With My Baby, which included the memorable lyric: "If I seem to scintillate/It’s because I’ve got a date."

Rosemary Clooney (who once sang Where Will The Baby’s Dimple Be?) tells us about Kentucky where: "You can go to sleep on a carpet of moonbeams/You can dream your dreams ‘neath a blanket of stars."

This is all very well but, by the time we get to Barry Manilow, I am beginning to worry that the neighbours might think your reviewer has gone a bit peculiar. There is a fair bit of Mantovani too (hmm, taste that bromide), but also some Carole Kidd, a big favourite of David’s.

One such song is called Nice Girls Don’t Stay For Breakfast, prompting David to note afterwards that: "The next thing, she’s singing ‘pass the jam’."

Perhaps the jam could have been made from fruits grown at Blair Castle, Perthshire, which boasts "the most beautiful kitchen garden in the world". The restoration of this horticultural paradise was the subject of Vanished Gardens, which awakened the ghosts of planters past. Sir James Murray, the 2nd Duke of Atholl, created the Hercules Garden, Perthshire, 250 years ago.

This was a Herculean task for those who actually did the work, though that was not how the place got its name. Sir James was a somewhat eccentric collector of statues, and erected one of the ancient Greek ned to overlook the grounds.

In the 20th century, even the knotty club of Hercules could not stop the gardens falling into ruin but, happily, now they’ve been restored, and here we heard the programme presenter, Mark Stephen, scrunching around the gravel paths extolling the results.

Grateful visitors he encountered described these cultivated acres variously as calm, restful, peaceful, tranquil and colourful. And we know just the sort of music to complement that sort of scenario, don’t we?