Radio Four

Well the BBC may have rejected me, but Radio Four have just commissioned an idea of mine! It's a half hour doc. about an American singer called Mrs. Miller, and it will go out in May 09 if I can convince Victoria Wood to present it.

Who was Mrs. Miller then? Well, she was a woman with a bizarre, untrained, tuneless, vibrato-laden voice, and a tendency to forget lyrics both in live performances and on recording, She became something of a cult figure in the 1960’s, and beyond.

Her success was phenomenal. In 1965 she was just an ordinary grandmother singing as a hobby in Church at her home in California. In 1966 she released her first LP on Capitol Records, the ironically titled ‘Mrs Miller’s Greatest Hits’, and it sold more than 250,000 copies in its first three weeks of release. By 1967 she had sung for the troops in Vietnam and performed live at the Hollywood Bowl.

But this is not a tale without hurt and sadness. For one thing, it’s not so certain that Mrs. Miller was in on the joke herself. In fact, the singer claimed late in her career that she wasn’t off-key or off-rhythm by nature but that Capitol, keen to cash in on the possibility of a ‘so bad it’s good’ cult, engineered the whole project without her knowledge. She claimed that they would make her wait until she was tired before allowing her to record, and would not allow her to familiarise herself with the words of a song, so that she would appear forgetful and distracted.

I'm excited about the programme, and really hope I can get Wood to present. Should go now, but thought that I'd leave you scattered readers with a little treat of a promise... Soon to come , people, will be a couple of posts on the supremely ridiculous and varied characters that I met at my Cambridge college, Wolfson - the only international college in the University. Watch out, that's all I'll say.