Al Read

Al Read was directly responsible for the early success of Shirley Bassey and indirectly responsible for the success of Coronation Street. Whatever your opinion of either of these British institutions it shouldn’t affect your judgement of one of Britain’s greatest radio stars.

Born in 1909, his radio career didn’t start until 1950. His early showbusiness ambitions were tempered by his desire to run his sausage business. He was born into a family of meat processors, his grandfather was the first in the UK to pack meat in tins. Despite the ups and downs of the business Al had made it successful by the time he was breaking into radio. So much so that he asked that he only made one show a month.

His career is reported to have begun when he delivered what was no more than a party piece at a business dinner he was hosting for his customers at The Queen’s Hotel, Manchester. The story goes that watching this performance from just outside the room was  BBC radio producer Bowker Andrews, who immediately asked Read to perform the sketch on the BBC radio show ‘Variety Fanfare’. The success of that performance led to a series of his own. At the height of its success the show attracted 20 million listeners.

His shows were just himself and a microphone, he played men, women, children, dogs, whatever the sketch called for. They were simple observations of life in the North West of England. He was born in Salford and lived in and around the area all his life (he did end up in Yorkshire, but I won’t hold that against him!). He was a one man Coronation Street ten years before it existed, the first time that ‘real’ northern voices were heard regularly on the radio. Where LS Lowry painted the pictures of Northern life, Al Read acted them out. His characters and catchphrases have echoes throughout sketch shows down the years, The Fast Show and Little Britain spring to mind. He is said to have influenced Bob Newhart when he gave an impromptu performance of his Bus Driver sketch that was the frame for Newhart’s sketch of the same name.

As success grew Al had to decide between sausages or showbiz, eventually showbiz won. He had successful stage and variety shows and appeared in pantomime, the show “You’ll be Lucky” introduced Shirley Bassey to the West End theatre goers, her first big break. His only downfall was television, it’s most likely that he just wasn’t given the right vehicle. The TV series I have seen is essentially the radio show with Al stood centre screen doing all the voices, for some reason they recreated sets to signify where he was (when he was a policeman it was set in a police station, etc), yet the set was just a backdrop and nothing was added to it. If anything the ‘live’ feel took away the pictures that we paint in our minds when listening to the radio shows.

The radio shows that exist now are mainly re recordings made by Al Read in the mid 70s, the original broadcasts were wiped.

His influence on Coronation Street was acknowledged in the programme with the character of Fred Elliott as portrayed by John Savident, Fred came into the programme as a sausage maker who was prone to repeat phrases by using “I say”, one of Al Read’s many catchphrases. There were other notable repeated phrases “Such is life”, “right monkey” (well before the Johnny Vegas ads!), “you’ll be lucky”, there were various other bits that weren't quite catchphrases that were oft repeated "dad, daad", "j...j....just a minute", they probably don't do much written down, but here's some brought to life..

Al Read, March 3rd 1909-September 9th 1987