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Rick's Place: Planet Rock

Rick Wakeman
  • Posted at 4:25pm
  • 19 September 2007
  • by SarahDempster-RT
  • 4 comments

"There's nothing like a professional show…and this is nothing like a professional show!" gurgles Rick Wakeman, ensconced in the small, saggy armchair of merriment that is Rick's Place (Planet Rock, Saturdays, 10am - 1pm).

He's right. Wakeman's breakfast show is a masterclass in ineptitude. There are pauses, clangers and fluffs. Things fall over (Wakeman, usually, though this week's show saw the former keyboard player with Yes accidentally knock a stack of listeners' letters to the carpet tiles - a gaffe that prompted a desperate cry of "Christ!").

Wakeman's jokes are something else. Frankly, I don't know how he gets away with them. Cracker-cheap, wonderfully rude and invariably (sadly) unrepeatable, they make you pine for the days where Les Dawson made jokes about his mother-in-law's bum and nobody clutched their chest in horror or launched into a speech about "standards of decency" or some such.

Wakeman's jokes are something else. Frankly, I don't know how he gets away with them. Cracker-cheap, wonderfully rude and invariably (sadly) unrepeatable, they make you pine for the days where Les Dawson made jokes about his mother-in-law's bum and nobody clutched their chest in horror or launched into a speech about "standards of decency" or some such.

Wakeman's anecdotes are similarly priceless. Enormous, convoluted things, they ramble, stumble and then wander off, bewildered, only to return minutes or even hours later, covered in mud and bracken and complaining about the price of real ale.

The grumpiest peach in this week's grumble-orchard is a lengthy monologue about how he'd spent the previous Sunday at a garden centre with the in-laws, only to stumble across an entire aisle of the allegedly "one-off antique" Italian urns he'd just shelled out a fortune for on eBay. "Caveat emptor," mumbles long-suffering sidekick Dave sadly, while Wakeman's heart-rending threats to "name and shame" the "guilty party" drift into Paranoid by Black Sabbath.

Like all the best radio shows, you find yourself picturing the scene in the studio. I like to think of Wakeman straddling a phalanx of flashing controls, his sequined cape twinkling like it did on stage during Yes's 1974 Tales from Topographic Oceans tour, while Dave - the sensible anchor in this storm of abject childishness - stands in a pulpit, in a bow tie, reciting jokes about piles sent in by a listener calling himself Bob Upandown. Though, to be honest, they're probably just sitting around in jumpers.

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Comments

  • Posted on 16 May 2009
  • at 12:22pm
  • by John Wood

Knocks the S**t out of Jon Ross on a Sat morning!

Please dont change a thing about it!

  • Posted on 14 March 2009
  • at 10:19am
  • by Caroline

Wakeman rules

  • Posted on 26 September 2007
  • at 2:55pm
  • by Agaatha

Oh! it is a much better to imagine Wakeman in his sequined cape - jumpers are so passe

  • Posted on 24 September 2007
  • at 5:38pm
  • by lawsw6

I have to agree with Sarah on this one, personally, I couldn't stand 'prog rock' at the time, and would hate it when my friends would troop round to our house in their army surplus great-coats and cowboy boots clutching Rick's Six wives of Henry the VIII or a triple Yes Album, hours of my life that I will never get back... But this show is great, gives Jonathan Ross a run for his money on a Saturday morning. Some of the music takes me back to those dire evenings discussing the merit's of Camel or Van der Graff generator's latest, but the banter is very funny, and Rick does the whole 'grumpy old man' bit to perfection. Tune in, but be careful you might start buying all that old vinyl your other half persuaded you to put in that skip 3 years ago!

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