[Swprograms] ANOTHER VANCE OBIT

["Paul David" <pauldavid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Ian Macrae" <ian.macrae@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 11:50 AM
Subject: ANOTHER VANCE OBIT


This from today's Telegraph,.
> 
> Obituary of Tommy Vance Disc jockey whose deep voice was the
>           long-running accompaniment to Radio One's heavy metal
>           programme
> 
> TOMMY VANCE, who died on Sunday aged 64, was a disc jockey
> specialising in heavy metal, a genre to which his deep,
> mock-portentous tones (inevitably described as 'gravelly') and
> keen sense of the absurd were well suited; he was also much in
> demand for voiceovers for commercials and television programmes.
> 
> For 15 years from 1978, he presented Radio One's Friday Rock Show
> and was a regular - and in the view of many, much the most
> watchable - presenter of Top of the Pops on television; in 1982,
> he took over from the long-serving Alan Freeman as presenter of
> Sunday afternoon's Top 40 countdown, a job he did for the next
> two years.
> 
> In recent years, he enjoyed something of a revival, bringing the
> Friday Rock Show to VH1, presenting a show for Virgin Radio, from
> 1993, setting up the station Total Rock and appearing as a
> replacement for Roger Cook on Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen
> (though he left early, fed up with the constant foul-mouthed
> abuse from the chef).
> 
> Richard Anthony Crispian Francis Prew Hope-Weston was born on July
> 11 1940 at Eynsham, Oxfordshire, the son of an electronics
> engineer, but with showbusiness in his background; his mother had
> been a singer and dancer, and his grandmother had run a repertory
> theatre. Rick left school at 15, and after a series of other
> catering jobs, joined the merchant navy as a cook at the age of
> 16. (He sported a tattoo on his left forearm.)
> 
> He was entranced by New York on his arrival in the city, and
> stayed for a while, becoming devoted to American radio and
> resolving to become a DJ; on his return to the United Kingdom, he
> enrolled in college in Northern Ireland and joined a repertory
> theatre as an actor and stage manager. But in the early 1960s he
> moved to Vancouver, where he worked the night shift at a radio
> station before joining KOL in Seattle. He moved from there in
> 1965 to KHJ in Los Angeles, where Rick West, as he was first
> known on air, transmogrified into Tommy Vance, after the station
> had signed a DJ of that name who failed to turn up. The money had
> already been spent on producing jingles, and Vance took on the
> morning show under his new name. When he was drafted for the
> Vietnam war, Vance returned to England, where he joined Radio
> Caroline, one of the 'pirate' stations broadcasting pop music
> from just outside British territorial waters, before switching to
> its rival, Radio London, and also serving a stint at Radio
> Luxembourg. Like many of his colleagues from those stations -
> including Tony Blackburn and Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart - Vance
> transferred to Radio One after the pirate stations were closed
> down in 1967, but not before he had presented the last Fab Forty
> Show. He also had stints on Capital Radio in London and on Radio
> Monte Carlo.
> 
> In 1966, he recorded the singles You Must be the One and Off the
> Hook, and later made a cameo appearance in the 1975 film Flame, a
> vehicle for the glam-rock band Slade. But it was not until
> comparatively late that his fine sense of humour was best used
> away from radio, as the voiceover for Channel 4's Eleven O'Clock
> Show and on Five's Dumber and Dumber, where he enlivened CCTV
> footage of incompetent criminals with comments such as: 'Get a
> load of this muppet. What does he think he's doing?'
> 
> Though essentially a private man, Vance was always good company
> when the ice had broken. Despite his undoubted knowledge of rock
> music and the numerous interviews he had conducted with leading
> bands and singers, he was rubbish at pop music questions in
> Trivial Pursuit. He loved travelling and watching films.
> 
> He married Stella Brusa (always known as Cookie), and is survived
> by her, and by their son and daughter.

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