Looking Back with Eric Leaver

IN his '50s and '60s' heyday, radio comedian Al Read claimed a phenomenal 35 million listeners.

But if you know of the show the Lancashire comic gave in a Blackburn iron works to an audience of just a handful then, to use his famous catchphrase, you'll be lucky.

However, thanks to Blackburn reader Bill Officer, Looking Back can reveal how the "secret" show came about -- and that his host was a high-flyer in the world of business who also became a nationally-known name.

Yet, though the board meeting at the old Phoenix Iron Works in Shakespeare Street, Bank Top, ended in hilarity as Al put on an impromptu performance, it was strictly business that had brought him there -- as the guest of boss John King.

No-nonsense King was destined to become the first chairman of the newly-privatised British Airways in 1981.

But when he had Al under his wing at the foundry, he headed the giant Midlands and Yorkshire engineering firm Pollard Bearings, which in 1962 acquired and revived the Blackburn works.

It was as a major shareholder in King's business that the comedian -- a one-time Salford sausage maker -- arrived at the plant, which for many years had been owned by the Blackburn Loom Company before its 1959 acquisition by the R and J Dick group, of Glasgow.

"This visit caused quite a stir in the factory as John King took his visitor on the customary tour and introduced him to some of the employees," recalls Bill, who was on the management team. "There followed a fairly lengthy board meeting at which our special visitor took a keen interest in all the matters discussed.

"We were just about to break up when John King turned to Al Read and asked him to give the meeting an idea of how one the men in the factory who had met him that day would greet his wife when he arrived home that evening."

"This lead to a five-minute impromptu comedy performance which had everyone in the room in stitches and confirmed our guest as one of the great comedians of that decade," adds Bill, of Preston Old Road, Feniscowles.

But it was not the first time in this part of the world that Al, who first made his name with his hilarious observations of life on his weekly Wednesday night show on the old Light Programme more than 40 years ago, had put on a free turn for a privileged few.

For regulars in the small back bar in the Inn at Whitewell, in the Hodder Valley, were often treated to a spontaneous show from the top-paid comedian on Sunday nights when he was staying there in the 1950s while doing a summer season on stage in Morecambe.

Indeed, his stopovers at Whitewell were commemorated long after his fame faded as his humour failed to make the transition to TV -- in the form of two trophies that he donated for winners of horse classes in the annual Hodder Valley agricultural show.

One was the You'll Be Lucky Cup and the other, the Right Monkey Cup -- each named after catchphrases he made so popular that, for years, they were expressions adopted by millions.

Al was still a top name when he was pictured (above) clowning for blonde-haired Stacksteads 21-year-old Mary Pegg and Linda Nield, of Bacup, who were in the audience when he launched the new Sunday Night Cabaret Club at Rawtenstall's Astoria Ballroom in November, 1969.