Half a Day in the Life of...

Here's a pretty good question for next year's reunion quiz based on the Big Green Book of Dartmouth Trivia: Name the Dartmouth alumnus who chose the music for Elizabeth Taylor's 50th (£50,000) birthday party held at the Legends Night Club, London, on February 27, 1982. The correct answer would name the man who I would confidently suggest is the most famous living graduate of the College - Paul Gambaccini.

Fame is a funny thing to measure, and I guess that "most famous" is a phrase that needs fairly careful definition if it's to mean anything. In this instance, I used it to denote the man whose name and occupation are known by the largest number of people; within that definition I suspect that he has few rivals, even though his fame is concentrated in the United Kingdom.

The first inkling I had that I had shared some years in Hanover with a Space Age celebrity came during a visit I paid to Britain about two years ago. I spent a weekend with some old friends who live in one of the most rural of the English counties. They have four teen-age daughters, and I still remember the effect of my saying to them as I left for a walk with their parents, " And if Paul Gambaccini should call while we're out, please tell him that I'll phone him as soon as I get back." My stock went up like a rocket. For Paul Gambaccini has been one of the most effective presenters of pop music on British radio and television for several years now; and in the country which gave the world the Beatles and Elton John and the Rolling Stones, to be someone important in the pop-music business is to be a fact in the lives of many millions of people under the age of 30, give or take a year or two. Which is why the volumes about pop music that he coedits for the Guinness Books empire reach the top of the best-seller lists over here. And it is a phenomenon which also led me to think that following him around for a number of hours on a typical day might provide me with the material for a story worth offering to the Dartmouth family. If it also conveys something about the current state of this land to which Eleazar Wheelock looked for his first benefactors, so much the better.

Probably a brief paragraph to establish the context would be useful. (Those of you who hold on to your alumni magazines, as I do, might like to know that an Alumni Album profile of Paul appeared only four years after he graduated, and may be found in the May 1974 issue.) He graduated in 1970, having been, among other things, one of the best general managers WDCR ever had. As a Keasbey Fellow and the holder of a Reynolds Scholarship, he went/ came to Oxford University, intending to proceed eventually to law school. It was while he was at Oxford as the result of his writing for the magazine Rolling Stow —: that he made his first contacts with the BBC and began an association which seems to suit all concerned down to the ground. "The Day" is a Monday, and it gets off to quite different starts for the two of us. For him it's a good one: After a bath (pesky things, British shower heads) and a modest breakfast, he completes the New York Times crossword, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, and knows that all has begun to go well. For me it's ridiculous: Not only do I oversleep, but I find myself still confused by having called his home number (as I thought) the day before, to confirm time and place, only to be told that he's moved out of his apartment and that the decorators are there "doing it over." Since the police, whom I alerted in case the decorators were actually burglars (lots of burglaries in London far, far more than muggings, whatever these monthly essays may say about growing violence over here), did not call me back and since there's another voice again at the "home" number, all I can do is wait for him to call me - assuming that he has not been kidnapped for a ransom consisting of a couple of quid from every teenage fan.

The call comes, and it's agreed that Paul is going to have to spend the next hour or so without his Boswell-for-a-day and get on with a couple of things that can't wait. For the record and a day with recording is worth recording well I ought to report that I was subsequently told on the very highest authority that four things had occupied our hero during the unobserved hours. Here's a precis.

First he typed up the fourth version of a proposal for a series of programs on Channel Four the new, second commercial television channel, due to come into existence some months from now - the first three versions having called for more money than the program planners had wanted to shell out. (It's the same the whole world over.) Then he phoned to see if the new Billboard, his lifeline to the American record charts, had been flown in as usual on a Monday morning. (It was late.) Then he headed out for a talk with the production people at BBC publications about final details for the illustrations for another book that's due imminently this one by him alone and based upon a very successful radio series called Masters of Rock. And lastly a visit to the bank (the manager went to the same college at Oxford, and Paul plugs into his alternative old boys' network) to start the ball rolling towards a new mortgage and a new house, in one of those parts of London - Dulwich Village or Greenwich-Blackheath which most remind him of the New England small-town environment he doesn't want ever quite to leave behind. The implication of putting down roots seems increasingly clear: that he knows on which side of the Atlantic his bread is buttered.

Which brings us to the moment when he breezes through the doors of Broadcasting House, takes me in tow, and leads me through one of the more interesting 11hour expeditions of my recent past. But that s a story that will have to wait for next month's column.