I knew Jock in the days when I helped with the production of the issue of Liberal Democrat News that was put together during the Liberal Democrat's autumn conference – one year I copped for all the desktop publishing work.
My reward was that I got to chat to two other people who pitched in to help: Adrian Slade and Jock.
I talked Cambridge Footlights with Adrian Slade, who went down in history as the man who auditioned Peter Cook. I once blogged what he said about Cook:
He said Cook was the funniest man he had ever met and that you would spend all evening with him laughing and then not be able to remember a word he had said the next day.
Adrian also said, however, that being a revue performer – putting on a hat and a funny voice for a two-minute sketch - is not the same as being an actor. And he agreed that sometimes with Peter Cook it showed.
With Jock, I talked about The Archers, which he had been responsible for when he was head of network radio at Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham.
When he took on that role in 1971, The Archers was in the doldrums and the BBC was debating whether to bring it to an end. Jock managed to modernise it without upsetting its existing fans too much. Hence a Daily Record article from 2017 that described him as "the Scot who saved the most English series on radio".
I once tried a theory popular with a long-defunct group called 'The Archers Anarchists' on him, and Jock confirmed that Brian had murdered Adam when he was a boy – they never got on – and buried him somewhere on Home Farm without Jennifer noticing. Who this "Adam" they have now is, God alone knows.
It was remembering these happy days in the Lib Dem News broom cupboard at conference that led me to look Jock up last week and find that he had died. Adrian Slade also died last year, and I am very glad that I knew them both.
