Following the death of Coventry-born singer Frank Ifield, Coventry Society Vice Chair, Peter Walters, recalls an encounter with the Sixties pop star back in the 1980s. Peter writes…..
There was no question of volunteering. This was compulsory.
The honour of the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the city itself was at stake, our Editor let it be known. And I, and my colleague, Features Editor Chris Arnot, would be the instruments of another glorious victory to add to the recent Sky Blues FA Cup triumph.
All we had to do was to defeat the Derbyshire town of Chesterfield, represented by journalists from its weekly paper and a locally born celebrity whose identity now entirely escapes me, in Central Television’s new family-friendly teatime quiz, Home Run.
Questions would be all about the place you came from and to help us we had Coventry-born Sixties star Frank Ifield, at that time, in the late 1980s, living in the West Country, I think.
We met up with Frank on the day of recording at Central TV’s production centre, then located on a grim industrial estate just outside Nottingham.
He was charming and friendly, but immediately confessed that he didn’t know an awful lot about his birthplace. I Remember You may have been his first big hit, but Frank couldn’t remember, he told me with a smile, where he’d been born in Coventry. He thought it was perhaps Holbrooks, but it turned out to be Coundon.
In hindsight it’s not that surprising. His father, an engineer and inventor of some note in Australia, had brought the family over to England in the mid-1930s to work with jet pioneer Frank Whittle.
Little Frank, born in 1937 and one of seven brothers, was only young when they returned to Oz, taking with him a vague memory of the Coventry Blitz but not much else.
I don’t remember anything of the questions as our quizmaster Andy Craig, in appearance and style very much a Central Television clone of the BBC’s Noel Edmonds, took us through the early rounds. No doubt there was something for our team on dear old Lady Godiva and for their’s on that funny twisted spire that’s Chesterfield’s most startling landmark.
I do remember that the audience was a gaggle of TV technicians and back office folk – it was far too far out of Nottingham to get the real public in. And I do recall that the recording was beset by technical problems.
I had just answered a question, wrongly it turned out, when somebody shouted STOP and we had to start again. Asked the same question by Andy Craig, I deliberately gave the wrong answer again. I’m not quite sure why.
Our TV Editor, who had been watching proceedings, afterwards branded me the most honest – and the most stupid – person on TV.
As it turned out, we lost, narrowly, and pocketing the glass Home Run souvenir we were given, slunk home to Coventry, feeling we’d let down both the city, and our celebrity guest.
So farewell Frank. It was good sharing the limelight with you.