In a career in which he was both a late starter and late finisher, the radio disc jockey Alan Freeman became one of the most familiar voices on radio in the UK, seemingly defying the march of time in a medium noted for being an unsparing consumer of such talents as his. His never-changing manner and somewhat cheesy delivery garnered him enormous popularity, especially in audiences who might otherwise have taken some time to adjust their tastes to pop and rock music as it rapidly usurped more traditional forms of popular music from the 1950s onwards.
With his relentless cheerfulness and rapid-delivery patter — exemplified by his catchphrases “Greetings, pop pickers”, “Alright” and “Not ‘arf” — Freeman was an instantly recognisable presence on the airwaves.
His secret was variety, a quality that helped to ensure his longevity. For five decades “Fluff”, as he was universally known, plied his wares on British radio. Versions of the sources of the nickname were legion. Freeman maintained that he had once put a white submarine sweater in the wash, and it had come out looking like the fleece of a sheep. Persisting in wearing it, nevertheless, he found that the sobriquet stuck.
As the years went by, Freeman adapted himself to the latest music genres. But he kept an open mind, so that at the dawn of a new millennium he could share with his listeners his love for the output of Aretha Franklin, Luciano Pavarotti or Iron Maiden.
Freeman was a loner and a bachelor, who dressed young and could talk in the latest youth patois of the time, achieving an evergreen existence in the land of radio. That was not something that could have been predicted when, as a brash newcomer from Australia, he first arrived on Britain’s shores in 1957.
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Alan Leslie Freeman was born in 1927 in Melbourne, the son of a timber company worker. He always liked to say that he had come to Britain almost by accident. He had been a fairly well-known DJ in Tasmania and later worked as an announcer for the Melbourne station 3KZ.
He had at one time thought quite seriously of a career as a singer. But although he had a decent baritone voice he came to the conclusion that it was not quite good enough for him to make a profession from it. Radio in Australia offered him the chance to combine a love of music with a “natural” personality, and he turned his hand to announcing and presenting music shows, often crooning his own versions of his selections for his listeners.
However, after breaking up with his fiancée, he set out to travel around the world, intending to be back in Melbourne to resume his 3KZ job at the end of nine months. But his stop-off in London turned out to be permanent and he never completed his journey. Numerous letters explaining his delay finally became an apology to his Melbourne employer.
In fact, although he had fallen in love with London, the atmosphere of British radio as it then was did not immediately appeal to him and he took work at first as a summer relief on Radio Luxembourg. His first BBC job was presenting Housewives’ Choice in 1960 and he was already 34 when, a year later, the BBC chose him to anchor Pick of the Pops, a live show on the Light Programme.
It was the corporation’s first serious attempt at a show compered by a pop DJ, and Freeman’s extrovert and genial character proved a big hit with audiences. Pick of the Pops was soon in the forefront of the pop music revolution, appealing not only to the young, but also to their parents for whom it was often a first introduction to the mysteries of rock’n’roll culture.
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By 1965 Freeman was receiving a postbag of hundreds of items of fan mail a week. But although he had his female admirers, he was never quite a sex symbol, though he did at that time live a well-upholstered bachelor existence in a luxurious flat in Maida Vale.
Pick of the Pops transferred to Radio 1 in 1967, and although it was axed for the first time in 1972, Freeman went on to host the Alan Freeman Show. In 1973 he launched the first Radio 1 roadshow and throughout the 1970s confounded critics by remaining at the top of the pop business in spite of the hordes of much younger DJs who snapped at his heels.
In 1975 his Saturday morning programme was voted Music Radio Show of the Year in the New Musical Express readers’ poll. In 1978 he left the BBC and spent 11 years at Capital Radio. After he was named Radio Personality of the Year in 1988 he returned to Radio 1 to host the Saturday Rock Show and the revamped Pick of the Pops in 1989. After another brief spell at Capital Radio he once again returned to the BBC in 1997 to present the third incarnation of Pick of the Pops, now on Radio 2.
By 2000 the gradual onset on arthritis was curtailing his professional career. He also suffered from asthma, not helped by a 60 cigarettes-a-day smoking habit. He had latterly lived in a retirement home in Twickenham.
With his bachelor status, Freeman became well-used to rumours about his sexual orientation. He laughed these off, admitting to having been at one stage bisexual.
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“We’re all basically lonely,” he once said. “The DJ is a lonely man playing to a lonely public. I’m lonely, but my loneliness is self-inflicted. I wallow in it and it’s great.” Freeman jokingly added that if he had to go, it would ideally be of a heart attack, live on air, having just put Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven on the turntable.
Freeman also had a number of acting roles. In 1965 he appeared in the film Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, in the 1970s he played one of two male leads in Noël Coward’s Private Lives at the Adeline Genée Theatre, East Grinstead, while he also appeared as an ingratiating television host in Absolute Beginners (1986). Freeman made a cameo appearance as God in the anarchic comedy, The Young Ones.
A kindly man, he suffered fools easily, and parted company with a good deal of money, either betting with it or simply giving it away. Elsewhere, his presenting style and banal catchphrases became the inspiration for Harry Enfield’s Dave Nice, one half of television’s fictional “Smashy and Nicey” duo. Freeman took the leg-pulling in good spirit, even appearing in one sketch himself — which did him no harm with his public.
Freeman was appointed MBE in 1998.
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Alan Freeman, MBE, disc jockey, was born on July 6, 1927. He died on November 27, 2006, aged 79