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R.I.P. Jimmy and Harry

R.I.P. Jimmy and Harry

It is sad news to report the passing of two Manchester greats: one nationally famous, one obscure. Both left their mark on the city. Jimmy Savile often claimed to have invented the disco – the notion of playing recorded music for dancers rather than putting on a live band. There is much debate over the validity of this claim but he certainly pioneered the new phenomenon in the 1950s, taking advantage of new technology to make dancers question whether it was worth listening to a crooner desperately trying to sound like Vic Damone when you could spin a disc with the real Vic Damone singing, albeit not in the flesh.

Savile, who died on 30th October aged 84, was manager of the Plaza ballroom on St James Street (now demolished, opposite the side of the Odeon) in the late 1950s. With his shock of multi-coloured hair, he began hosting lunchtime discos and was soon attracting as many as 2,000 punters. Anyone who smelt of drink, had a dirty shirt, or was wearing unpressed trousers would be turned away by the tough ex-miners from Savile’s former Yorkshire colliery days who patrolled the door and were even known to shave the sideburns off particular hairy revellers. The Plaza sessions attracted a large number of truanting schoolchildren, and when local headteachers complained Savile, with trademark cheek, responded: “You’ve had it too easy for too long. If you make your school more attractive than my dancehall you can keep them.”

On 6 February 1958 Savile was due to host a press ball at the Plaza. Then the news came in of the Munich Air Disaster. Savile posted a “Press Ball Cancelled” note on the door, and he and his colleagues sat hunched around the wireless awaiting more information.

Jimmy Savile co-presented the first episode of Top of the Pops on New Year’s Day 1964 from the now demolished BBC studio off Dickenson Roadin Rusholme. There, a generation earlier, John E Blakeley had based his Mancunian Film Studio, responsible for such carefree romps as Cup-Tie Honeymoon (starring a young Pat Phoenix) and School for Randle with the irrepressible Frank Randle (catchphrase: “Bah, I’ve supped some ale tonight”). By the 1960s TV had seen off films and the new music show, irrevocably linked with the charts, began with the Rolling Stones playing “I Wanna Be Your Man”, their only Beatles’ cover. Also on were Dusty Springfield with “I Only Want to Be with You” (this being 20 years she confirmed her true greatness on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Nothing Has Been Proved”), the Dave Clark Five (“Glad All Over”), The Hollies doing “Stay”, the Swinging Blue Jeans’ “Hippy Hippy Shake” and the Beatles (“I Want to Hold Your Hand”, which was Number One.

Around the same time that Top of the Pops was being conceived in 1964, Harry M. Fairhurst was overseeing the construction of the formidable Quay House on Quay Street. This is brutalist concrete massing at its best. The materials, the positioning and the three-section shape are all perfect. Each of the blocks fits the demands of the Golden Ratio of antiquity. Fairhurst also worked with Anthony Hollaway in the 1970s on Manchester Cathedral’s gorgeous expressionist stained glass windows on the west wall: Genesis, Mary, Denys, George and Revelation. Harry M. was the son of the better known Harry S. Fairhurst, whose work dominates 20th century Manchester architecture (Lee House by the Rochdale Canal off Oxford Street; Ship Canal House on King Street; Arkwright House and National Buildings on St Mary’s Parsonage). Harry M. Fairhurst died on 17 October aged 86. The company, the most prolific architects in Manchester history, continues.

* Jimmy Savile pioneered no less than six stone-cold, unforgettable, endlessly repeatable catchphrases, making him the Mark Twain or maybe the Oscar Wilde de nos jours.  In no particular order they were “‘as it ‘appens”; “Now then, now then”; “‘ow’s about that then?”; “guys ‘n’ gals”; “goodness gracious me”; and the unspellable yodel perhaps best rendered as “eueuurrrgh, eueuurrrgh, eueuurrrgh”.

Ed Glinert