Smiley Miley's Radio Roadshow

As Coldplay's ‘Every Teardrop’ drew to a climatic conclusion on the Pyramid stage around midnight on Saturday we all counted up our miles. Dad finished with over 2,200 miles in his possession which meant he won the game, even though I had been the first to reach London after the nationwide journey around the board of the Smiley Miley Game and thus brining an end to the game.
Lynsey Ann had brought the Radio One Smiley Miley Road Show game up with her to Mum and Dad's on Saturday night to be played after we all demolished a delicious and rather impressive Chinese carry-out which included Chow Mein, King Prawns and Sweet and Sour chicken.
The Smiley Miley board game was based on the famous Radio 1 Road shows which toured the country every summer between the late seventies and the late nineties, entertaining the nation live on Saturday afternoons from various beaches and parks across the country. The young Reid family went to around three or four of them. The likes of Bruno Brookes, Phillip Schofield and the lovely Jackie Brambles would present the show live to the gathered locals. Games with lucky contestants plucked from the crowds included pop quizzes, 'Bits and Pieces' and 'Smiley Miley's Mileage Game'.
In 'Bits and Pieces' a small sample of a tune was played and you had to guess the artist, song name, or both, a game which I ended up introducing into the family Christmas quizzes I used to put together for the Big Boxing Night bashes we used to have. Mum and Dad's vinyl collection always came in quite handy for that particular round. I'd use the linked tape recorder to make cassettes up full of five to ten second clips from records that my Mum and Dad had bought over the years and apparently forgotten the sound of after a few beers on Boxing Night. I still use the old 'Bit and Pieces' routine occasionally in homemade quizzes to this day. Instead of the old tape recorder I now use the Mac's Garageband application. It's much easier to blend the tracks and even distort them but it's strangely not as much fun.
I miss cassettes. Music in a thin plastic case on a magnetic tape played when wound between two cogs. How cool does that sound? Antiquated, but cool! They were so brilliantly temperamental too.
I spent many an afternoon trying to wind a tape smoothly back inside it's cassette casing. Hours of fun! Once successfully all wound back into place, I'd plug the tape victoriously back into the my cassette player, pressing play with a satisified grin, only to hear the music start warping and morphing, after a few minutes, into a chewed up garbling noise. A wonderful alien noise the BBC's Radiophonic workshop could not easily produce.
Anyway, the BBC finally axed the Radio 1 Roadshow in 2000 replacing it with the present day, annual, festival wannabe, Big Weekend. Probably a good move in the end up as The Big Weekend now attracts pretty big, international names such as the Foo Fighters, Lady Gaga and Madonna.
Del Amitri and Status Quo were the big crowd pullers of the Road Show. Not quite the same.
The last Road Show we went to was in Arran. Mum, Dad, Lynsey Ann, Kenny and myself travelled over in the wee Nissan Micra with our tents, setting up camp on the Friday afternoon, the wee two man tent and the bigger three man dome tent, alongside each other, just in time for the imminent arrival of the Radio 1 lorries and their guest artists, Wet Wet Wet.
Mum and Dad had decided to set up camp with the rest of the Radio 1 roadshow campers and as we settled down to bed, everyone else in the makeshift campsite decided to waken up and the campsite seemed to suddenly transform into a rave. Being younger and naive at the time the Reid family spent the night cowering in our tents, surrounded by crazy, wild, drunken teenagers high on drugs and juice, falling into the sides of the tents, puking on tents, shouting, dancing and ramsacking tents. Kenny and myself were in the wee two man tent which stood before the larger where Mum, Dad and Lynsey Ann’s cowered, sleep deprived and helpless. Halfway through the night Kenny and myself looked up into the darkness of our tent to find some bloke staring back at us.
“Here, there’s somebody in this tent?!”, I remember the guy blurted, before reversing back out and diving off into the noisy darkness.

A young Jackie Brambles and the rest of the roadshow, eventually arrived the next morning as promised, and as Marti Pellow started belting out the hits live on air to the gathered crowd, who seemed strangely mellow and considerably more controlled than they had been the past eight hours, even with Wet Wet Wet on stage, the band they were apparently all camping out to see.
Mum, Dad, Lynsey Ann, Kenny and myself sat on the grass in the open Arran park, half dozing in the Scottish summer sun, enjoying the quiet. Even with Marti Pellow warbling in the background it seemed like bliss.
The board game proved to be more of a hit for the Reid family than that particular Road Show in Arran and at the weekend proved that, although dated, it’s still a hell of a lot more enjoyable than listening to Wet Wet Wet.