Alan Dell, born Alan Creighton Mandell (20 March 1924 – 18 August 1995), was a

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

radio broadcaster, associated in particular with dance band music of the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s.

Formative years

Dell was born in

Cape Town Cape Town is the legislature, legislative capital city, capital of South Africa. It is the country's oldest city and the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. Cape Town is the country's List of municipalities in South Africa, second-largest ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

, son of Creighton Mandell, of Johannesburg, and graduated from

Kearsney College Kearsney College is a private boarding, English medium high school for boys in Botha's Hill, a small town between the provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg and Durban, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. History Kearsney College ...

in Natal. He joined the

South African Broadcasting Corporation The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is the public broadcaster in South Africa, and provides 19 radio stations (Amplitude modulation, AM/Frequency modulation, FM) as well as 6 television broadcasts and 3 OTT Services to the general ...

in 1943, introducing for several years a programme called ''Rhythm Club''. Moving to England in the 1950s, Dell worked on

Radio Luxembourg Radio Luxembourg was a multilingual commercial broadcaster in Luxembourg. It is known in most non-English languages as RTL (for Radio Television Luxembourg). The English-language service of Radio Luxembourg began in 1933 as one of the earlies ...

(which then had recording studios in London), the

BBC Light Programme The BBC Light Programme was a national radio station which broadcast chiefly mainstream light entertainment and light music from 1945 until 1967, when it was replaced by BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2. It opened on 29 July 1945, taking over the ...

and its successor Radio 2, until shortly before his death, aged 71.

''The Dance Band Days''

Dell's most celebrated programme, '' The Dance Band Days'', ran from 1969 (initially on Radio 1) until 1995 and, in later years, did so in a sequence on Monday evenings with Dell's "other side", ''The Big Band Sound''. The former included recordings by the likes of

Jack Hylton Jack Hylton (born John Greenhalgh Hilton; 2 July 1892 – 29 January 1965) was an English pianist, composer, band leader and impresario. Hylton rose to prominence during the British dance band era, being referred as the "British King of Jazz ...

Ambrose Ambrose of Milan (; 4 April 397), venerated as Saint Ambrose, was a theologian and statesman who served as Bishop of Milan from 374 to 397. He expressed himself prominently as a public figure, fiercely promoting Roman Christianity against Ari ...

, Henry Hall, Geraldo and other

British dance band British dance band is a genre of popular jazz and dance music that developed in British dance halls and hotel ballrooms during the 1920s and 1930s, often called a Golden Age of British music, prior to the Second World War. Thousands of miles awa ...

leaders. The main elements of these programmes were retained for a number of years after Dell's death, in a Sunday night programme introduced on Radio 2 by Malcolm Laycock. DJ

John Peel John Robert Parker Ravenscroft (30 August 1939 – 25 October 2004), better known as John Peel, was an English radio presenter and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original disc jockeys on BBC Radio 1, broadcasting regularly from ...

, known for his promotion of

progressive rock Progressive rock (shortened as prog rock or simply prog) is a broad genre of rock music that primarily developed in the United Kingdom through the mid- to late 1960s, peaking in the early-to-mid-1970s. Initially termed " progressive pop", the ...

and other cutting-edge music, was an admirer of Dell's broadcasting style and regularly pointed his listeners to Dell's dance-band show.Peel owned a considerable collection of vintage 78s, including a number of dance band records. A compilation of these was released after his death.

Other work for the BBC

Though Dell mostly presented programmes of music from the dance band and swing eras, he was also an early presenter of ''

Pick of the Pops ''Pick of the Pops'' is a long-running BBC Radio programme; it was based originally on the Top 20 from the UK singles chart and was first broadcast on the BBC Light Programme on 4 October 1955. It transferred to BBC Radio 1 (simulcast on BBC Rad ...

'' in 1956 and, in his later years, of ''Sounds Easy'', a Sunday afternoon programme on Radio 2 which was notable for its attention to the recordings of

Frank Sinatra Francis Albert Sinatra (; December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and actor. Honorific nicknames in popular music, Nicknamed the "Chairman of the Board" and "Ol' Blue Eyes", he is regarded as one of the Time 100: The Most I ...

and

Peggy Lee Norma Deloris Egstrom (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, and actress whose career spanned seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local r ...

(both of whom he pre-deceased) and

Henry Mancini Henry Mancini ( ; born Enrico Nicola Mancini; April 16, 1924 – June 14, 1994) was an American composer, conductor, arranger, pianist and flutist. Often cited as one of the greatest composers in the history of film, he won four Academy Awards, ...

with the "Mancini moment". Dell won a 1983

Grammy Award The Grammy Awards, stylized as GRAMMY, and often referred to as The Grammys, are awards presented by The Recording Academy of the United States to recognize outstanding achievements in music. They are regarded by many as the most prestigious ...

in the

Best Historical Album The Grammy Award for Best Historical Album has been presented since 1979 and recognizes achievements in audio restoration. Since this category's creation, the award had several minor name changes: *In 1979 the award was known as Best Historical R ...

category for ''The

Tommy Dorsey Thomas Francis Dorsey Jr. (November 19, 1905 – November 26, 1956) was an American jazz trombone, trombonist, composer, conductor and bandleader of the big band era. He was known as the "Sentimental Gentleman of Swing" because of his smooth-to ...

Sessions - Vols. 1, 2 & 3''. Dell provided the sleeve notes for ''Dance Bands UK'' (1988), a BBC

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and was capable of hol ...

stereophonic Stereophonic sound, commonly shortened to stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configurat ...

transfers by sound engineer, Robert Parker (1936–2004) for the

Australian Broadcasting Corporation The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia’s principal public service broadcaster. It is funded primarily by grants from the federal government and is administered by a government-appointed board of directors. The ABC is ...

External links

*
The History of Radio 2 - Alan Dell profile
at

bbc.co.uk BBC Online, formerly known as BBCi, is the BBC's online service. It is a large network of websites including such high-profile sites as BBC News and BBC Sport, Sport, the on-demand video and radio services branded BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds, t ...

DEAD LINK *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dell, Alan 1924 births 1995 deaths British radio DJs British radio people BBC Radio 2 presenters Grammy Award winners 20th-century British musicians South African emigrants to the United Kingdom Alumni of Kearsney College