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Few archive programmes make thrilling listening to those who didn't hear them first time around. To be sure, there's one famous exception to this rule, in the person of the Prince of Wales. In his twenties, he rather tragically said, 'It has always been one of my profound regrets that I was not born 10 years earlier than 1948, since I would then have had the pure, unbounded joy of listening avidly to the Goons each week.' Deprived, you see, poor chap, despite everything.
I listened pretty avidly to John Peel's late-night show Top Gear on Radio 1 as a teenager in the early 1970s. But I was an oblivious child when he first broadcast in Britain, on the pirate station Radio London, from a Second World War minesweeper, MV Galaxy, moored three and a half miles off Frinton-on-Sea.
Peel didn't last long in this role. He joined in March 1967 - and in August of that year the station was closed down by a repressive law, the Marine Broadcasting Act,...