Dell's most celebrated programme, The Dance Band Days, ran from 1969 (initially - and perhaps ironically - on Radio 1, the BBC's "pop" channel, launched in 1967 as a replacement for the offshore pirate stations) 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, Ambrose, Henry Hall, Geraldo and other dance bandleaders. 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. (Dance band recordings were sometimes played also on the digital channel PrimeTime Radio 2000-6.)
However, in November 2008 Laycock's Sunday night programme changed format to a more swing orientated playlist. Laycock resigned suddenly in July 2009 which took everyone, including his bosses, by surprise, citing difficulties on agreeing a new contract.
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Famous quotes containing the words dance and/or band:
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)