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Steve Race
Steve Race, the musician and broadcaster, who died on June 22 aged 88, became a familiar face on television in the 1950s and went on to host the popular Radio 4 panel game My Music, which ran from 1967 until 1994; he subsequently set a regular crossword for The Daily Telegraph.
Steve Race - Telegraph
Immaculately dressed and sporting a distinguished white beard, Race – although a somewhat shy man – was always confident and assured in front of a microphone or a camera. My Music, while pioneered on radio, made a successful transfer to television bringing out the best (and worst, when it came to puns) from the comic writers Denis Norden and Frank Muir, and their fellow-panellists John Amis and Ian Wallace, a former principal bass at Covent Garden.
Answering questions, identifying tunes that Race played, and singing songs, they produced an overall effect of cosy English eccentricity for serious music lovers; neither Race nor Wallace missed a single episode of more than 520 that were broadcast.
Every year at various arts theatres, Race presented a handful of performances in front of live audiences called An Evening With Steve Race. A classically-trained composer, he also dabbled in serious composition, commercial jingles, film scores and incidental music for the theatre and television.
In 1962 and 1963 Race won awards for his commercial jingles for ITV. The most lucrative was the one for Birds Eye frozen peas: "Sweet as the moment when the pod went pop". He also won an Ivor Novello Award for his composition Nicola (named after his daughter). Other more serious compositions were Faraway Music and The Pied Piper.
Stephen Russell Race was born on April 1 1921 at Lincoln, the son of a lawyer who died when Stephen was five, at which age he began to learn the piano. He was educated at Lincoln School, and became something of a local celebrity, playing at church concerts and on the stage in cinemas around the county.
Aged 16 he went to the Royal Academy of Music, later recalling: "I was very shy because I had never been away from home. I had to work very hard to stay there. I never entertained the delusion that I was meant for better things. I just had a steely determination to do well in the musical world."
His first job was as a pianist with Harry Leader's band, and he went on to play with the bands of Lew Stone and Cyril Stapleton, and to arrange for the Ted Heath band and Judy Garland.
His first broadcast was in 1941, when he was serving with the RAF. He led RAF Swing Stars and played and arranged for the RAF Bomber Command Dance Orchestra. In 1946 he became a freelance pianist, arranger and composer.
Race first came to notice on BBC children's television in 1953, in the magazine programme Whirligig, a miscellany of items that introduced a generation of postwar children to puppet favourites such as Hank the cowboy and Mr Turnip.
In 1955 Race became light music adviser to Associated Rediffusion, remaining in the post until 1960, when he went on to conduct for many television series, including the Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers shows. He found them to be "two sad people with a sort of blankness at the centre".
Race enjoyed nine weeks of chart fame in 1963 with his catchy rendition of Pied Piper (The Beeje), which reached number 29. In 1965, aged 44, he suffered a heart attack, but it did little to halt his prodigious work rate.
He gave up smoking his 30 cigarettes a day and lost a stone and a half. In the mid-1960s he made an injudicious comment about the American multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk, calling him the "Charlie Caroli of jazz" (Caroli being a musical clown of the time). Race then visited Ronnie Scott's when Kirk was appearing and found himself challenged to get up on stage and play piano with the band. Race obliged and acquitted himself well.
By the late 1960s, on the newly-launched Radio 4 network that had replaced the Home Service, Race was a regular anchor of a general-interest magazine programme called Home In The Afternoon; when this was replaced in 1970 by the early evening news and current affairs sequence PM, presented by the former Daily Mail editor William Hardcastle, Race was kept on to introduce some of the softer items, together with Derek Cooper.
Elsewhere his radio and television programmes included A Good Read; Jazz in Perspective; Any Questions?; Music Now; Music Weekly; Kaleidoscope; Jazz Revisited; and With Great Pleasure.
An excellent writer, he produced radio reviews for The Listener between 1975 and 1980 and an autobiography, Musician at Large, in 1979.
His other books included My Music (also 1979), Counties of England (1984), You Can't Be Serious (1985) and The Penguin Masterquiz (1985).
He was "addicted to politics", and was once asked to stand as a Liberal candidate. He later became a founder member of the SDP.
His research into his family's history revealed that his grandfather was the first Methodist missionary to perish in the field in China.
For 11 years, until March 30 this year, Steve Race set the quick crossword which appears on Mondays in The Daily Telegraph. The first few answers to the Across clues form a pun, and he particularly enjoyed his offering on January 19 this year (Lemming, Ton, Paris, Really, Dull, Knightly; "Leamington Spa is really dull nightly"), although it was not universally appreciated in Warwickshire. He was appointed OBE in 1992.
Steve Race's first wife, Marjorie, died in 1969. He is survived by his daughter from that marriage, and by his second wife, L�onie.
Published June 22 2009
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