From the Guardian Archive: “An interview with Bob Harris”

Bob Harris in 1977. Photograph: BBC

31 October 1972: Martin Walker meets the DJ on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

“Other shows could be spectacles of pop, but we are dealing with Rock music. Nobody else is doing this on TV,”

Bob Harris is one of the best disc jockeys in the country and he is soft in the head. He was knocked out 25 times while playing rugby because the crown of his head where the skull bones join is very vulnerable. So he abandoned the game and went into the safe profession of the DJ, where his cranium is subjected to nothing more violent than 12 hours a day of rock music at 90-odd decibels.

Perhaps you need to be soft in the head to think that you can use the medium of speech to portray and interpret the medium of music and then use the visual tool of television to get the whole thing across. But it is being said that BBC-2’s late Tuesday night rock programme, “The Old Grey Whistle Test,” is the first television rock show which is a success in inter-media terms.