Treating Kiwis to George’s life and music

GFS member Chris Webster was recently invited to chat on a New Zealand radio station about one of his heroes, the great George Formby. Chris did a brilliant job, giving the full Formby story and speaking with great knowledge, he chatted for almost one hour twenty minutes. The radio station is based in New Zealand and Chris is based in Spain but everything comes together on this web page. Chris is well known for his audio restoration techniques and was responsible for the Feenamint Radio Collection. Chris takes up the story..... The presenter from Radio Woodville in New Zealand, Hugo Manson, contacted a friend of mine, Seb Lassandro, a month or two ago about participating in a show on Gracie Fields and Seb suggested that he might also like to interview me because I've been working on Gracie recordings. When we were chatting off-air I mentioned that I had some marvellous Formby material for a show including long-lost broadcasts and even recordings of George broadcasting to New Zealand. He said that they'd not long done a feature on George but not to worry about that because this sounded like it was still worth doing and would be better than the original. He rang me on a recent Saturday to ask if I could do the Formby interview the next day and I think he was thinking it would only be a twenty minute thing, but I spent the rest of the day thinking of all the various things I'd like to include and to speak about and then got the tracks ready for it and we then did the interview on Sunday morning Spanish time, which was then all edited together to match the tracks in time for being broadcast between 10-12 Monday morning in New Zealand. Hugo was delighted with it and so are the station who have asked for a hard copy for their archives so that it can be played again. I think that Chris comes across really well, not only very knowledgable on his subjects, but obviously very passionate about the world of George Formby and the hi-tech world of audio restoration. Make no mistake about it, the George Formby Society has strived over so many years to get the name of George Formby in to the limelight and Chris has done a fantastic job in supporting the GFS and I am delighted to be able to reproduce the programme in full on this website. Peter Pollard