Writing Jokes for Aled Jones

When I arrived at the Royal Academy of Music as an 18-year old composition student in 1989, some fellow students became friends very quickly. In a previous blog, I mentioned Dominic Seldis, the bass player who I bonded with over Maynard Ferguson in our harmony classes and who I now work with in Amsterdam hosting shows for Symphony.Live. Another, back in 1989, was Aled Jones. Of course, we all knew who Aled was before RAM; he was the only genuinely famous person at the Academy at the time. But, like the rest of the world, we all knew him as a choir boy; that angelic face and the ruff round his neck, the hit records and of course The Snowman. But suddenly - at least to us - he’d turned into a college student; drinking, chatting up girls, joining bands. 

Aled and I bonded in the short time I was at RAM (I left after a year - that’s another story…). As a huge Leonard Bernstein fan, I would ask Aled about when he performed the solo in Chichester Psalms with Bernstein at the Barbican, as well as about the business generally. After all, here was a teenager who’d already had a massively successful career before arriving at college. We also talked about girls. 

But I think that was also the challenge for Aled at RAM. He clearly needed to shake off the choirboy image and he certainly threw himself into doing just that. I admired him enormously for it. And he was a pretty nifty footballer, a valuable asset up front in our RAM football team. His fame made him a marked man for the opposition, of course, and one year Aled sustained a broken leg in a game during the annual inter-music-college football competition (in the year I played - as goalkeeper - we got to the semi-finals, beaten eventually by the Welsh College, who had their own proper football kit and EVERYTHING!). 

Fast forward about 25 years and one Sunday morning: Aled was hosting his show on BBC Radio 2 and I was hosting the breakfast show on Classic FM. We texted each other that day in almost disbelief about what had happened since those RAM days. We were hosting the two most popular shows on British radio at that moment. To be honest, it was a pretty proud day.  

And now, today, I find myself writing scripts for Aled ahead of a set of Christmas concerts with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Inevitably, one of the pieces in the concerts is The Snowman, that astonishingly successful masterpiece by Howard Blake that helped make Aled world famous (although it wasn’t Aled on the original film soundtrack - that was Peter Auty). Aled will be narrating for these performances and hosting the rest of the concert. 

Those drunken nights in the college bar with Aled were 33 years ago and now I’m writing jokes for him. Well well.