Family link (From The Northern Echo)

Family link

6:00pm Monday 16th January 2012 in Tonight's TV By Steve Pratt

Inside Out North-East and Cumbia: BBC1, 7.30pm
Stargazing Live: BBC2, 8.30pm

A SON has heard the voice of the father he never knew thanks to the discovery of a lost recording of Seventies hit Seasons Of The Sun sparked by an appeal on BBC Radio Tees.

Four years ago, Adrian Ludley contacted Radio Tees lunchtime show presenter John Foster for help in finding out more about his father, Alan.

The story is told tonight in a BBC Inside Out documentary. Adrian is seen breaking down in tears as he listens to his late father singing the words “we had joy, we had fun” for the first time.

The 1973 version of Seasons In The Sun by Canadian singer Terry Jacks sold ten million copies worldwide and remains one of the best-know pop songs of all time. The song, containing a message from a dying man to his friends and family, was actually written by a Belgian songwriter years before in 1961.

Five years before Jacks shot to fame, a newly-signed band in Middlesbrough called Rivers Invitation had recorded their version of the song, which Polydor was set to release as the band’s first single.

Then tragedy struck. Singer Alan Ludley was killed in a car crash and Rivers Invitation disbanded with their debut single unreleased.

Alan was only 23 and left behind a oneyear- old son, Adrian, who was raised by his grandparents and then moved to start his adult life in California.

As he approached his 40s with children of his own, he became determined to find out more about the father he could not remember and try to track down the Rivers Invitation version of Seasons In The Sun.

He contacted John Foster and an appeal to listeners helped to find some recordings and photographs, but not Seasons In The Sun.

Adrian, 43, said: “I had never experienced any of his music. Since I was a kid, I would search, but nothing every came of it, so I could only really imagine what his voice must have sounded like.

“Almost 40 years later, I finally heard his voice and that was through the radio station. I realised how wonderful his voice was.”

The first time he was told that his father sang Seasons In The Sun, he did not believe it. He said: “It was too much because of the magnitude of that song and how everybody knew it. It was the first 45 record I ever bought and I would listen to it in my bedroom over and over, and imagine how he would sing it.”

After four years of searching, he feared the song had been lost forever – then it was discovered in an old tin in band member Peter Ayton’s house.

The song was played to Adrian, and the Inside Out programme makers got the band members back together for the film.

Adrian said: “Nothing could top this in my life; this is just amazing. It is the best experience ever. Definitely, I have found a reconnection with him. It is just incredible – the perfect closure for my search.”

THREE years ago, Dara O Briain watched the first few minutes of blockbuster 2012 slack-jawed. He was willing to suspend his disbelief over John Cusack’s near-death scenes, but the line, “The neutrinos have mutated” left him so incensed, he wove it into his standup shows.

Most of us wouldn’t have a clue that neutrinos couldn’t mutate, but O Briain trained as a physicist.

Now he is in the control room of Jodrell Bank’s radio observatory fronting Stargazing Live with Professor Brian Cox.

In the opener, Captain Eugene Cernan, the last man on the moon, discusses his extraordinary memories. Plus, O Briain learns how to take pictures of celestial events and Liz Bonnin reports from South Africa on the differences between northern and southern hemisphere constellations.