Top Gear

Top Gear was a show presented by Peel on BBC Radio One between 1967 and 1975. It took its name from an earlier BBC show, which went out between 10.00 and 11.55 p.m. on Thursday nights from 16 July to 24 December 1964 on the Light Programme, before being reduced to one hour, moved to Saturday afternoon and axed in June 1965 . This show was produced by Bernie Andrews, presented by Brian Matthew, and was an untypically lively and modern pop music programme for the largely sedate Light Programme. The programme's format, a mixture of specially recorded BBC studio sessions and records, most of them new releases or imports, set the pattern for most of the shows Peel was to present for Radio One for the rest of his long career on the station.

Ken Garner, in his book The Peel Sessions, describes how Bernie Andrews played a crucial role in ensuring that Peel was able to establish himself as sole presenter of the Radio One Top Gear, in the face of considerable opposition from his BBC superiors. The programme quickly became successful, winning awards in 1968 for both Peel and Andrews. The latter, however, left the programme under controversial circumstances in April 1969, and was replaced as Peel's producer by John Walters; their working relationship lasted far longer than Top Gear itself. There was no great change in the style of the show, although Walters' background as a musician and his scepticism about some aspects of the hippy culture contrasted with Bernie Andrews' pop sensibility, and resulted in a wider variety of artists, from solo folk singers to avant-garde jazz groups, doing sessions for Top Gear in the early 1970s.

At the same time as the removal of Bernie Andrews, a new regime at Radio One, less supportive of Peel than the station's first controller Robin Scott, also robbed Top Gear of its prime Sunday afternoon slot and began to move the programme around in the weekend schedules, until it became part of the Sounds Of The Seventies strand on weeknights, early in the new decade. Then, in 1975, with the BBC in financial difficulties, Top Gear was moved to an early evening time, with Peel the only Sounds of the 70s DJ to retain his programme. In the final Top Gear, Peel expressed his relief that the show was less fashionable than it had been in the late 1960s, but hoped it was still influential.

Following the demise of Top Gear, Peel was given a show under his own name from 29th September 1975, initially running five nights a week, 11pm-midnight.

It was one of the Corporation's few attempts to compete with the pirate radio stations and Radio Luxembourg, who had attracted large audiences of young British pop music listeners in the absence of an "official" alternative. This was made explicit in the show's title, which evoked the 1960s fascination with fast cars, jet planes and high-speed travel, but also the use of "gear" to describe fashionable Carnaby Street clothes and the 1960s Liverpool term "fab gear", popularised by the Beatles as an expression of approval. The programme comprised a mixture of records and live sessions, was introduced by Brian Matthew, and featured many popular guests such as Jimi Hendrix, Free, The Beatles, The Who, Dusty Springfield, Led Zeppelin, The Kinks and Manfred Mann.