Starry Chichester line-up celebrates the magic of radio

You will be in great company. Dame Joanna Lumley is the special guest. Sir Richard Stilgoe will compose comedy songs on the spot. Alistair McGowan will offer brilliant impressions. And Charlotte Green and Garry Richardson will share inside stories from their lives on radio.

Garry, a sports presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, is thrilled to be returning to Chichester for the first time in five years: “It started because I had done a couple of little things with Richard Stilgoe and I just said to him about doing a show about radio and bringing in a couple of other people. He said we should do it in Chichester and we did it and we had two shows completely sold out, I think just because of the quality of people that we've got. Richard's got a great radio tradition which goes back to the 1960s and Alistair has also done so much on the radio. Charlotte has got such great radio stories, and I have been on the wireless really since 1976 when I started in my local radio days which is a very long time! And I have to say that I have still not got the hang of it! But radio is one of those things where you are learning all the time and I just consider myself very lucky to have done what I've done and to work with the people that I've worked with.”

One of the great highlights was interviewing Bill Clinton in the Royal Box at Wimbledon: “When we finished he sat with his arm around the back of the chair and just wanted to chat. I just wanted to go off and ring people and tell people what I'd just done! It just literally happened without any warning. They rang and said I could go down and speak to him in five minutes.”

For Garry, there is real magic in the radio: “When I was six or seven I used to listen to the Clitheroe Kid in the 60s and I used to listen to Sing Something Simple and a great DJ called Jack Jackson who was a forerunner of Kenny Everett and Steve Wright but I also used to love listening to plays on the radio, things like Sherlock Holmes and I just loved the simple striking of a match that you would hear and you would imagine Holmes standing in a dark alley over the body.”

Taking it onto the stage now brings the advantage of actually meeting people: “People will say to me ‘I have listened to you on to the Today programme for 40 years. I thought you were much taller! Or I thought you were older! I thought you were younger.’ It is funny how people build up pictures of you without actually seeing you. But doing this on the stage, what is so good is you get instant reaction. You know instantly whether people have liked the story you've told because hopefully they will laugh! For the show we've all got our own little set routines though there are a couple of things that we do together. Obviously Alistair 's great strength is doing the voices and he did a lot of radio. He did the early series of Dead Ringers and he's so great at doing all the topical voices. He will always come up with something really topical.”