Saturday October 28, 1961

They're Top of the Pops around the city hospitals!

'HELLO AGAIN FOLKS! This is the Hull and District Tape Recording Club bringing you another hour of your favourite record request programme, Flat Spin......'

As this cheery greeting goes out every Sunday evening over the city's closed circuit radio network, hundreds of hospital patients in Hull and the East Riding settle back in their beds and, with the aid of headphones or pillowtones, tune into a programme that is especially for them.

They may hear their own request played, they may hear an item requested for them by one of their relatives, but, whichever it happens to be, Sunday night at 6pm is a disc date every hospital patient keeps whenever possible

The people responsible for providing this dose of musical medicine are all members of the Hull and District Tape Recording Club, who willingly give up their spare time and free weekends to help those less fortunate than themselves.

Last Friday evening I met some of them at their studio in Hessle Road. Busily sorting through the week's pile of requests and checking the appropriate records out of the gramophone library.

'Friday is the day we really start being busy.' Ken Fulstow, secretary and originator of the club, told me.

'All the requests are in by then, and have to be sorted out so that each of the seven hospitals which receives our broadcast gets its fair share.

'Up to now the programme has been fortnightly and we've done eight, but this week we received permission to make it a weekly broadcast, and it's a good job because the number of requests is growing steadily.'

'That pile there for this week' he pointed, 'Totals over 250!'