It can be a difficult thing, saying goodbye. It can be a challenge to get the tone right, making sure you’re not too sentimental, that you don’t stray into mawkish, while still sounding sincere.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that, after 58 years on the radio, Johnnie Walker did it perfectly on Sunday afternoon when he signed off for the last time at the end of Radio 2’s Sounds of the Seventies.

“The day has come I’ve always dreaded really, my last ever radio show,” Walker said at the start, as he prepared to being the curtain down on a career that started on pirate radio and saw him become a mainstay on, first, Radio 1 and then Radio 2 (apart from a spell living in America and working for Radio Luxembourg). If he sounded a little nostalgic, well, that was surely allowed in the circumstances.

It was clear the 79-year-old didn’t want to say goodbye particularly, but he has been soldiering on for some time now despite being diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a respiratory illness that is terminal. But now the time had come to hang up his microphone.

His last two-hour show saw him play some of his favourite tunes from the 1970s and retell some old war stories. He recalled his run-ins with Radio 1 bosses who wanted him to stop playing album tracks, and how he made Lou Reed’s A Walk on the Wild Side a hit, partly because none of said bosses really understood what it was about. Oh, and then there was his year after Radio Caroline where he was driving trucks.

“I remember I got taken over by Simon Dee who roared down Wood Lane past BBC Television Centre in an Open E type Jag waving and blowing his horn at the commissionaires on the gate. And I thought, ‘Well, his claim to fame was he was the first DJ on Radio Caroline. Here am I, driving a van …I’ve done something wrong somewhere.”

Walker was soon back on Radio 1.

Rod Stewart sent in a message (and got his order in for pints in Heaven) and Walker was joined by “Sally Traffic”, aka Sally Boazman, who was so much a feature of Walker’s Radio 2 Drivetime show back in the day (and on every Radio 2 show since).

Walker’s wife Tiggy (“Tiggy Stardust”) was also on hand to help him and in a way she had the most interesting story of the day to tell. When she was growing up, she said, there were only three records in her house because “My mother really hated music … She actually had radios taken out of cars.”

The horror, the horror. What were the three records, you might ask? Johnnie did. La Traviata, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and the Bonanza theme tune.

After two hours, a couple of Bowie tracks, and others from Neil Diamond and Stevie Wonder, it came time for Walker to say one final farewell.

“So, here we are at the end of a 15 year run on Sunday afternoon, Sounds of the 70s, and 58 years on British radio,” he began. “And it’s going to be very strange not to be on the wireless any more. But also, by the same token, life will be slightly less of a strain, really, trying to find the breath to do programmes.

“Thank you for being with me all these years and take good care of yourself and those you love. And maybe walk into the future with our heads held high and happiness in our hearts. God bless you.”

Cue Judy Collins singing Amazing Grace. Most of us don’t get the chance to say our goodbyes in the way we might want. This seemed a perfectly judged way to wind up a long and winding career. And in its own quiet, un-mawkish, way really rather moving.

A Nightmare On Elm StreetA Nightmare On Elm Street (Image: free) Later on Sunday evening, driving to Bo’ness to see A Nightmare On Elm Street for the first time in, I think, 40 years (it holds up pretty well) I listened to Words and Music: This Haunted Land on Radio 3, a repeat but worth listening to again for Tim McInery’s frankly spine-tingling reading of John Donne’s A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day, one of his most potent poems about love and loss, and A Young Girl’s Guide to Horror, poet Joelle Taylor’s slightly tricksy reminiscence of growing up watching scary movies in the cinema her mother helped manage. It was when she talked to those who worked in the cinema the programme came to life.

She spoke to one of the projectionists who recalled the pickets outside when The Exorcist was screened in 1974. “I can absolutely verify how terrifying The Exorcist was,” Taylor added. “You said it was 1974. That means I went to a midnight showing of The Exorcist in 1974 and I was seven years old. Which is why I still sleep with the light on.”