How It Is

Overview

 * ''How It Is' was a youth-orientated music and discussion programme transmitted by the BBC during the late 60s on which JP was a co-host and on the set of which he met Sheila for the first time. As he relates it:

"There comes a time in your life when almost every day is the anniversary of something, but the Pig's just pointed out, well, has brought in an invitation that reads thus. It says, 'BBC TV invites you to shout, sing or listen during 'How It Is', on Friday November 26, Studio 2, Riverside Studios, Griff Road, Hammersmith. Doors open 5.15, no admittance after 5.30, dress wild. Admit one.' She was the one they admitted, and the TV programme, called 'How It Is', on which Richard Neville and myself used to talk in a thoroughly opinionated and ill-informed way on a topic of our choice, and this is therefore the 33rd anniversary of the first time our eyes met across a crowded BBC studio. Isn't that romantic? (JP, 29 November 2001 show."


 * Sheila also recalled the programme in Margrave Of The Marshes (Bantam Press, 2005, p. 209-11):

"One of my friends occasionally acquired, through her lecturer, tickets for recordings of television shows. I hadn't been to one before, but I had recently split up with a boyfriend, and found myself at a loose end one Friday night, so I trundled off with her to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith to watch the recording of a show caled How It Is. One advantage of attending those shows was that you got paid. Nothinbg grand-no repeat fees or anything like that-but the meagre stipend of ten shillings was doled outonce you had signed as contract promising not to leave before the programme was finished."


 * Peel's co-host was the Australian author and "futurist" Richard Neville, widely known as the co-editor of the Australian and UK versions of the counterculture magazine Oz, at the obscenity trial of which Peel testified.