This Is Your Life: Richard Branson

Richard BRANSON (1950-)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Richard Branson, businessman, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews - with the help of the crew of the Atlantic Challenger dressed as pirates - while being interviewed on his Regent Canal houseboat in London.

Richard, who was born in London, attended Stowe School but left early to pursue his budding business ideas. After failed attempts to grow and sell Christmas trees and budgerigars, Richard launched a magazine and an advisory service for students in 1966 at the age of 16. In 1970, he set up a mail-order record business, which led to a chain of record stores, the first of which opened on London's Oxford Street.

With the money earned from his record stores, Richard launched the record label Virgin Records with Mike Oldfield's debut album, Tubular Bells, which became a chart-topping best-seller. With Richard's net worth estimated at £5 million by the end of the 1970s, he began the next decade by entering the airline business, launching Virgin Airlines with just one aircraft.

"I don't believe it! Is this serious?"

programme details...

Edition No: 683
Subject No: 677
Broadcast date: Wed 20 Nov 1985
Broadcast time: 7.00-7.30pm
Recorded: Fri 8 Nov 1985
Venue: Royalty Theatre
Series: 26
Edition: 5
Code name: Island

on the guest list...

Steve Ridgway
Dag Pike
Steve Goodwill
Duggie Duggan
Nobby Clark
Peter McCann
Chay Blyth
Phil Collins
Mike Rutherford
Tony Banks
Gary Daly
Eddie Lundon
Helen Terry
Suggs
Bedders
Feargal Sharkey
Joan Templeman - partner
Eve - mother
Edward - father
Lindy - sister
Robin Brockway - brother-in-law
Ned - nephew
Jack - nephew
Vanessa - sister
Joyce - aunt
Simon Draper - cousin
Jonathan Gems
Robert Drayson
Nik Powell
Robert Morley
Christopher Stylianou
Chris Strangeways
Max Handley
Joan Vernon
Mike Oldfield
Clare - aunt
six sheep
Clifford Birt
Vince Antia
Peter Williams
Mark Tait
Dorothy Huntley-Flindt - grandmother
Holly - daughter
Sam - son

production team...

Researcher: David N Mason
Writer: Norman Giller
Directors: Terry Yarwood, Michael D Kent
Associate Producer: Brian Klein
Producer: Malcolm Morris

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

Top of the Pops

charting the pop stars

Biggest night of all for the big red book

Press coverage for The Night of 1000 Lives

Screenshots of Richard Branson This Is Your Life

Producer Malcolm Morris recalls this edition of This Is Your Life in his book, This Is My Life...

Richard Branson was not only young but a mystery to most people in 1985 when he had just bought his first plane for his new airline project called 'Virgin'. The unanimous opinion throughout the business world was that this was a ridiculous name for an airline and he and it were doomed to failure. I was advised not to target him. 'He was too young, too brash and had upset too many people' was the word.

I still wanted to do it and Eamonn agreed because Richard Branson was a young man who had already done some extraordinary things. We started our research and found out that he was a practical joker who had a barge on the Thames which he used as an office. We felt strongly that if we surprised him in a normal fashion he just might find it boring, so we thought up something special. The plan was for Eamonn to draw up alongside him in a small boat and board him, pirate style.

Someone then suggested that he should go the whole hog and dress up like a pirate, complete with a dead parrot on his shoulder. Eamonn immediately began to imitate a very good friend of his, Robert Newton, who had immortalised 'Long John Silver' in Treasure Island. 'Ah, Jim Lad, ah.' Eamonn got quite carried away and, much to my amazement, agreed to do it.

Luckily for us it was a nice day on the Thames as Eamonn's boat pulled up alongside Richard Branson's barge. Richard was being 'interviewed' by one of our team as a way of distracting his attention when Eamonn, complete with dead parrot, arrived on the deck and gatecrashed his way into Richard's office.

'Ah, me hearties!' Eamonn called out as he approached Richard, who was totally baffled by Eamonn's outfit but agreed to come quietly as we whisked him away from his barge to the shore and a fast car to Teddington.

He was convinced that his friends had helped us as a form of revenge for the many practical jokes he had played on them, and he was right.

This Is Your Life: Richard Branson The Times article

The Times 23 November 1985

Long Distance Form: This Is Your Life

Just one of the success stories

If almost every Briton keeps, for emergencies, a mental list of eight favourite records, so too have most of them, in idle moments, imagined a large red book half-hidden beneath the overcoat of the stranger moving purposefully through the crowd: "And tonight... This is your life!"

This Is Your Life began in 1955 with the BBC, transferred to Thames Television in 1969 and, last Wednesday, reached the fifth programme in its seventeenth Thames series with the usual 24-minute flick through events and friends in the life of "millionaire business tycoon" Richard Branson.

The programme's durability and rock-like constancy of format provide ample fuel for detractors. Gentle, affectionate, acceptable, This Is Your Life admits no scandal or malice; its brief biographies are not profiles but panegyrics: "You've often been a bit of a rascal, Ricky, but we love you!" Its attentions are a form of taxidermy, leaving the subjects smug and stuffed, exhibits in a hall of fame.

The famous, unchanged format which has survived for 32 years was seen at work in Wednesday's programme. The show opened with Eamonn Andrews on a barge, dressed as Long John Silver. Interestingly, in a medium obsessed with pre-selling (Later in the show... Wednesday's guest will be...) This Is Your Life trades on the frisson of ignorance. With no advance billing of the night's life, Andrews plays guess the guest, confiding at last that it is Richard Branson.

The second central shibboleth is that Branson does not know. Surprised on his own houseboat by a smiling Irishman with a parrot on his shoulder and a red book in his hand, Branson squeaks an expletive (bleeped on transmission). And so to the studio, where, the guest is assured, his family and many of his friends await him.

The guest's friends are as important to the show's success as the guest himself. Branson's record business is an excuse to introduce Phil Collins, China Crisis, Madness and two other pop stars. They are required merely to appear, smile at Branson (hugs and kisses optional but encouraged) and be cheered for it. Next, Andrews introduces "the lady in your life and mother of your two children".

The first substantial fact revealed is that the subject weighed 11 pounds at birth. A voice wafts from offstage: "And you've been larger than life ever since, Ricky". Enter the subject's mum to hug him. And so on, until the climatic arrival of Branson's 87-year-old ballroom-dancing grandmother with his two tiny children. Roll titles and emotion.

It is idiotically simple, executed with professionalism, popular in the extreme (though past its ratings-topping days) and able to claim that 32 years of success is sufficient defence against carping like this. I wonder, however, how much longer it can survive.

This Is Your Life employs the only style of television profile which enquires into lives in less depth than the chat show. The parade of faces ("The foreman you haven't seen for 19 years", "She's flown in from Los Angeles specially!") seems increasingly to mask a fear that the subject cannot hold a show on his or her own.

The problem is, perhaps, that the title This Is Your Life hints at more than it delivers.

Mark Lawson

Series 26 subjects