"My wife said 'You're not going to New York without me!' - she'd never been there either! So I asked permission and they said yes, if we paid £100 because it would be first class. Well, we hadn't got £100 so I went to the local bank manager and explained what I wanted. He said 'We can't miss an opportunity like that!' and came up with a hundred quid. So everything was great about it.
They sent me up the main mast - I thought I'd never get to the top...
Brian Matthew
In first class, Brian and his wife Pamela "had a superb state room. On the crossing, Gracie Fields was on board, and she gave a concert for of the crew in what was very like an English pub, in the lower reaches of the ship. She did a super show, singing for an hour and a half then doing an interview for us. That was all very friendly."
Brian did commentary on various aspects of the ship, and literally went everywhere. "They sent me up the main mast - I thought I'd never get to the top - to record a little bit from the crow's nest. Once, they called all the engers onto the deck to see the QE2 going in the opposite direction."
One of the guests on board was the actor Victor Mature, star of many Biblical epics like The Robe. "His girlfriend was in an adjacent state room" Brian recalls, and Mature had paid for a whole room purely for his hi fi. The purser gave Brian the phone numbers of everyone on the ship. "I plucked up the courage to ring him and he mumbled 'hello?' It was quite obvious to me that he was in bed, and equally obvious that he was not alone." In spite of his embarrassment, Brian managed to arrange "an appointment to meet, but he failed to turn up and I didn't get the interview.
"But it was a tremendous trip and I'm eternally grateful to the BBC for 'rewarding' me, as they put it."
