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Grunty
Fen |
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This is the story of
the story. It begins back in the 1980’s when singer and songwriter Pete Sayers began to give life to a character who had lived inside his head since he was a boy. As part
of his stage act, Pete turned himself into the sort of fenman
he had often met when cycling into the countryside close to his Wearing a dirty black corduroy cap and an even dirtier mac, he convinced not only audiences but even fenmen he met face-to-face that he really was a sly, self-sufficient and sometimes surly citizen of a real-life
parish called Grunty Fen. |
Pete became Dennis and soon Dennis began to take over part of Pete’s life. But as the character of Dennis grew in complexity and detail, Pete realised the stage was not the ideal medium. Everyone knows radio is one of the great visual media where imagination is let loose, so Pete sought out a partner to bring Dennis to the wireless.
Wily Dennis finds Mr South
One day Dennis was at an antiques sale in
for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. This was their first meeting. Neither was much impressed with the other.
Dennis thought Mr South was a pompous snob. Mr South thought Dennis was a dim clod.
Nothing ever shifted either of them from his view of the other, and it was on this abrasive relationship that
Dennis of Grunty Fen, the radio show, fed for seventeen successful years.
Together this ill-assorted pair invented a whole landscape and peopled it with an ever-growing cast of characters and an ever-widening host of fans around the world, ranging from Prof Stephen Hawking and
Dr Mary Archer to USAF officers who included their treasured Dennis recordings
among the few
personal effects they were allowed to take to
When Pete Sayers died of cancer in 2005,
Dennis lived on, together with Pete’s musical achievements, as his memorial.
A new generation is discovering Dennis and his squalid, poverty-stricken but essentially lovable world.
It is the world of the universal peasant.