BILLY
RAYMOND
1975
Billy came back home again in January 1975 for a holiday-cum-business trip. He related to the columnist, Iain MacDonald, that he had his own TV series, “A Touch of Tartan” and his stage show, “Scotland the Brave”, had been running successfully for two and a half years. He had formed his own production company and had been appointed entertainments adviser to one of the major TV companies, in which capacity he went to London to try to negotiate Australian dates for Morecambe and Wise, Tom Jones, Tommy Steele, Reg Varney, Danny la Rue and Engelbert Humperdinck. He was also looking for an accomplished accordion player to substitute for another of his performers who wanted to return to Scotland for a break.
However, Equity stepped in to foil Billy, by insisting that no more overseas acts were being allowed into Australia at that time because of inflation.
Back in Australia, he made another 7-part series of the talent show “Starquest” for Channel 3.
Channel NBN3 did 2 special shows of “A Touch of Tartan” and followed that up with a six-part series of 60 minutes’ duration, recorded in colour. An anecdote written in a local newspaper relates that, during filming, the script called for a set of bagpipes to float skywards to Billy’s “surprise”. There was someone above the camera pulling the pipes by a nylon string. However, the head of the arc lights caused the string to break, bringing the inflated bagpipes down on Billy’s head! The scene was kept in for transmission.
Billy was also flying back and forward to Newcastle from Sydney every Friday by light aircraft to appear at one of Australia’s leading Sporting Clubs, the Western Suburbs Leagues Club, to present “Billy Raymond’s Morning Show”. He made this journey every week for 12 years and Billy decided to “pass the baton” to a colleague, Lee Young. He made the 200-mile round trip on a 10-seater Beechcraft Kingair aircraft 600 tiles, covering 600,000 miles, and Masling Airlines made him an Honorary Member of the Airline!! During this time, he had been stranded, fogbound, and “tossed around like a shuttlecock” during bad weather flights and one flight had to make an emergency landing when an engine failed. But perhaps the worst incident of all was when a hoax caller said that a bomb had been planted in the 10-seater plane. Police searched both passengers and plane and found nothing.
However, Equity stepped in to foil Billy, by insisting that no more overseas acts were being allowed into Australia at that time because of inflation.
Back in Australia, he made another 7-part series of the talent show “Starquest” for Channel 3.
Channel NBN3 did 2 special shows of “A Touch of Tartan” and followed that up with a six-part series of 60 minutes’ duration, recorded in colour. An anecdote written in a local newspaper relates that, during filming, the script called for a set of bagpipes to float skywards to Billy’s “surprise”. There was someone above the camera pulling the pipes by a nylon string. However, the head of the arc lights caused the string to break, bringing the inflated bagpipes down on Billy’s head! The scene was kept in for transmission.
Billy was also flying back and forward to Newcastle from Sydney every Friday by light aircraft to appear at one of Australia’s leading Sporting Clubs, the Western Suburbs Leagues Club, to present “Billy Raymond’s Morning Show”. He made this journey every week for 12 years and Billy decided to “pass the baton” to a colleague, Lee Young. He made the 200-mile round trip on a 10-seater Beechcraft Kingair aircraft 600 tiles, covering 600,000 miles, and Masling Airlines made him an Honorary Member of the Airline!! During this time, he had been stranded, fogbound, and “tossed around like a shuttlecock” during bad weather flights and one flight had to make an emergency landing when an engine failed. But perhaps the worst incident of all was when a hoax caller said that a bomb had been planted in the 10-seater plane. Police searched both passengers and plane and found nothing.
