Long long standing Radio 2 show The Best Of Jazz, presented by Humphrey Lyttelton, will come to an end next month, some forty years after it first aired. Although it's not the first long running show to be axed by Radio 2 - 'Your Hundred Best Tunes' was dropped at the start of the year, and the station's annual national big band competition was axed after 31 years last year - Lyttelton insists that it was his decision to bring the show to an end, adding that he will return with a similar jazz music show in July.
Here's what he said: "I've presented The Best Of Jazz for almost 40 years continuously, at a rate of around 50 a year, choosing and scripting some 20,000 items and I now want to have a bit more time for other things, my own still active and flourishing band, high among them. So if this announcement has summoned the word 'retirement' to your minds, dismiss it at once. I shall be back in July with a three-month series of similar programmes, but this time it will be as a short distance, rather than a marathon, runner".