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| - Peel admitted that no records were available of the early years and was unsure of how long the programme had been on the air (or even what the original name was). Charles Foster produced the programmes "on and off" from 1984 onwards (even though they occasionally disagreed about John's choice of music ), and Peel also frequently consults a recording engineer (possibly Denis O'Keeffe). One facet of these shows (aside from the lack of sessions, only played when they had been officially released, as in the notorious set by Die Toten Hosen) marked them out from others in his entire output: he sporadically interposed excerpts (presumably written by him) from stories written in a kind of cod noir thriller style which invariably ended up with some reference to his shows. This was gradually dropped when he began making programmes from home. Also uniquely for his overseas shows, he included, following a listener request, a potted version of the 1995 Festive Fifty in his 30 December 1995 (BFBS) and 07 January 1996 (BFBS) programmes. By this time, he had begun to record some of his Radio 1 material at Peel Acres, and by August 1997 was strongly suggesting to BFBS listeners that the same thing might be possible. The first such show went out on 11 September 1997 (BFBS). In December 1997, when due to circumstances detailed by him on 08 January 1998 (BFBS), one was repeated and on another date (18 December 1997 (BFBS)) Foster presented an 'Unpeeled' show of concert repeats. BBC Radio One colleague and Rock Show presenter Claire Sturgess also sat in for him on occasions (e.g. 05 November 2000 (BFBS)). Despite comments indicating the existence of special request shows, however, long-time listener and prolific taper Dirk notes: "there never were 'special request' editions per se on BFBS: what happened in fact was that he would 'collect' requests for a few weeks, due to various reasons (mostly because he simply forgot the bag with the requested records he had picked at home and/or he didn't find the time to search his shelves from one programme to the next). This would lead to the fact that occasionally one programme had more requests than the next one .... but this was never intentional." JP cavilled at the fact that he received little or no feedback concerning his shows from the military, for whom the programmes were primarily intended, but had a large fanbase of civilians. (He recounted one story of a sole fan on an aircraft carrier during the Falklands conflict who was given BFBS tapes to avoid the shows being played on the tannoy. [2]) In addition, Peel Mailing Listuser Maartens has less than fond memories of his listening experiences: "They went out on Friday or Saturday, late at night and were repeated very early on a Tuesday morning. BFBS was quite sloppy, playing the wrong tapes or when something went wrong at the start. Or play the second hour first."
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