An instruction from a radio chief executive bans a singer from the playlist. The instruction is ripped up on air. The country's most famous DJ is suspended. It sounds like a stunt Malcolm McLaren might have concocted for the Sex Pistols. But this is about whether Tony Blackburn can play Cliff Richard's 1963 humalong hit "Summer Holiday" on his morning show for Classic Gold.
The row could not have been about anyone else. Listening to the Cliff Richard oeuvre might be as aesthetically challenging as watching an apple turn brown, but the man and his fans are probably the most determined bunch the pop world has ever invented. Across the decades, Cliff has flattened all attempts to shut him up. Squash him down in one arena and he will turn up somewhere else, with extra verve. Cliff, singing in the rain on Wimbledon's Centre Court; Cliff, like a bad penny every year in the Christmas charts; Cliff doing a free gig on millennium night; Cliff going "alternative" on TV on The Young Ones.
Quite possibly Cliff's most Cliff-esque moment was when he ignored the critics completely and stormed the proscenium arches of the nation with Heathcliff, his £3m theatrical adaptation of Wuthering Heights. This involved the then 56-year- old rockster personifying the Romantic hero with the help of hair extensions and a special diet of "55 allowed foods" which, it was hoped, would beef him up to astonishing proportions. While Cathy slopped about in a nightie, Cliff wandered about a stage set of dry ice and plastic rocks, singing "Misunderstood Man", a phrase not thought to have any relation whatsoever to Emily Bronte's literary imagination, but never mind. The show was a commercial triumph, and played to 4,000 enraptured souls every night for about six months.
I had the privilege of travelling with Sir Cliff on the Heathcliff promotional tour, which proceeded in stately fashion across the nation by helicopter. Sir Tim Rice, who had penned the lyrics of this musical spectacular, was meant to come with us, but had overslept. We left without him. Cliff is not one of those stars who lets his fans down, and they were out in force to meet him as the chopper touched down on football fields from London to Edinburgh. Most cried when he arrived. Most were as manic as Cliff is, about Cliff. One appeared with a vast banner reading: "Sir Cliff! Our Knight in Shining A'mour!" That Cliff has never really had an amour, bar brief dalliances with Una Stubbs and Sue Barker, is - naturally - part of the whole enigma.
Indeed, Cliff Richard is so very inexplicable, he makes hard men such as the Gallagher brothers look like babies, while his fellow long-distance warblers Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, with their prescriptive megastar lives, seem utterly predictable. The bachelor boy lives in gated splendour on St George's Hill, Surrey, with two other middle-aged people (a man and a woman) and at least one Westie. He hasn't eaten lunch in decades. He sells Cliff Richard wine to Waitrose. He does 50 press-ups a day. He has been blacklisted by more radio stations than Frankie Goes to Hollywood, yet he is apparently a better-known Christian than the Pope. The whole weird package is humbly acknowledged by Cliff, as he furthers his life's aim of defying the British taste police.
