INTRODUCING the first in what will hopefully be a new series of pieces that seek to tell the story behind a song.

I’ve been interested in the stories behind some of my favourite songs for a long time now – as someone who first became a fan of the Manic Street Preachers at the age of nine, it’s very hard not to, quite honestly when the subjects their music covers span from getting a number one hit about the International Brigades battling Franco and Fascism to the painter Willem De Kooning to name two of many.

What I intend to do is pick a song from my rather vast encyclopaedia of knowledge and tell it as a story to you. Because it’s nice to have something other than news for a moment and music is such an endless tapestry of things to discover and stories to tell.

This week we’re taking ourselves back to the 1937 Coronation Review of the Fleet at Spithead, the commentary of which was broadcast on BBC Radio, the subject at the heart of the song Lit Up by the tremendous Public Service Broadcasting, who I suspect will feature often in this new series.

It is infamous for the commentary of Thomas Woodroofe (1899-1978), who was a British naval officer, broadcaster and writer.

After retiring from the Navy in 1933, Woodrooffe became a broadcaster for the BBC, providing commentaries on major events including the opening ceremony of the 1936 Summer Olympics and Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich with a piece of paper that he claimed was Adolf Hitler promising to behave himself in 1938.

But in 1937, Woodrooffe was to do the commentary on the Coronation Review from his old ship the HMS Nelson and that’s where things went a bit wrong.

He had met some of his former colleagues before the broadcast for a drink, or possibly several and by the time he came to do his broadcast he was sailing on the seven seas of drunkenness.

What came next was one of the most jaw dropping ramblings that would probably catch attention today, even more in the era of prim and proper Reithian era BBC.

His commentary included lines such as “At the present moment, the whole fleet's lit up!... I'm sorry, I was telling some people to shut up talking... It’s absolutely fantastic. It’s fairy-land.

“The whole fleet... I suppose it must be about five or six miles... and it's lit up. You can see destroyers outlined in lights... But now, believe it or not, the whole fleet has disappeared! The whole colossal fleet of hundreds of ships has just vanished, as if by magic."

His broadcast was cut from the airwaves after a few minutes.

Sir John Reith, the BBC Director General intervened after the incident and suspended Thomas Woodrooffe for a week.

The public were not told that Woodrooffe was drunk, rather they were infamously told he was ‘tired and emotional’ – which is where that phrase being used to describe someone drunk in Private Eye and elsewhere came from.