Talking about that day, which was a celebration of his 25th week of radio success, the now  77-year-old B R Shivaramaiah recalls: “I was specially out-fitted for the evening with a dark suit and multi-coloured floral shirt. I was introduced on stage with booming music, then the spotlights framed me… It was crazy. Today, it seems surreal that people were so much in love with a voice on the radio. I got marriage proposals by the dozen from women much to the annoyed amusement of my wife…”

An income tax officer by profession, Shivaramaiah’s voice was discovered by chance, when Gubbi Veeranna’s son Shivanand praised his diction (which had irritated him then) instead of his acting when he had performed in A S Murthy’s first production Adhyakshate in 1959. He went on to act in several radio dramas after that, which his family heard on their neighbour’s radio. “Radio was a luxury at that time. I managed to buy my first radio only in 1970.”

In 1973, Shivaramaiah began his golden innings on the radio with the show Gana Sourabha on  Vividha Bharati.  Uttara Bhadra, his alter ego, on the show became so popular that the show itself came to be identified by that name. “Can you imagine an RJ, with a name like Shivaramaiah, becoming popular?” he asks, laughingly. No we can’t. Even  Shivaramaiah couldn’t understand how someone with an “old-man-sounding-name” became a popular RJ. “We actually called the character Maathina Malla (meaning smooth talker), but it didn’t sound right. I chose the name Uttara Bhadra, which was my birth star and ran with it. It just caught on,” says the man who later made the country’s first documentary film on the income tax department’s processes in the nineties – as part of the IT department’s initiative to become people friendly.

Today, Shivaramaiah is an A grade artist with AIR. “Radio compering in India at that time meant a very flat voice that had to stay somber and unemotional regardless of whether you were talking about a song or reading the news, except for an odd Amin Sayani (who worked for Radio Ceylon) who did things differently. So when we started the trend of ‘mad talk’ with emotion and humour, our listeners connected with the content and the program became a raging hit,” he explains.

The show which was the brain child of Gopinath Das and Jagannath of Prabhat Kalavidaru studios, was actually a sponsored program by Byrappa Saree House in the city -an extended commercial. The owner of the showroom Eshwarappa wanted something funky to catch the attention of the people. So the duo came up with the idea of this talk show intersperced with songs and mentions of the shop. “Many people don’t know this, but I was not the original voice for the program, the first couple of episodes that aired had someone else hosting the show and the writer was also a different guy. But it had not clicked with the audience yet. I and the late H N Dwarkanath (the writer of the show) came in when the pair had not turned up one day,” recalls Shivaramaiah. The trio of Shivaramaiah, Dwarkanath and Jagannath (who was the sound engineer for this show) brought magic to the air waves and then there was no looking back. 

Each episode stretched the imagination and tickled the funny bone of the listeners all the while promoting the sponsor. “One episode was about a cricket match between current apsaras (filmstars) and retired apsaras (mythical Rambha, Menaka and Urvashi) with Chitragupta as the umpire. We plugged the sponsor saying that the women looked stunning in their sarees from the shop as they played the game. Another episode was about a woman who appeared as a premonition to me after I ate too many chilli bondas. In one episode that was aired close to the Ganesh festival, I played almost twenty five characters from Mahabharata, both male and female,” recalls Shivaramaiah. He would begin the show with a plethora of greetings at the speed of a bullet train and end the show with – “Will see you next week, take care. These were things unheard of at those times,” says Shivaramaiah who hardly rehearsed before the recording. “We recorded on Sundays from 12 in the night till three in the morning at Prabhat Studios. Then technology meant spool recordings and you had to be perfect with your tenor and bass. There was little you could do technologically if the voice  modulation was not right, unlike today.”