Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire. Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son. A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull.
With a record five-and-a-half million listeners and thirty years as BBC Radio 2's top presenter, Sir Jimmy Young left the BBC at Christmas 2002. It was a controversial departure behind which lies a story he is only now prepared to reveal. In an extraordinary career which first brought him fame ...