Miles Kington: Everything I know and love about jazz I owe to Humph

Humphrey Lyttelton announced on his Monday edition of The Best of Jazz (BBC Radio 2) that he was soon giving the programme up, and for a moment my world fell to bits. Humph has been presenting this programme for 40 years. Forty years! How can he give it up so soon?

Every Monday evening he can be heard taking us on a Cook's tour of jazz, except that he is not Thos Cook, he is, rather, Captain Cook, exploring and explaining and navigating his way through the exotic reaches of jazz. He is opinionated, and reasonable, and nostalgic, utterly free of sentimentality, but full of sentiment, and I think I have learnt more about jazz, and enjoyed it more, listening to him than doing almost anything in the world (except listening to live jazz).

Humph reckons that in 40 years he has scripted more than 20,000 individual items. This is even more impressive than it sounds. Humph does not just announce the name of a record and tell you who is playing, and then play it. He tells you why he is playing it (because he admires it, because it's new and worth hearing, because it's old and worth rescuing, because he first heard the record when he was at Eton, because one of the guys on it is very good even if the others are lousy, because it's a new girl singer he's just discovered) and he has the gift of always making you curious about a record before he plays it.

Over the years he has got bored with just playing good or favourite or new recordings, so he has devised games to keep us all amused. Sometimes he will invent a ludicrous rule to which he has to adhere. Recently, for instance, he told us that every bandleader on the programme would have a name ending in "-man". And out they came - trumpeter Joe Newman, baton-twirler Paul Whiteman, British vibes genius Victor Feldman, and so on. (But he made us guess who it was by not telling us till afterwards.) Absolutely barmy, but it led him into corners he would not have otherwise looked into and we follow him there every time.

Recently he has taken to quizzing us. "Here's a Humph's teaser," he will say. "We can all identify the tenor saxophonist on the next record, but who is the clarinet player?" Double teaser, there. You look forward eagerly to identifying the clarinettist, but you dread not recognising the apparently easy tenor player. Also, you suspect deep down that it's a trick and they may be the same person. And the whole programme has become that sort of easy-going conversation between you and Humph, in which he does all the talking, and you do all the answering, because you think you are the only person he is talking to.

A lot of people must know him only as the brilliant compère of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue, and think of him at 85 (85!) as a late-flowering comic talent, but Humph has been funny for five decades. His first book, I Play As I Please (subtitled The Memoirs of an Old Etonian Trumpeter), was published in 1954, and was full of wonderfully sardonic wit, as was his second, Second Chorus (1958). Somewhere - and I only wish I could track it down - he wrote a hilarious premature obituary of himself, which incorporated all the clichés, the misquotes, the misspellings of his name, the idiocies which had been perpetrated against him over the years. "Mr Henry Lyttelston was born at Eton College with a silver trumpet in his mouth" etc etc.

But what really humbles me is that for 40 years I have come to regard The Best of Jazz as my one unmissable landmark of the week, and I cannot think of life without it. Humphrey Lyttelton says that he is not retiring - he is merely planning to spend more time with his band on the road. But I see the end of the programme as an intimation of mortality, of the approach of death. And I'm not sure it's Humph's I'm thinking of. I think it may be mine.

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