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16 Facts About Steve Race

1.

Stephen Russell Race OBE was an English composer, pianist and radio and television presenter.

2.

Steve Race was born in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, the son of a lawyer, Race learned the piano from the age of five.

3.

Steve Race was educated at Lincoln School, where he formed his first jazz group, which included a young Neville Marriner, later a major figure in the world of classical music.

4.

Steve Race grew up 6, St Catherine's, where his father was Russell Race, who died in 1926.

5.

Steve Race's brother Philip, a solicitor, was a Methodist preacher, and worked with the British Council of Churches, from 1990 known as Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.

6.

Steve Race developed a sideline arranging player piano rolls for the Artona company.

7.

Steve Race is probably best known as the chairman of the long-running light-hearted radio and TV panel game My Music which ran from 1967 to 1994.

8.

Steve Race presented and wrote most of the questions for all 520 episodes broadcast.

9.

Steve Race presented Jazz For Moderns on radio and Jazz 625 on television for the BBC in the 1960s.

10.

Away from music, for two years from 1970 Steve Race co-presented the BBC Radio 4 "drive-time" news magazine PM.

11.

Steve Race coined the term Denham Concerto for short romantic film pieces inspired by the success of Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto, such as Hubert Bath's Cornish Rhapsody, Nino Rota's Legend of the Glass Mountain and Charles Williams' The Dream of Olwen, after the Denham Film Studios where many of them were made.

12.

Steve Race wrote the acoustic guitar jingle which introduced programmes made by Southern Television in the 1970s and early 1980s.

13.

Steve Race wrote the score for the 1962 British B-movie crime film Crosstrap, and the scores for Three Roads to Rome, Against the Tide and Land of Three Rivers.

14.

Steve Race married Marjorie Leng in 1944 and they had a daughter, Nicola.

15.

Steve Race married again in 1970, to radio producer Leonie Mather, who survived him.

16.

Steve Race died of the second attack at his home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, in June 2009.