Local Radio, Going Global

Local Radio, Going Global

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Also by Guy Starkey RADIO IN CONTEXT BALANCE AND BIAS IN JOURNALISM: Representation, Regulation and Democracy RADIO JOURNALISM (with Andrew Crisell)

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Local Radio, Going Global

Guy Starkey

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© Guy Starkey 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–27689–5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Starkey, Guy. Local radio, going global / Guy Starkey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–27689–5 (hardback) 1. Radio broadcasting – Great Britain – History. 2. Local mass media – Great Britain. 3. Mass media and globalization. I. Title. P96.L622G85 2011 384.54—dc23

2011021385

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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To my brother, Clive, and his ever-growing family, and to the sister I never met, Lynn

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Contents List of Tables

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Preface

xi

1 The Sleeping Giant – Resistance and Repression in the Monopoly Years

1

2

The Wake-Up Call – The New Dawn and Local Radio’s Place in the New Duopoly

3 Growing Pains – Localness: Regulation, Deregulation and What about Automation?

27 80

4 Homogenisation, or Two Digits to the BBC – and to Everyone Else?

129

5 Global Village or Total Eclipse? – From ‘Hot’ and ‘Cool’ Media to ‘Active’ and ‘Passive’

160

References

190

Index

195

vii

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Tables 1.1 1.2 2.1

2.2

2.3

2.4

2.5

2.6 2.7 3.1

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1

The original UK regional stations, with their call-signs and on-air dates The eight stations in the BBC Local Radio experiment, with their on-air dates Additional (post-experiment) BBC local radio stations launching in the 1970s, with their original on-air dates The scheduling of specialist music and thematic programming on a range of BBC local radio stations in 1970 The nineteen stations in the first wave of ILR stations, launching between 1973 and 1976, with locations and first on-air dates The twenty-three stations in the second wave of ILR stations, launching between 1980 and 1984, with locations and first on-air dates The third wave of BBC local radio stations launching in the 1980s and early 1990s, with their original on-air dates The scheduling of titled, extended news bulletins on music-based ILR stations in 1976, weekdays The scheduling of specialist music and thematic programming on music-based ILR stations in 1976 The geographical origins of the presenters on a range of first-wave ILR stations in 1976, in weekday breakfast, mid-morning and drive dayparts The ‘league table’ of radio audience research published by JICRAR for Spring 1982 The incremental radio stations launched under the IBA’s licensing process, with their original on-air dates Total growth in display advertising in the UK, 1992–2002 Group ownership of stations licensed by the Radio Authority, March 2001 Number of licensed commercial and RSL radio stations in the UK, 1973–2008

5 24

31

36

50

59

62 70 72

91 103 116 123 125 135

viii

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List of Tables ix

4.2

The relative complexity of principal UK commercial radio groups in January 2011, according to analogue licences held and national broadcast brands operated 5.1 Aggregation of stations’ self-assessment of own content with our own observations in early 2011, using previous IBA definitions of ‘meaningful speech’ 5.2 The original ‘Access Radio’ pilot stations in the UK, with their original on-air dates and the nature of each service 5.3 Digital radio listening in the UK by platform as a percentage of total listening, quarter three, 2010 5.4 Top 30 UK radio stations by listening share in their own TSAs

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145

165

168 184 187

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Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies in Sunderland, United Kingdom, located within the Department of Media at the university. Grateful thanks also to everyone who has helped with the project, including Tony Stoller, formerly Chief Executive of the Radio Authority and Paul Wilson, Curator, Radio at The British Library Sound Archive. Others whose support has been invaluable include Steve Barnes, Jeff Cooper, Len Groat, Euan McMorrow, Pete Reeves, Richard Spencer and Giles Squire. My thanks, too, to the team at Palgrave Macmillan both past and present, especially Felicity Plester, Catherine Mitchell and Christabel Scaife as well as the production team at Newgen Publishing and Data Services, India.

x

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Preface A book including the words Going Global in its title, that concerns itself to a large extent with trends in the development of local radio in the United Kingdom, might at first glance arguably seem over reliant on a joke that would certainly have been topical at the time of writing. It is quite true that, at the time of writing, the largest operator of commercial local radio stations in the United Kingdom is a privately-owned company that calls itself Global Radio, and it was formed in the aftermath of a long-running series of previous mergers and takeovers of local radio stations, many of which started life as wholly-independent operations – locally-owned, locally-originated and locally-accountable. So the title does reflect, at least in part, a significant trend worth noting. However the scope of this book is much more inclusive and much more representative of wider phenomena than a microcosmic study of Global Radio’s undoubtedly impressive expansion into over sixty local radio markets around the UK would imply, even when the group’s interests in regional and national commercial radio are added into the equation. More problematically, such a title, if it were so topically based, would be vulnerable to the often-overwhelming pace of institutional change in an industry not overly recognised for its stability: at the time of writing, the inevitability of the name Global Radio still being current even as the printing presses begin to roll is by no means guaranteed, and if by the time you read this book Global is still a major player in UK radio, recent history suggests your ability to enjoy the joke to the full may be due more to good fortune than to any great insight on the part of the author. For, although Global, with its official total listenership of 19.9 million adults (RAJAR 2010 quarter three), is in many ways a ‘model of efficient, brand driven, market leading radio’ – as it currently describes itself – this is an industry which changes fast. Global could itself disappear in a merger or an acquisition, leaving the name as obsolete and anachronistic as those of its predecessors are now. So how is a book, produced with the long lead times of the relatively sedate publishing industry, to remain current as a reference source for long enough to repay the investment of the publisher, the author and perhaps more importantly the reader, when unforeseen events continue to occur and new facts continue to emerge even on a weekly, if not daily basis? Quite simply, far from being a book about a single company or even a wider status quo, xi

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xii Preface

and far from being a pretext for a none-too-clever play on words, this book addresses a national industry from a number of different perspectives, providing both detail and informed analysis, and relates trends in that industry to wider contexts in a range of other countries with similar or contrasting experiences. The identification and analysis of trends require some historical study, and some of this task requires the placing on record of key milestones in the development of local, regional and national radio. Those milestones then have to be rationalised in terms of their origins and their implications. Only then may likely future histories be extrapolated from what has gone before them, and because predicting the future is essentially epistemologically unstable, anyone who would attempt such a feat would be best advised to base their efforts on sound knowledge and incisive analysis. The phenomenon with which we are concerned is one that has its origins in the 1920s, yet which has become most apparent over the last twenty-five years, as public and institutional expectations concerning the importance and the appropriateness of regulation have changed over time. Such change has been inspired by other phenomena, rooted in aspects of political economy, societal change and also developments in popular culture, each of which may have been influenced in turn by technological advance. The latter may have been the most decisive of catalysts for change, simply because of the new opportunities and challenges it has brought to the processes of mediatisation and because technological advance in the media industries has been exponential: the pace at which technology has influenced the wider contexts within which it is deployed has quickened in our most recent history. What, though, is the significance of the subject of this book? The central irony in the apparent reference in the title Local Radio, Going Global to Global Radio is but a minor distraction. Such trends as those identified over the next five chapters are often characterised as influences behind and consequences of a paradigm known as ‘globalisation’. Although not uncontroversial in their views, those who consider a caucus of data collected over time and derived from contexts which are geographically spread over large parts of the world we inhabit, to indicate a homogenising and centralising force is at work that they call globalisation, are generally concerned with what they perceive to be its likely negative consequences. The themes of globalisation as they relate to the medium of radio are explored in detail later in this book, but assuming globalisation will increase in significance rather than diminish in importance, many of those commentators assume it has considerable

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potential to damage the economic independence of individual states, regions and local communities, to weaken national and local identity, to erode cultural heritage and development, and to threaten the political autonomy of minorities large and small. Despite the insistence in 1964 of the Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan that the shrinking ‘global village’ of the then already substantially mediatised world was not a homogenising influence on societies (2001: 334), even more recent theorising about the mass media has accommodated the prediction of trends that are increasingly apocalyptic. It is possible to argue more or less convincingly that significant change has taken place since 1964, and with the subsequent quickening of the pace of change, both technological and societal, the threat of globalisation has grown since McLuhan’s day. Today the media might well seem to be important agents of globalisation, and of course there is plenty of evidence to support such a proposition, in radio as in other electronic and print media. Each individual or organization contributing to the process may deny that they are themselves guilty of globalising anything – but it may simply be that they cannot see the contribution they are making to a transformation of the wider economic and social context within which they are situated. To return to the specific case of Global Radio, its own actions in 2010 in rationalizing its product offer to reinforce consistency and brand recognition (as we shall see in Chapter 4) can at least be immediately accommodated within the paradigm George Ritzer first described as McDonaldization (1993). The phenomenon which is central to this book, then, is not one which will quickly become outdated with the passage of time or the yellowing of pages. It is one rooted in the beginnings of the last century, problematised by McLuhan in the 1960s, accelerated by more recent developments in production and distribution technology and accommodated within fundamental shifts in perceptions around issues of ownership and regulation of the mass media. Specifically, it is the diminution of an element of radio broadcasting that was growing in importance at the turn of the millennium, which has since gone into decline due to factors relating to the political economy of the mass media and which may be of increasing significance in a world becoming increasingly subject to forces of globalisation: localness of content and ownership. Furthermore, this trend may be generalisable to many different territories around the world. That diminution of localness is occurring in a number of ways, but in essence it can be rationalised as locally-owned, locally-originated and locally-accountable commercial radio stations falling under the control of national and even

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xiv Preface

international media groups that disadvantage the communities from which they seek to profit by removing from them a means of cultural expression and democratic participation. In free societies, independently-owned media can play an important role in developing and sustaining democratic structures, processes and participation – sometimes more so than those media which are dependent on either state support, such as public service radio, or private capital, such as commercial television. In the face of increasing globalisation the independence of small-scale, locally-owned and -originated commercial media is especially problematic. Smallscale media controlled by indigenous citizens can give a voice to minorities and to majorities, empowering groups and individuals who would otherwise be disenfranchised by larger media corporations and national broadcasters. Local media have the potential to unite communities through their shared characteristics and raise expectations of access among individuals, to local and regional democratic structures and processes. Underpinning this support for democracy, local media (including local radio) can reflect and encourage cultural diversity within small and large populations. There are many examples of this and, while it would be wrong, especially in the UK, to claim that popular culture is overwhelmingly local or regional in nature, it can be subject to local variation that has the potential to be encouraged and reflected in locally-owned and -originated media, such as radio. This analysis, then, is less concerned with the particular individuals and institutions exerting influence on localness in local radio at the time of writing than it is in the influence of developments in a range of spheres on the local radio sector in a number of countries over extended periods of time. Chapters 1 to 4 trace the events and influences in a hundred-year history of radio which are pertinent to this analysis, while acknowledging the existence of other, more comprehensive histories of the medium which address the wider field from other perspectives. That acknowledgement takes the form of appropriate references to and suggestions for further reading in such seminal academic works as Briggs (1995), Crisell (1994) and Street (2002), as well as Tony Stoller’s detailed and fascinating insider’s account, Sounds of Your Life: A History of Independent Radio in the UK (2010). There are a number of other very useful texts; for example, Chignell (2009: 131–4) offers a brief overview of the nature and history of what he quite reasonably terms ‘localism’. Then, Chapter 5 draws some comparisons with a number of international contexts, before returning to base to develop an emerging theme within the UK radio industry that perceives evidence of

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resistance and more than a glimmer of hope in the relatively new community radio sector. Finally, we ask whether localness really matters and whether radio’s role in providing local communities with cohesive opportunities for the expression and development of their own distinctiveness is now over. Above all, this book should not be perceived as one that ignores the BBC. As in previous work, for example Starkey and Crisell (2009), there is a recognition to which we return so often it is almost a leitmotiv that the histories and the present day of the public and private sectors of the UK radio industry are inextricably intertwined, and that this is a relationship which can be explored in other territories, too. The one both competes with but also sustains the other in ways which we shall examine in the first four chapters. Their ideological and institutional positioning, and that of their respective supporters, makes this essential relationship one which is pivotal to our understanding of privately-owned local radio, and, of course, the BBC has itself been a major provider of a different kind of local radio richly imbued with localness since the late 1960s. Less space is devoted to this important network of local radio stations simply because it is less controversial and less ripe to be problematised than the commercial sector. Throughout, this is an informed analysis that itself attempts some forward projections in the final chapter but which would prefer to equip you, the reader, with a depth of knowledge and understanding of the field which will enable you to personally extrapolate in a meaningful way from what has preceded us in local radio to what is to come. In terms of localness, with all the potential it has for listeners and producers alike, we ask whether radio can build on the achievements of the second half of its first century, or whether it is inevitably going global in essence if not necessarily in name.

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1 The Sleeping Giant – Resistance and Repression in the Monopoly Years

The birth of radio as we knew it Local radio, as we shall see, is a world-wide phenomenon. That is, it is not a rarity, found only in a few, perhaps maverick countries which have distinguished themselves by going down a route in the organisation of their own radio industries which the majority have chosen not to follow. Instead, local radio is to be found across the globe, but it can differ greatly from country to country in the way it is organised. Neither did local radio appear overnight, in the early days of radio. Rather, it was at first like a sleeping giant: full of potential but as yet still dormant. In most countries of the world, radio has grown up over the past hundred years or so in a way that has been directed by central government – or in some cases regional government – because from the start broadcasting was perceived as the use by a privileged few of a resource that is finite, and indeed scarce. This concept of broadcasting as an activity using a scarce resource that must be allocated in an organised manner – rather than being fought over in a chaotic and ultimately self-destructive way – is one that has been successfully argued in most countries and which has governed their radio and television industries since their early beginnings (Barnard 2000: 10). It has been used ever since the 1920s to exert control over broadcasting, to limit the right to go on air to a powerful few and, as we shall see, to impose particular ideologies on whole populations. In order to fully understand the scarce resource argument, it is necessary to consider at least in fairly simplistic terms some early radio history and some important technical detail, without the need to go into either in the kind of depth that other books do perfectly well. Crisell (1994: 17–41) 1

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famously distilled the many milestones in the early development of the medium into a few pages, and referenced a wealth of other sources from which more detail can be gleaned. We shall focus here on those events and trends which are key to the issues of localness in local radio. It was at the end of the nineteenth century that inventors began to demonstrate the potential of electro-magnetic waves generated electronically in one place to be organised in such a way that as they radiate out from a central point – the transmitter – they may carry with them messages that can be received and understood many miles away by receiving equipment that turns those messages back into audible sound. The first transmitted sounds were most unimpressive by today’s standards, being little more than clicks, and later beeps, but they could be organised according to the Morse Code in such a way that anybody who knew the code could transmit or receive a sequence of sounds that, together, spelt out words which in turn formed sentences. Although a number of inventors were exploring this newly emerging technology, some of the most dramatic – and best-known – early demonstrations of the power of radio were by the Italian Guglielmo Marconi (Barnard 2000: 10). Although others had succeeded in transmitting across a room, he famously transmitted a radio signal across ever greater distances, including the span of the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the importance of a new way of sending messages over long distances without the need for wires between sender and receiver was instantly recognised. It wasn’t until 1906, though, that a Canadian inventor, Reginald Fessenden (Starkey 2007: 159), demonstrated the power of radio to entertain and inform, by broadcasting a short programme of music and speech aimed at anyone who might be listening, as opposed to sending a message intended only for the ears of a particular person or a group of known individuals (Crisell 1994: 17–18). At the time, Fessenden was a lone broadcaster, but he wasn’t to be the last as the potential of radio broadcasting was slowly understood by governments, private companies and other individuals. Fessenden probably wasn’t expecting many people to hear his first broadcast, and because few had radio sets with which to tune in, he was probably correct. He was a visionary, working as inventors do at the cutting edge of what at the time was the very latest communications technology. It wasn’t until the 1920s that broadcasting began to catch on.

Technical talk If you have ever tried to make yourself heard in a crowd of noisy people, you’ll immediately realise that shouting at the same time as hundreds or even thousands of others is fairly pointless: only the very closest people

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The Sleeping Giant

3

to you can tell what you are saying over the noise of everyone else. Radio waves are in some ways similar to sound waves, yet different in others. In order for more than one radio station to be audible at one time by different listeners using different receivers in different houses, the early pioneers correctly judged that transmitters which covered the same geographical areas would need to differentiate their transmissions from one another – that is, make each one distinctive so it isn’t drowned out by other transmissions. They first did this by using radio waves with different characteristics, so a receiver would be able to ‘tune in’ to the signal of choice and reject all the others within range. This would be like being able to use your ears to home in on one voice on the other side of a noisy room and hear nothing else, but with electromagnetic radio waves it can be done, at a cost. For this selectivity to be technically possible, every transmission using this original analogue technology needs to use a different frequency (in this case, frequency refers to the rate at which the electromagnetic waves are modulated, or altered to carry information that can be decoded by a suitable receiver). Because it has a variable tuner which can be set to the listener’s choice of frequency, when it is switched on a radio receiver is receptive only to radio waves of the chosen frequency. So the radio is in effect ‘listening out’ only for waves of that frequency and able to shut out all other radio waves using other frequencies, wherever they are coming from, that would otherwise drown each other out. Each transmission, though, occupies a certain amount of bandwidth (or put simply, space) on a spectrum of radio frequencies which are suitable for transmission. Once a frequency has been taken by someone, it can’t be used by anyone else in the same area. The size of the area covered by the transmission depends largely on the power of the transmitter, and at some frequencies, especially on the short wave band, the radio waves transmitted will actually follow the curvature of the Earth for long distances even to distant continents, instead of disappearing off into space (Starkey 2007: 116). This means that, without careful planning, different transmitters will interfere with each other if they are using the same or adjacent frequencies to transmit: the strongest making the weakest inaudible and signals of equal strength drowning each other out. Frequency planning has its origins in the 1920s because it was then that after that slow start would-be broadcasters began to emerge, each wanting their own frequencies on which to start their own radio services. This problem – the scarcity of frequencies – has not gone away now due to the arrival of digital technology (Starkey 2007: 23), but it is today much less of a problem, as we shall see later. It didn’t, of course, ever trouble the print industry because as many different newspaper or magazine titles may be

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printed as there are enough trees to chop down, so that anyone who can afford to produce a newspaper can do so, whether it makes a profit or a loss. Similarly, today the internet has the potential to accommodate as many different web sites as people care to create, so there’s no need for any official body to dictate who may have a web site and who may not. To be effective, frequency planning has to be international, as well as addressing the particular needs of individual countries. It was during the 1920s and 1930s that through a series of international conferences and agreements, different countries made the first decisions over the allocation of frequencies among them (McCarthy 2007: 3–9, 12–13). Adjacent countries agreed not to interfere with each other’s radio services, sharing out the available frequencies, limiting the power of some services so they broadcast only to small areas, and granting higher power to create larger stations where to do so seemed sensible. The countries of the world which didn’t include local radio in their initial frequency allocations, and they were in the majority, didn’t perceive local radio provision as of much importance. One aspect of the undiscovered potential of the sleeping giant, though, was that local radio transmissions can reach their local audiences using relatively low-powered transmitters that are far less likely to interfere with distant stations than high-powered transmitters intended to serve larger areas.

Radio: local, regional or national? Most countries, depending on their size and their political economy at the time, tended to perceive radio broadcasting as a national, or at least regional activity. In the United Kingdom for example, in 1920 the Post Office gave the Marconi Company permission to broadcast intermittently to small numbers of early radio enthusiasts from a low-powered transmitter in the county of Essex, using the call-sign 2MT. In 1922 this was followed by a formal licence to regularly broadcast a service to London, 2LO. Further stations quickly came on air in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Cardiff, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Bournemouth, Sheffield, Plymouth and Belfast, each with their own call-signs with which to identify themselves on air. In addition there were relays of neighbouring services in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds and Bradford, Hull, Nottingham, Dundee, Stoke-on-Trent and Swansea (McCarthy 2007: 1–9). The relay stations, where there was considered to be insufficient funding or need to set up a bespoke service, provided an early example of how a geographical area might be given its own radio service simply by extending another beyond its original transmission footprint. Engineering technology could only support limited

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use of relays, which depended on the bundling together of multiple telephone lines, but the opening of a high-powered station on the long waveband – where signals can travel much father – brought with it the new concept of a national service. The BBC historian Asa Briggs chronicles in detail how the new long wave service, call-sign 5XX, became known as the National Programme. This ran in parallel with the new generic call-sign (and, effectively, what we would today call ‘brand’) of the Regional Programme, as the original regional stations dropped their original call-signs. The resultant twin offering meant that listeners in the most populous parts of the UK had a choice of two radio services: one national and one based in their own regions (Briggs 1961). This new national long wave service was born of the concern that there would be too few frequencies available to provide enough separate regional services or even relays of services to cover the whole country. Table 1.1 lists the regional stations and their original on-air dates. Table 1.1 The original UK regional stations, with their call-signs and on-air dates (italics indicate relay) 2LO London

14 November 1922

5IT Birmingham

15 November 1922

2ZY Manchester

15 November 1922

5NO Newcastle-upon-Tyne

24 December 1922

5WA Cardiff

13 February 1923

5SC Glasgow

6 March 1923

2BD Aberdeen

10 October 1923

6BM Bournemouth

17 October 1923

6FL Sheffield

16 November 1923

5PY Plymouth

28 March 1924

2EH Edinburgh

1 May 1924

6LV Liverpool

11 June 1924

2LS Leeds/2LS Bradford

8 July 1924

6KH Hull

15 August 1924

2BE Belfast

14 September 1924

5NG Nottingham

16 September 1924

6ST Stoke-on-Trent

21 October 1924

2DE Dundee

9 November 1924

5SX Swansea

12 December 1924

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One of the most widely-acknowledged strengths of the study of history, of course, lies in the fact that history has a tendency to repeat itself – or at least for patterns to become evident in developments taking place at different times when some, if not all possible variables in the prevailing context are present. In short: what happened next in the early history of UK radio is a clear precursor to some of the most recent events in the early twenty-first century. This is a phenomenon we shall refer to as ‘consolidation’. Concentrating the resources of what had by then become the BBC on programming for a smaller number of individual stations made economic sense, and the period up to the Second World War became one of consolidation as gradually the regional differences between ‘opt-outs’ within the network of stations broadcasting the Regional Programme dwindled until the outbreak of war all but ended regional broadcasting, at least for a while. In 1939 the National and Regional Programmes were closed, to be replaced by the BBC Home Service, a new call-sign and brand that was to be broadcast for a further twenty-eight years. After the war, regional variations to the Home Service emerged (Scottish, Northern, Midland, Welsh, West and Northern Irish), as did a new entertainment-led service, the Light Programme (1945–1967) and the ‘highbrow’ Third Programme (1946–1967) (Crisell 1994: 22, 24–5). However, these regional variations were mere opt-outs from the national Home Service programming and so in the UK by the end of radio’s first half century, the clear preference for a broadcasting system based on national services had been firmly established.

Radio: ideologically speaking Because during the course of the 1920s radio broadcasting began to gain popularity in many different countries and sales of radio receivers increased dramatically, governments around the world began to realise that radio – or ‘wireless’ – was something rather more powerful than had originally been perceived. It was clear that it needed to be regulated in such a way as to properly address the many issues emerging from questions over ownership, finance and control. The British government asked two committees of inquiry to determine what would be the best way to ensure this new medium developed in the best – and least dangerous – way. It is worth remembering that in the 1920s Europe was just recovering from the enormous loss of life suffered in the First World War (1914–18) and that the seeds were being sown then for the human catastrophe that was to end the next decade when war would break

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out again in 1939. There was also a fear in the 1920s that, in the wrong hands, broadcasting could bring about unwanted changes in public attitudes – and this was one reason why Britain was soon to reject the model adopted in the United States. The Marconi Company had begun broadcasting so that there would be something for people to listen to, once they had purchased a wireless receiver, but it had already begun to accept money from the Daily Mail newspaper, which sponsored some of the programming. In 1923 the first of the two committees, led by Sir Frederick Sykes, made a number of recommendations that were accepted by the government. The British Broadcasting Company, formed in 1922 from the Marconi Company and a number of other wireless manufacturers, should be funded by a licence fee, and not by advertising or sponsorship. This outright ban would prevent advertisers having undue influence over programme content in the way Barnard described as ‘pernicious’ (2000: 51–2). It was also considered by some that if the BBC needed to maximise commercial revenue, it would cause a progressive diminution of quality, in the same way that excessive commercialism is blamed today for low standards in a range of mass media (McQuail 2010: 224–5). However, the relationship between the BBC and government was considered unresolved by Sykes, hence the second committee, led by Lord Crawford. The outcome of the Crawford Committee’s recommendations was the creation of a public monopoly in the UK, under which the British Broadcasting Company was recognised as the sole provider of wireless broadcasting, as a state-owned corporation. In January 1927 the new BBC – the British Broadcasting Corporation – was incorporated under a Royal Charter, renewable every ten years, that guaranteed it a certain amount of independence from the state, gave it the right to broadcast within the law of the land and accorded it the privilege of being free from competition from any other British broadcaster. Because the BBC was now a state-owned body that benefited from this privileged status, it was expected to provide for its public certain levels of service of a quality which, it was thought, private companies run for profit would not or could not provide. In return, it would be funded from a licence fee paid by everyone who operated a wireless receiver. This was the birth of the notion of public-service broadcasting, but it was quite different from the American model, in which broadcasting was mainly left to private companies to provide. In the US there would be no licence fee and no monopoly for any one broadcasting organisation, but radio stations could be set up by private companies or individuals in order to make a profit

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out of charging other companies for advertising. What might have seemed like anarchy to the British was actually very well organised because stations were licensed to broadcast by a regulator (a number of different bodies performed this role, which from 1934 has been undertaken by the Federal Communications Commission or FCC). A very small public sector was allowed to develop in parallel with the commercial stations in the US, and today National Public Radio (NPR) remains a significant force in American radio even though its audiences are very small compared with those of the commercial stations. What was established then on these two very different sides of the Atlantic, though, was more than a couple of very different radio industries. The decisions taken by those early legislators created an ideological divide between bullish free-marketeers in the US who believed that the market would provide the broadcasting that the people wanted, and the advocates of public-service broadcasting in the UK who firmly believed that the market couldn’t be trusted to provide what was considered good for the people. On the one hand, the American model, adopted almost universally on that side of the Atlantic, is essentially capitalist in intention: capitalism favours an economy driven by money, one which is stimulated by investors who provide products or services for consumers who in turn repay that investment and more, thus creating wealth for the investor. The smarter the investment, the greater the profit – and any benefit to wider society from this economic activity is a welcome bonus. On the other hand, the British model, readily adopted in one form or another (Starkey 2007: 23) by a number of European countries, is clearly ideologically opposed to outright, unfettered capitalism but it would be misleading to go so far as to describe it as the antithesis of capitalism, communism. True, some of the key features of communism were there: central control, exclusivity of supply, limited variants available in recognition of diversity, top-down determinism of what should be provided for the population with no provision of alternatives for those who dissent from the limited range of choices on offer and intolerance of anyone who would disrupt the system by trying to undermine that central control. We should remember, though, that although at the time there was a small Communist Party in the UK which, in common with its sister organisations elsewhere in Europe advocated the spread of the workers’ revolution beyond the borders of Russia, it never succeeded in advancing its goals beyond the level of pipedream. Furthermore, the first Labour government, led

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by Ramsay MacDonald, while firmly socialist in outlook, took office in 1924 but lost power that same year – and yet the post-Crawford arrangements endured as far as radio was concerned until the early 1970s. In blunt ideological terms the typical model of public-service broadcasting is a form of compromise between two sources of tension: the market and society, the needs of each not necessarily being compatible (McQuail 2010: 179). Among McQuail’s list of ‘main goals of public service broadcasting’ are ‘universality of geographic coverage’, ‘diversity in providing for’ mainstream tastes, opinions and beliefs, ‘concern for the national culture, language and identity’, and a ‘concern for “quality”’ (2010: 178). It would be misleading to suppose, as outside commentators might, that the British model was universally supported by everyone who was British. Although the BBC’s monopoly of legal, mainland radio persisted until 1973, there were individuals on the right of the Conservative Party who were uncomfortable with the fundamental contradiction between their own free-market inclinations and the state control of radio broadcasting that their leaders were willing to accommodate. They were able to point to some early successes of commercial radio in order to demonstrate some of the merits of their case. These successes were mainly in the 1930s and the 1960s, when the BBC faced the most serious challenges to the monopoly conferred upon it by Crawford. As we shall see, rival broadcasters broadcast radio programming aimed at the British public from outside the jurisdiction of the British government, effectively circumventing the legislation applying to the use of transmission equipment and the official regulation of content which applied to the BBC through its Royal Charter. In each case, the challenges to the BBC’s monopoly lacked the legitimacy, though, that official political and establishment sanction might otherwise have given them, and their potency was reduced as a result. Instead, it was the invention of television that provided fresh impetus for free-market advocates of competition between parallel public and private sectors, if not actual abolition of state provision of broadcasting. The BBC began a regular television service with a single, black and white channel in 1932, but it was to lose its monopoly of television broadcasting relatively quickly. In 1955 a new commercial television service, ‘Independent Television’ or ITV, began broadcasting in competition with the BBC. Its name came from its independence from the BBC: it was, in short, an alternative, and it became known as ‘the other side’, as if television now existed as two faces of the same coin and it was

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possible to choose between the two. It is very difficult in our multichannel age to imagine an era when there were only two television channels, but the discourse of that era centred around ITV as providing citizens with ‘freedom of choice’. One of the curiosities of the era was that few people or politicians questioned the fact that viewers could choose between providers when deciding what to watch, but radio listeners were restricted to the BBC and had only very limited freedom of choice.

Radio’s ‘other side’ If the Conservative politicians who wielded political influence between 1924 and the Second World War, as well as those Conservative governments which followed between 1951 and 1964, were prepared to tolerate a state monopoly of public-service radio broadcasting in the UK, others were not. The potential of radio as an advertising medium to enable entrepreneurs to make money was clearly visible in the example of the United States. However, transatlantic travel was the preserve of a privileged elite, and only a minority of British people travelled to the US. Instead, the US model of commercial radio was reinterpreted by European entrepreneurs and imported (in a dilute form made more palatable for British ears) directly into their homes. Because radio waves can travel across national frontiers, a number of those entrepreneurs set up radio stations outside the UK, and beamed programmes into the country, without the need for any form of permission to broadcast or to fit into the UK government’s frequency planning. They had the permission to broadcast of the state authorities in France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands or Ireland, and did not need permission from the UK government. A number of commercial radio stations on the continent of Europe began broadcasting programmes in English, aimed at the UK Market. The most enduring and famous of them was Radio Luxembourg, which was forced off the air during the war when the independent state of Luxembourg was invaded, but returned to the airwaves once hostilities had ceased and broadcast until the mid-1990s. Poste Parisien, Radio Normandy, Radio Côte D’Azur, Radio Lyon and even the state broadcasters in Hilversum, Holland and Athlone, Ireland were among the most popular to broadcast sponsored programming and advertisements in English, aimed at the UK market, in the very late 1920s and 1930s. The appeal of the continental radio stations lay in the popular nature of their programming. They claimed sizeable audiences, and the puritanism of the BBC’s first Director-General

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(John, later, Lord Reith) famously created the problem of the ‘Reith Sunday’, when the BBC’s programming was so intentionally dour that more British people were tuning in to the continental stations than to the National and Regional Programmes broadcast by the corporation (Crisell 1994: 21–2). That is, the BBC, with its public-service remit and a Director-General with a strong sense of purpose to inform and to educate rather more than to entertain, tended to broadcast more serious programming than its public wanted. Because the Director-General was a deeply religious man, he insisted on the BBC’s output being particularly restrained on Sundays. This was to become the continental broadcasters’ best day for attracting audiences in the UK and their mixture of music and variety programming, infused with advertising messages, was a big hit. If anything, though, the diet of popular programming coming from the continent was perceived by the UK authorities as vindicating their rejection of commercial radio and proof that the public-service model was better than the alternative: that adopted in the United States. As attitudes hardened, the BBC’s monopoly of radio licensed in the UK became even more secure, and it was not until the 1960s that it was seriously challenged again. By the 1960s only Radio Luxembourg remained to pose a serious threat to the BBC, and by then it had changed dramatically from the station of the inter-war years. The variety shows had been replaced by sequence programmes consisting of pop-music records and chat, many of them sponsored by record companies in order to promote their products. As the rock and roll revolution (that began in the 1950s with such performers as Bill Hailey and the Comets) gathered pace, American-style disc jockeys would ‘spin’ the latest vinyl discs, announcing the names of these exciting new artists and the titles of their hit songs. In a world in which access to popular culture was much more difficult than today, the radio became a vital conduit for teenagers and other young people to experience the music and the thrills of the era. The advent of superstars such as Elvis Presley and the home-grown Beatles and Rolling Stones added fuel to this cultural fire. It is worth noting the role radio played in creating an environment in the United States, in which teenagers found a new collective identity they could call their own, instead of emulating the attitudes and following the fashions of their parents (Wall 2003, Barnard 2000: 13–14). At the beginning of this teenage cultural revolution an American disc jockey named Alan Freed heard music being played on radio stations aimed at black audiences, and began playing them

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on stations aimed at white audiences. Developing a name as an exponent of a new, exciting musical form, one which contrasted sharply with the safe, conservative middle-of-the-road artists being played on ‘white’ radio stations, Freed found himself at the centre of a cultural turning point in the development of middle-America. Many of the white artists of the late 1950s, Elvis among them, were promoted by record labels keen to exploit the growing interest in black music but in a safer, ‘sanitised’ form that would be more acceptable to the majority of white audiences and the radio stations which served them, in a country that was still unused to treating individuals equally irrespective of their ethnicity. As rock and roll spawned different musical genres and sub-genres in the US, so in the UK British artists began to imitate and innovate in a field that became broadly known as ‘pop music’. By this time the BBC had developed its three national radio services, the Light Programme, the Home Service and the Third Programme. The last of those was a cultural network, broadcasting classical music and serious talk programmes, the Home Service offered listeners more of a mixed diet that included drama, documentaries and current affairs, while the Light Programme had been introduced in 1945 in response to demand for a service of popular entertainment that had become evident when civilians had tuned in large numbers to a temporary wartime service, the Forces Programme. The rock and roll revolution, though, had largely left the BBC behind, as the popular music it broadcast on the Light Programme was mainly ‘middle of the road’ music: crooners, jazz combos, swing and light orchestral acts featured highly, and chart music was more likely to be played as rearranged cover versions than in its original form by the original artists. Barnard credits the restraint of the BBC in preserving some Britishness in popular culture on this side of the Atlantic as a creative catalyst in the development of such distinctive artists as the Beatles (2000: 13), and we shall reflect later on the importance of broadcasting in reflecting and supporting indigenous culture of all kinds, but neither were the Beatles’ own original recordings a staple of the Light Programme. It was mainly on Radio Luxembourg that British listeners would hear the new music coming from the US and such British artists as were inspired to develop home-grown pop music in response to it. When it returned after the Second World War, the official state broadcaster of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg began re-introducing additional foreign-language services for the populations of neighbouring states, and more than fifty years later the French radio station RTL

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(Radio-Télé Luxembourg) was still among the top three radio stations in France (Médiamétrie 2010). It should come as no surprise that, when direct-to-home satellite television began to gain the critical mass necessary for Sky TV to become popular in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a series of geostationary satellites operated by a Luxembourg-based company, using Luxembourg’s allocation of the Clarke Belt in space, that provided the means of beaming television programmes into British homes used to receiving only the BBC and ITV. Similarly, long before the development of geostationary communications satellites, for most of the second half of the last century the AM radio signal beaming across from a transmitter in the Grand Duchy on the medium wave band was subject to changing atmospheric conditions in the ionosphere that meant it was audible in most parts of the UK after dark, so Luxembourg only ran an evening service in English, using the frequency for transmissions to other countries during daylight hours. This evening alternative to the BBC was popular with young people and, because television had already taken over the evening in terms of winning the majority of the available audience at that time, they were the most receptive audience available for evening radio, so a diet of non-stop pop music and advertisements proved a success. Gone were the formulaic built-entertainment, variety and quiz programmes of the 1930s, to be replaced by programmes featuring the latest new releases on vinyl and current chart hits in the UK and the USA. The popular belief at the time was that teenagers would listen to Luxembourg in their bedrooms while doing their homework, with friends who had come round to listen to the latest new hit music, and secretly later under the bed clothes after they had been told by their parents to switch out the lights at bed time. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that picture of Radio Luxembourg providing a cultural lifeline to Britain’s youth, who were underserved by the BBC’s three national networks and single television channel, with their only official competition coming from a single rival commercial television channel, ITV. It is difficult to imagine now the lack of forms and sources of entertainment available to young people in that era, when today there are many ways of accessing music and entertainment over the internet, over the mobile phone networks or through multi-channel broadcast or cable platforms. So restricted in their options were they that a popular Saturday activity was going to high street record shops in order to listen to music in specially-provided audition booths or on headphones attached to the sales counter.

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An uneasy monopoly and an unofficial duopoly At the start of the 1960s, it was only Radio Luxembourg that posed a serious threat to the BBC’s monopoly of the UK radio industry, broadcasting in rather poor analogue quality on the AM waveband at 208 metres. This wasn’t a particular disadvantage, other than the limitation that the signal was not audible until dark, because the BBC’s services, too, were all analogue, and broadcast on either long, medium or short wave. To return briefly and very simplistically to technical matters, AM stands for amplitude modulation: it is the size and shape of the radio wave that is modulated to encode audio into the transmissions, rather than the frequency of the waves, as we have already considered in the case of FM. Analogue AM was the norm at the time, the clearer sound of FM being largely unknown to British audiences until the 1970s. Other foreign AM stations on the medium waveband which had tiny UK audiences included the American Forces Network in neighbouring Germany and the national services of neighbouring countries. However, these signals were either low in strength by the time they reached the UK, subject to interference from other stations, or simply unattractive to the British because they were broadcast in languages other than English or concerned themselves with matters of interest only to their own target audiences, as did RTE in Eire. The short waveband was the preserve of real enthusiasts and most stations using it were the external services of foreign governments, including those broadcasting cold-war propaganda in a range of languages, such as Radio Moscow and Radio Prague and their antitheses, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe (Starkey 2007: 119–20) Short wave transmissions are even more susceptible to interference and fading than medium wave, and the quality is usually so poor that speech is easier to listen to than music – or put another way, music sounds so unlike the original studio recordings that listening to it on such stations is largely unrewarding. So, as an official duopoly of the BBC and ITV existed in television, an unofficial duopoly of evening radio belonged to the BBC and Radio Luxembourg. The development of an electrical component called the transistor meant that new, portable transistor radios were now on sale and that car radios were being bought for the first time. As television only broadcast in the evenings, the daytime was now radio’s prime time, families no longer gathering round the wireless radio set in their living rooms to ‘listen in’ together, as they had done each evening before the arrival of television. An interesting exception to this cosy duopoly was Manx Radio, broadcasting to the Isle of Mann at the instigation of the island’s

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semi-independent government, the Tynwald. It wanted to set up its own commercially funded radio station in 1959 in order to benefit the island community and its economy. Unfortunately the Tynwald had to wait until 1964 to get its broadcasting licence from the UK government, who had until then correctly perceived such a derogation of power to be a weakening of the state monopoly and potentially an uncomfortable precedent. The signal could be heard on the UK mainland, but Manx Radio’s programming remained focused on serving the islanders, rather than trying to establish itself as a rival to the BBC’s national services. Such a proposition would come much later in the island’s history, with the planned MusicMann project of the 2000s, which envisaged, but has yet to realise, a high-powered transmitter sited there. However, secure though it was in practice, the status quo of the unofficial duopoly in UK radio did not go unchallenged. The success of a new private sector of broadcasting in securing the right to broadcast a television service had spawned a parallel demand for commercial radio. Its popularity and commercial success in both the United States and the antipodes had not gone unnoticed. Several dozen private companies had been officially registered in the UK with the intention of bidding for licences to run local commercial radio services whenever the government decided to open up the market and officially sanction them – but those companies were to be disappointed. In 1960 a further committee on the future of broadcasting was set up under the chairmanship of the glass manufacturer Sir Harry (later, Lord) Pilkington. The timing was more due to public disquiet about imported programming on television: that is, mainly on commercial television (ITV) and mainly consisting of westerns and crime series imported from the United States. In its final report the committee accorded with an establishment view that much of this programming was so un-British as to be potentially harmful to the cultural identity of the nation. As Milland (2004: 76) suggests, ‘at a time when television was becoming the dominant medium in British life, sections of the governing elite, which were otherwise in contention, came together to ensure that broadcasting in Britain continued to reflect middle- and upper-class values, and to resist American-type commercialism.’ This is a notion that was in effect an early acknowledgement of some of the more harmful aspects of cultural, as opposed to economic, globalisation. Milland also notes that ‘The concerns of some Conservatives … and a widespread “moral panic” about television on the right and on the

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left, were to lead to the rejection of the ideology of the free market in broadcasting’ (2004: 76). One of the committee’s key recommendations was that the third national television service, rather than being handed to the commercial sector as an ‘ITV 2’, should be run by the BBC. Analogue television was also subject to the restrictions of spectrum scarcity and the authoritarian gatekeeping by governments, which that naturally engendered around the world. Two years after the publication of the report, the Corporation launched BBC-2. Pilkington’s position on radio was, unsurprisingly in the circumstances, that there was no merit in the idea of removing the BBC’s monopoly of legal, landbased, mainland radio. To create a commercial radio sector now, especially in the light of the commercial television experience, would be unwise, and there was no need for any further national services. Instead, the BBC should launch a network of local radio stations in response to the demand for local radio, which was being stimulated by the commercial radio lobby. Because Radio Luxembourg was outside the reach of regulation by the British authorities, the station was able to raise additional income from sponsorship. Many of these programmes were sponsored by record companies, who then dictated their content and ensured that only records on their own labels got played. Two of the biggest sponsors were the rival companies EMI and Decca, and between them the major record labels accounted for most of the radio airplay on Luxembourg in the early 1960s. It was this domination of the only way to expose Britain’s youth to new music that was to provide the inspiration for the most important turning point in the history of UK radio. The idea of breaking an official state monopoly by broadcasting into a country from the high seas was not new. Radio Mercur and Radio Syd had each broadcast to Denmark and Sweden respectively since 1958. They demonstrated that, by anchoring a ship in international waters off the coast of a country, it was possible, with an aerial atop an extended mast and a powerful transmitter, to send a reliable signal deep into that country. Provided that the arrangements for the staffing and supply of the radio ship were adequate, it could broadcast without interruption and benefit not only from being outside the regulatory reach of the country targeted, but also avoid paying the large royalty fees required by the music copyright bodies for permission to broadcast records in their programming. Radio Veronica launched in 1960 off the coast of the Netherlands, where it later became a legal, landbased broadcaster, fully integrated into the country’s own rather distinctive broadcasting system: one based on a mix of public and private provision in which

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‘subscribing’ listeners demonstrated support for their preferred radio stations, which in turn conferred legitimacy once a threshold of popular support had been reached. For the British market, a young Irish entrepreneur, Ronan O’Rahilly, who had launched his own record company in order to promote an act called Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, found he couldn’t get his product played on Radio Luxembourg because of the sponsorship cartel operating there. This was effectively a form of ‘payola’ that was tolerated by the Luxembourg authorities; the record companies bought the airtime and used it to promote their own new releases to the exclusion of other companies’ material. So, drawing inspiration from the early pirate radio stations, O’Rahilly decided to set up his own radio station. He wasn’t alone, as another entrepreneur, an Australian called Alan Crawford, was working on a similar project. In the early months of 1964 a race developed between the two businessmen to be the first on air with a service aimed at the south-east of England. Both chose to anchor their ships in the Thames estuary, but it was O’Rahilly’s Radio Caroline that beat Radio Atlanta, launching full programmes on Easter Sunday and gaining the maximum publicity from being the first to offer the majority of the British public an ‘all-day music station’. The two stations soon merged and one ship was moved to the Irish Sea, ironically near the Isle of Mann, from where it broadcast its re-launched service, Radio Caroline North. The success of the pop pirates of the 1960s was one of the phenomena which characterised the ‘Swinging Sixties’, along with the mini-skirt, Carnaby Street and Beatlemania. Most critically for our analysis, this was a breakthrough for the ideologues of the right: the freemarketeers had found a way to circumvent the tight regulation that guaranteed the BBC its official monopoly of radio and, with a modest investment buy themselves access to the daytime radio audiences that the BBC was patently under-serving. The ships that launched Radio London, Radio Sutch and Swinging Radio England (generally recognised to be the most ‘Americanised’ station, with its tight Top 40 format and jingles recorded in Dallas) were not alone. In the Thames Estuary were located abandoned wartime forts, built as gun towers against an expected German attack, and now some of these were occupied by other, equally ambitious, pirate radio entrepreneurs. One was Radio 390, a light music station competing directly with the music of the BBC’s Light Programme in all but abundance of resources, rather than for the more youthful audiences being attracted by Radios Caroline, London and so on. Other fort-based stations included Tower Radio, Radio City and Radio Invicta. Crucially

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for this analysis, two pirate ships other than Caroline North located themselves away from the increasingly crowded Thames estuary which favoured covering London and the South East. Bucking this inevitable metro-centric trend were Radio Scotland and Radio 270, the latter being anchored off Scarborough from 1966 to the eventual closure of most of the pirates in 1967. Radio 270 was named, as became popular among some of the pirate stations, after the wavelength with which it broadcast, 270 metres. This brings a useful marketing dimension to branding, in an industry that initially required its consumers to search along a radio ‘dial’ for the product – the station’s output – amongst potentially dozens of competitors, who would be especially numerous on AM at night. Such numerical branding, though, does nothing to position a station in its target area, in ways that became important later in the development of local radio in the UK, and it would be wrong to suggest that Radio 270 sought to position itself as a station for the town of Scarborough. With such slogans as ‘Your swinging boat on the northeast coast’, this was a station for the town and its hinterland, a population of approximately fifteen million people. Before it launched, the station was to be called Radio Yorkshire, but the name had already been registered and was therefore unavailable (Preedy 2002). Rather than reflecting the cultural diversity of the region, this radio station sought to emulate the cosmopolitan, chart-oriented sounds of Caroline and London. Radio Scotland 242, however, was more a station for Scotland by Scots, although the voices heard on air reflected a wider range of geographical origins among its presenters and the Glaswegian businessman behind the venture, Tommy Shields, was regularly heard on the station. Some elements of Scottish culture pierced through the general veneer of swinging sixties British and American chart-based popularism, in a mix of programming that included MacLaughlin’s Ceilidh (‘forty-five minutes of the best in Scottish entertainment presented by Jack McLaughlin’) and through a fan club called the 242 Clan. Both stations suffered from chequered histories, and neither is among those most often cited as examples of the offshore pirates. Of greater significance though is the fact that, together with Manx Radio, they did help support the notion that alternative radio (to the BBC) might originate from and serve areas located outside the London and South-East region, rather than aspiring to be national in coverage and in character. Another fort-based station in the Thames Estuary, Radio Essex, also had more modest ambitions, using a lower-powered transmitter intended to focus its coverage on that county, rather than harbour pretentions towards being a national

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service. Although most commentaries concentrate on the way they brought about change to BBC national radio (Fleming 2002: 32; Wilby & Conroy 1994: 19), the notion that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between the arrival of the pirates and the birth of local radio is well-founded (Crisell 1994: 33).

How party politics spoilt the party If the 1960s began with a left-right consensus around small ‘c’ conservatism in the political establishment over the desirability of commercial radio, it was to be ripped apart by the end of the decade. The offshore pirate era of the 1960s was hugely influential, both in terms of its effect on the development of the radio industry and as a brief flourishing of a radio sector whose own demise was almost inevitable. On the one hand, the entrepreneurs who followed O’Rahilly’s lead showed that, if government stood in their way, they would circumvent officialdom and challenge the BBC’s official monopoly from beyond the reach of the law by broadcasting from the high seas. On the other, the party in power between 1964 and 1970, the Labour Party, perceived the challenge to state monopolism and the inherent lawlessness which accompanied unlicensed broadcasting from unregulated providers as both a challenge to its authority and an ideological assault on some of the values it held dear. This was not the Labour Party of today, nor that of the late 1990s which successive leaders from Neil Kinnock to Tony Blair repositioned, against considerable opposition from within, towards the centre of British politics. Its leaders, and in particular the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, were ideologically opposed to commercial radio as certainly as they would have railed against the forms of private sector involvement in the delivery of other kinds of public services that were sustained under the Blair and Brown governments of the early twenty-first century, had they been in power then. Meanwhile, many of the entrepreneurs and their supporters behind the offshore pirates were ideologically, if not physically close to the Conservative Party. For example, the founder of Radio 270, George Wilfred (‘Wilf’) Proudfoot, was elected to Parliament as a Conservative MP between 1959 and 1964 and again from 1970 to 1974, losing his seat at the end of each term of office to a Labour candidate. In 1964 Roger Gale joined both the crew of Radio Caroline North as a ‘disc jockey’ and the Conservative Party, serving too on Caroline South and Radio Scotland 242, as well as pursuing a successful career in the media before becoming the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Margate,

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Herne Bay & The Villages in 1983 (now known as North Thanet). So central to Conservative mainstream thought is Gale that he has enjoyed terms of office as Parliamentary Private Secretary to two Ministers of State, as Chairman of the All-Party Animal Welfare Group, as a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee and as Vice Chairman of the party. Some of the stations demonstrated that, despite the logistical difficulties of broadcasting from the high seas, commercial radio could be very profitable. Commenting later on the success of Radio London, former Managing Director of ‘Big L’, Philip Birch, said they were attracting ‘about a million pounds a year’ in advertising revenue, adding: ‘It paid for itself in the first ten months and after that we never looked back!’ (Birch 1974). Unlike Radio Caroline and some of the other stations, Radio London were not seeking to promote particular records, they were in it to make money through commercial radio – and the profit motive lies at the heart of capitalism. This was anathema to Harold Wilson’s government so, for them, pirate radio became a key issue: one important enough to risk electoral unpopularity over, because by 1967 the stations’ listenership was being estimated around twenty million people. In the peak-time hours for radio, during the day, pirates presented a serious challenge to the BBC and to the very concept of benign central provision of a public service that was financed from a licence fee and centrally controlled according to the government’s idea of the people’s wants and needs. In essence, this was an ideological struggle between advocates of publicly-owned, public-service radio, developed and managed on behalf of its audiences by a Reithian and post-Reithian BBC, and the free-marketeers, keen to let audiences and advertisers decide on the extent and content of radio broadcasting. Only three years into the great pirate adventure, the free market the offshore stations had created was winning the argument because the public were abandoning the BBC for the rising tide of commercial competition that Pilkington had tried to hold back. Turning back the tide without causing the party too much electoral damage at the next general election required managing public opinion and providing the public with an alternative that would be acceptable to both citizen and ideologue alike. Managing public opinion involved using the essential lawlessness of the pirates against them. While operating legally, they were doing so only by circumventing the law by transmitting from outside British territorial waters, and while adding to the glamour of their operation, this also made them easy targets on three counts. The very essence of the pirates’ popularity, their ability to play as many original artists’

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recordings as they liked, instead of the cover versions the BBC was obliged to play, stemmed from their operating outside the reach of the Musicians’ Union and the music copyright bodies. Not only were they free from the restrictions imposed on the BBC over the amount of music that could be played off records, as opposed to the live recordings of cover versions the BBC had to commission, but they didn’t have to pay royalties for the copyright music they did play. This was portrayed as theft: in not paying for the use of the music they played, unlike the BBC, the pirates were stealing from the artists and musicians on whose popularity they depended. Secondly, there was the issue of spectrum scarcity: because they were operating on unauthorised frequencies, chosen by them not at random but just in gaps on the medium waveband between transmissions from other stations in order to be heard, the pirates were breaking the international frequency plan and using frequencies allocated to other countries. The powerful AM transmitters were also claimed to be interfering with emergency services. For example, there were allegations that the Scarborough lifeboat crew had heard pop music on their ship-to-shore radio communication frequency. Most damaging, though, was the charge that the pirates were operating in a twilight world, perhaps crossing the borders of legality on land. In 1966 a dispute over a transmitter and contentious business dealings between the owner of Radio City, Reg Calvert, and a competitor, Major Oliver Smedley, led to a boarding party taking over the Radio City fort and later Calvert being shot dead on Smedley’s doorstep. This incident seemed proof enough that something had to be done, just over a year later the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967 (MOA) came into force on the 14th August. The Act of Parliament was either a neat solution to the problem of dealing with unregulated and disruptive behaviour largely taking place outside the jurisdiction of the British courts, or an attack on the civil liberties of British citizens, depending on one’s perspective. It certainly went for the pirates’ jugular in making it illegal for any British citizen to work for, supply or advertise on a radio station broadcasting from international waters. One by one all but Radio Caroline acknowledged that it meant they should cease broadcasting on the day it came into force, and with them died a brief but influential era. The 1960s pirates, like the continental stations of the 1930s, had given British audiences greater choice and the ‘MOA’ took that choice away. However, where Pilkington had failed to perceive demand for an all-day pop music service, the pirates had established that demand beyond all reasonable doubt. It would have been unwise of Wilson’s government to merely try and

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stifle that demand through what was perceived in some quarters on the political right, and certainly in the community of pirate broadcasters and many of their listeners, as heavy-handed and even undemocratic, particularly as it was using UK legislation to control activities in international waters. For quite different reasons, the full implications of which could not have yet been perceived, the following year was to be distinguished by considerable social unrest, particularly among young people, which was manifested most visibly in street protests and clashes with riot police in a number of other European countries. In a deft reading of the popular mood, which neatly stemmed any such violent backlash over the forced closure of most of the pirates, the government put in place alternatives – at least to the BBC’s current provision, if not to the BBC itself. Most famously, in the wake of the passing of the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act, the BBC was required to provide a substitute for the pirates and it responded by reorganising its existing national services into an offer that remains broadly unchanged today, as Radios 2, 3 and 4 and introducing a part-time popular music station aimed at young people, Radio 1. For much of its life, what was originally dubbed ‘Wonderful Radio 1’, in blatant imitation of the now-defunct ‘Wonderful Radio London’, was the UK’s most-listened-to radio station, and at times its on-air branding has stressed the fact that ‘It’s national, Wonderful Radio 1’. Obligingly, the two Caroline ships defied the passing of the MOA and continued on air through what would otherwise have been a fallow period over the summer of 1967, between the Act taking effect and the launch of Radio 1. The changed legal environment, with advertising income difficult to generate and transporting staff and supplies to the ships becoming increasingly problematic as the first winter of illegality set in, meant that Caroline began losing listeners to such an extent that it presented little competition to the fledgling Radio 1. In an echo of the earlier Luxembourg era, payola began to unduly influence Caroline’s music playlist, and some of the music the station was paid to play lacked popular appeal. In 1968 both Caroline ships were taken over by a creditor and, with the transmitters switched off, taken to the Netherlands in what seemed like an ignominious end to an important era in the development of the radio industry. As little more than a footnote to the pirate era of the 1960s, Caroline and a number of other North Sea pirates, including Radio Northsea International, Radio Atlantis and Laser 558, made sporadic appearances on the medium waveband during the 1970s and 1980s, as is well documented elsewhere, including in

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the insider’s detailed history Pop Went the Pirates II (Skues 2009). They inspired other entrepreneurs to launch offshore stations for different markets, mainly Israel, where the most influential pirate was an initiative of the peace campaigner, Abraham J Nathan, branded the Voice of Peace. Inevitably, though, despite the excitement and unpredictability of broadcasting from the high seas, the arrival of Radio 1 – and later, the new commercial radio sector that inevitably developed out of the sixties pirate era – ushered in levels of competition that deprived pirate ships targeting the UK of audiences large enough to sustain them financially. As transmission equipment became cheaper, smaller and easier for the non-technically-minded to operate and maintain, the term ‘pirate radio’ was to become increasingly synonymous with land-based pirates, whose relevance to our central theme will be explored in later chapters.

Local radio for local people Of the greatest significance for this analysis, though, was the launch of the first of a network of BBC local radio stations on 8 November 1967. Again, firmly in line with the Wilson government’s ideological opposition to private-sector commercial radio, it was to be the state provider which would be relied upon to satisfy public demand for the service. Choice was to be between services, but not between providers, and the intention was for the BBC’s monopoly of radio broadcasting in the UK to be fully restored – with, of course, the minor exception of Radio Luxembourg’s continuing presence in what had by now become well established as the less significant evening ghetto. So unimportant was the evening daypart considered, that initially Radio 1 effectively closed down at 6.30pm on weekdays, ‘sharing’ evening programming with Radio 2, that was wholly targeted at the Radio 2 audience. Yet, the public and private discourse among the political establishment in the late 1960s, as the MOA was being debated in Parliament and in the wider community, recognised that local radio could form part of the legal broadcasting landscape, and its viability ought to be tested in a formal experiment. Initially there would be eight stations, and BBC Radio Leicester was the first on air, launching on 8 November 1967. Like Radio 1, each of the stations in the BBC Local Radio network would be subject to tight budgets and, so, very severe restrictions on the amount of ‘needletime’ available to it: meaning that the playing of commerciallyavailable vinyl records would be very limited and this would have negative effects on the quality of the programming in ways that we will return to in later chapters. Several of the stations broadcast for as little as four hours per day, relaying national BBC services to fill the gaps in their

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Table 1.2 The eight stations in the BBC Local Radio experiment, with their on-air dates Radio Leicester

8 November 1967

Radio Sheffield

15 November 1967

Radio Merseyside

22 November 1967

Radio Nottingham

31 January 1968

Radio Brighton

14 February 1968 (became Radio Sussex in October 1983)

Radio Stoke

14 March 1968

Radio Leeds

24 June 1968

Radio Durham

31 July 1968 (closed down 25 August 1972)

schedules. For the first time since the 1920s, though, the notion became established that cities the size of Sheffield, Nottingham and Durham should have their own radio stations, rather than depend exclusively on national or regional programming intended for much wider audiences. Table 1.2 lists the stations in the experiment, with their on-air dates. With the exception of Radio Durham, they have all survived to the present day, although Radio Brighton has variously been re-branded as Radio Sussex, merged with another station to form Southern Counties Radio and most recently de-merged as the newly re-branded BBC Sussex. Even the initial experiment was ideologically charged: the funding was to be shared between the BBC and the local government authority – which in turn meant that local people were contributing financially to their own service through local taxation. This did mean that licence fee payers in areas without local radio were paying less than those who could potentially benefit from having their ‘own’ station, so in a sense there was no representation in this particular forum without increased taxation. What some might consider to be an admirably democratic founding principle, though, did mean that only those local authorities which were politically inclined to support the experiment were prepared to contribute to it by participating. Not surprisingly, in the ongoing ideological battle over the provision of radio, it was only Labour-controlled authorities that were willing to take part. Radio Leicester’s ceremonial opening broadcast was marred by a protest from the Free Radio Association, a campaign group protesting against the closure of the pirates and pressing for the introduction of private-sector commercial stations. When both the government and the BBC declared the experiment a success,

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the latter pushed ahead with plans to expand its network and, if it weren’t for the outcome of a general election campaign in 1970 that was unusually concerned with the issue of who should run radio, it would have exceeded the number of twenty stations that had finally emerged by the mid-1970s. Although many electors may not have noticed, the issue of commercial radio became a relatively minor campaign issue that loomed large in the consciousness of those with a stake in the longrunning ideological battle between left-wing supporters of the BBC and the right-wing free-marketeers who saw ‘free’ or commercial radio as a prize within their grasp. The 1970 Conservative Party General Election Manifesto: A Better Tomorrow, a document personally signed by the party leader Edward Heath, commented on broadcasting thus: We believe that people are as entitled to an alternative radio service as to an alternative television service. We will permit local private enterprise radio under the general supervision of an independent broadcasting authority. Local institutions, particularly local newspapers, will have the opportunity of a stake in local radio, which we want to see closely associated with the local community. We will ensure that the British Broadcasting Corporation continues to make its effective and essential public service contribution in both television and sound broadcasting. Equally, we will ensure that the independent television companies are not prevented from providing a responsible service by too high a government levy on their income. (Conservative Party 1970) During the course of the campaign, the press reported that the rather vague promise of ‘local private enterprise radio’ had been clarified as a network of sixty stations, bringing local broadcasting to what had already been described as ‘local communities’. Despite the vagueness in the manifesto over the extent of the network, the reference to ‘general supervision’ implied that earlier fears of anarchy on the airwaves and a breakdown in the orderly governance of use of the scarce resource of broadcasting spectrum would be avoided. Sharp eyes would have noticed the promise that this would be assured by an ‘independent broadcasting authority’ and the similarity of the form of words to the title of the body that had already been created to oversee commercial television, the Independent Television Authority, meant that few surprises lay ahead over the eventual regulation of commercial radio. It is worth noting, too, in the second paragraph of the extract, that, although depriving

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it of its long-standing official monopoly in radio, Heath was prepared to protect the BBC’s role in providing an ‘effective and essential public service contribution’, and that ITV was to be allowed to balance profitability with a responsibility to provide a ‘responsible’ service. The advocates of commercial radio, including the Free Radio Association and even Radio Northsea International, which broadcast sustained propaganda in favour of the Conservative Party (Starkey 2007: 29), fought loudly for a commercial radio future. When Heath won, they got it, although over the next forty years Heath’s vision of local radio stations, that they would be ‘closely associated with the local community’, has at times been realised but more often become blurred, as we shall see in the next three chapters. In the years immediately following the election, the sleeping giant, already stirring under the early stewardship of the BBC, was to demonstrate some of the inner strength that is the potential of radio to unite and to support local communities. However, the first faltering footsteps of the BBC experiment were to be followed by an even longer period of uncertainty as to which direction it would take, as the ideological battle between left and right continued into the 1970s.

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2 The Wake-Up Call – The New Dawn and Local Radio’s Place in the New Duopoly

Radio: the political football Edward Heath was the United Kingdom’s Conservative Prime Minister from 1970 until 1974, in which politically turbulent year he lost the next two general elections to the Labour Party. In 1975 he lost the leadership of his political party to his Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher, who in turn became Prime Minister in 1979. Heath kept his promise to the British people and the commercial radio lobby with the passing of the Sound Broadcasting Act 1972, but it was the political seesawing of the 1970s that meant the introduction of commercial radio was rather faltering in nature. The relative political stability of the inter-war years with a succession of coalition governments in power had been followed by a post-war consensus around the middle ground of politics. The Wilson-Heath era was, by contrast, one of binary opposites, as we have already seen through Wilson’s implacable opposition to the pirates and the whole principle of commercially-funded, privately-owned radio stations. In a tit-for-tat exchange, vaguely reminiscent of the spying scandals of foreign policy in the Cold War era, in which the East and the West would ratchet up international tension through retaliatory expulsions of spies and diplomats alike, radio – in particular local radio – became a political football. The 1970s were indeed politically tumultuous, with a great deal of industrial, and ultimately social, unrest, so by most observers and certainly most British citizens the testing times undergone by the radio industry would hardly have been noticed, if at all. However, for those in the radio industry, and those who wanted to join it, this was a time of great uncertainty and, for the 27

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new commercial radio sector, one which was to become a ‘chequered history’ (Crisell 1994: 34). There was at least one certainty: the BBC monopoly of radio was to be replaced by a duopoly. It is of considerable significance that the Sound Broadcasting Act 1972 opened the door to commercial radio only on a local scale. You will recall the manifesto promise to ‘permit local private enterprise radio under the general supervision of an independent broadcasting authority’ and that ‘Local institutions, particularly local newspapers, will have the opportunity of a stake in local radio, which we want to see closely associated with the local community.’ This was, though, a rather limited concession to the seeming admission in the manifesto that ‘people are as entitled to an alternative radio service as to an alternative television service’ (Conservative Party 1970). It was a partial fulfilment of a perceived need to address an iniquity: put simply, ‘people’ had national BBC radio and television and a small number of very new BBC local radio stations but they were entitled to an alternative service of radio only if it were to be provided on a local basis. Despite the free-market bravado, Heath’s government were limited in their ambition for commercial radio by what must have been a lingering ‘small c’ conservatism. Local commercial radio was imaginable, whereas regional or national commercial radio was not. This was in some ways surprising, given the obvious appetite for the quasi-national services that Luxembourg and Caroline attempted to be, and in other ways understandable. When ITV had launched – the first great concession to those who would break the BBC monopoly – the enabling legislation behind it, the Television Act 1954, ensured it was as a loosely organised federation of separate companies, each serving one of fourteen different regions into which the UK was eventually divided up. To prevent any of the companies becoming too rich and powerful in the federal structure, the potentially most lucrative regions, in London, the Midlands and the North of England, were divided up over the week so that different companies had the franchise to run the ITV service in each of those regions on weekdays from those on air at weekends. For example, in London two companies shared the broadcasting week: Associated-Rediffusion broadcast Monday to Friday and Associated TeleVision (ATV London) used the same transmitter infrastructure to broadcast over the weekends. The ITV service was also highly regulated, by the first broadcasting regulatory body to be established in the UK, the Independent Television Authority (ITA). This tight regulation, in response to many of the requirements of the Television Act 1954, was included in the legislation precisely to avoid earlier fears of the potentially

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damaging effects of private ownership in broadcasting coming to fruition, particularly around advertising, sponsorship and product placement, but also around notions of quality and a strongly-held intention to avoid undermining the public-service remit of the BBC by forcing it to compete with an unrestrained, unchecked commercial rival. The result was a broadcasting duopoly that was quite distinctive, in which the commercial broadcaster challenged but also improved the state provider in many respects (Fitzwalter 2008: ix–x). However, once all the regional franchises had been awarded and the production and transmission infrastructure had been put in place, ITV was in many ways a national service. The schedule included many nationally-networked programmes, and many of the regional variations between schedules merely reflected different day- or time-slots being given to the same programmes in different regions (including programmes produced by ITV franchisees that weren’t deemed to require or deserve simultaneous play out across the whole network) but also to feature films and imported programming, such as US series. A national news provider, Independent Television News, had been created as a separate company in 1955 to service the growing network. So, despite its federal structure and regional ownership, its regional branding and dwindling variations between the different regions’ programme schedules, ITV was in many ways a national television service – less so in its early years but certainly by 1972. Surprisingly, the scarcity of frequencies argument was not used to justify the idea of providing national coverage through dozens of local radio relays. National commercial radio was to come to the UK twenty years later, and in 1972 the UK had only just begun to exploit the VHF waveband for the provision of clearer FM transmissions, while half the band remained unallocated to broadcasters for the rest of the decade. So, the Act introduced Independent Local Radio (my emphasis), which was dubbed ILR in an attempt to mimic the success of the ITV acronym, and the ITA became the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) through an extension of its powers to cover all of the newly-expanded field of ‘independent’ broadcasting. In an echo of the political climate around the time of the first great concession to privately-owned broadcasting, the Television Act 1954, ILR was also to be tightly regulated over ownership, income generation and standards in programming content and quality. The use of the word ‘independent’, though, in radio as in television, was clumsily contentious. Superficially, both ITV and ILR were independent of the BBC, which was at the time quite significant due to the longevity of the BBC’s previously-held official monopoly of each medium. Put

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simply: until 1955 and 1973 respectively the British public had difficulty imagining an officially-sanctioned television or radio service broadcasting to them, that originated from a provider other than the BBC. In a sense, both the BBC and the ‘independent’ sector were independent of government, in that they were run or regulated by a governmentappointed body whose powers were derived from an Act of Parliament that only Parliament could amend. However, a government with a working majority in Parliament can often amend, repeal or replace legislation without too much difficulty, and one essential predicament of the BBC is that it remains, nearly ninety years on, beholden to the government of the day to renew its Royal Charter every ten years and to occasionally increase the level of the licence fee which funds it, depending on how rampant have been the effects of inflation over the preceding period.

Dependence and ‘independence’: market forces and the public sector Most significantly for our analysis, though, is the extent to which commentators of the period were correct in wryly observing that neither ITV nor ILR were ‘independent’ of the market. Between the two lay the regulator and its powers, but one of the most important catalysts for the key trends we shall consider in the next two chapters is the nature and extent of those regulatory powers and the ways in which they have been used. The new BBC Local Radio stations which had already begun broadcasting were, of course, finding new audiences in their own areas and the BBC continued to roll out the network to cover previously unserved areas of England and their communities. The requirement for co-funding from local authorities was dropped, and they became fullyfunded from the television licence fee, thus enabling the BBC to extend the network’s coverage beyond the original Labour strongholds which had supported the earlier experiment. Because this was a Labour policy, though, and the new Conservative government favoured the development of commercial radio, the BBC Local Radio network was later capped and no further growth was allowed. As in BBC network radio, the corporation’s two television channels and the regional opt-out services of Radio 4 for the ‘national regions’ of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, BBC Local Radio’s income was comparatively stable and predictable over the medium term – an enviable situation compared to that of commercial radio, and one which was guaranteed by the very fact that it was indeed derived from the licence fee. There would be no difficult start-up periods, trying to become established in the advertising market

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as well as building an audience, there would be no crippling effects of economic downturns during which advertising revenue would become even harder to generate than in the years of economic growth, and there would be no need to compete with local newspaper and regional television rivals for advertising. Table 2.1 shows the progress of the BBC local radio network that had taken place with the addition of twelve new stations in the years 1970–1973. The Conservatives’ handling of BBC Local Radio was not particularly rough: the BBC could have been instructed to close down the network. However, by insisting that no further growth take place, this was a gentle ‘no’ to further expansion. The BBC responded in 1972 by closing down Radio Durham and redeploying some of its resources to the new station at Carlisle because Durham was already on the fringe of Radio Newcastle and Radio Cleveland’s editorial areas. This meant BBC Local Radio could begin to serve parts of the county of Lancashire while avoiding duplication in the North-East of England. Although he retired in 1969, as the BBC’s Director of Radio from 1964, the former journalist and war correspondent Frank Gillard is credited as the creator of BBC Local Radio. He was also the driving force behind the 1967 reorganisation of the national networks into Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. Gradually the BBC local stations increased the amount of local programming they originated in their own studios, and the amount of needletime made available Table 2.1 Additional (post-experiment) BBC local radio stations launching in the 1970s, with their original on-air dates Radio Bristol

4 September 1970

Radio Manchester

10 September 1970

Radio London

6 October 1970

Radio Oxford

29 October 1970

Radio Birmingham

7 November 1970

Radio Medway

18 December 1970

Radio Solent

31 December 1970

Radio Cleveland

31 December 1970

Radio Newcastle

2 January 1971

Radio Blackburn

26 January 1971

Radio Humberside

25 February 1971

Radio Carlisle

24 November 1973

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to them increased, too. However, they depended heavily throughout the period on their ability to re-broadcast the BBC’s national network programming, predominantly from Radio 2, in order to fill the off-peak hours of broadcasting they could not resource themselves. This was a branding disaster for them, as the local stations’ names and broadcasting frequencies could be incorporated into their own programming, but not into that which they relayed from London. So listeners tuning in, in an age before radio text- or menu-driven radio sets had been developed, could easily become confused by the conflicting brand statements in the relays. Armed with a copy of the Radio Times, the BBC’s own listings magazine, a listener could more easily make sense of this, but otherwise, navigation through the local stations’ own programme schedules was far from intuitive. A further complication lay in the frequent merging of Radios 1 and 2, again due to budgetary constraints. For example, ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton’s Radio 1 afternoon show was simulcast on Radio 2 between 1975 and 1977. Despite these obvious handicaps, BBC local radio firmly established itself, as it is in many ways today, as locally-oriented radio, produced specifically for, if not necessarily by, local people within the editorial area. As the BBC’s medium wave frequencies were being reorganised to make way for ILR, BBC local radio was also given AM frequencies to complement its transmissions on the newly-developing VHF waveband. As the vast majority of listening during the period was to AM transmissions on medium wave, an easy way to stifle their growth would have been to restrict them to VHF. The remit was firmly set in the public-service broadcasting domain, meaning the expectation, as across the BBC’s services, was to inform, educate and entertain. Often, and certainly by comparison with the emerging commercial sector, the stations might have seemed rather short on entertainment, and they were certainly not pop music driven, as was to be the case with ILR. The requirement to provide education was taken quite literally, and programmes aimed at schools were common, as if there was a local need for BBC radio to fulfil that the national schools programming on Radio 4 and on BBC-1 television could not. In the 1970s many of the BBC local stations would employ an Education Producer, and the author’s first ever contact with the BBC in person was when the Education Producer at Radio Merseyside visited his secondary school to talk to pre-teenagers about the programme Sounds Interesting. The essential problem on radio with a programme schedule that seeks to offer a ‘fullservice’ of something for everyone is, though, that it is very easy to end up pleasing nobody, simply because the public are less inclined to use a

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programme listings magazine – or even in today’s world, the electronic equivalent – to try and navigate around a diet of programmes, some of which may be of instant appeal, while others might be quite unappealing. In national radio this lesson had already been learned, because Gillard’s four national networks were quite obviously targeted at some very broadly-delineated demographic groups: young people (Radio 1); the over 35s (Radio 2); older ABC1 listeners with an appetite for intelligent speech (Radio 4) and what could easily be parodied as a mature minority of the intelligentsia interested in classical music and serious talk programmes (Radio 3). BBC Local Radio, though, particularly with its frequent dips in and out of other relayed BBC services, ran schedules with numerous short ‘built’ programmes aimed at specialist audiences, such as a programme for anglers, one for farmers, and perhaps another in a different language aimed at an ethnic minority that happened to be present in significant numbers in the editorial area. For some ‘Programme Organisers’, the mere presence of a ‘community of interest’ group in the editorial area was justification enough for them to be given ‘their own’ programme. There are two conflicting positions to take on this approach to programming. One is to applaud the ability of a broadcasting service to use its privileged position of insulation from the free market as a source of funding to fulfil a major part of the public-service broadcasting remit. By not seeking only to find the lowest common denominator within the available audience and provide nothing more ambitious than that, such an approach is surely a valid justification of the share of the licence fee on which the station is entirely dependent. The other position, and this is one that has often been adopted in more recent years by the commercial radio lobby, is to decry this approach as a waste of public funds derived from a compulsory tax on television viewing to provide programming which struggles to build significant audiences because it is addressing a perceived, but non-existent, need. The truth is probably somewhere between those two positions. Certainly, the Heath government, and even the Thatcher government which took office in 1979, with its ideologically-driven right-wing zeal for privatisation, were prepared to tolerate a limited amount of BBC provision of publicly-funded local radio.

What’s on? Those Radio Times A look inside the BBC’s in-house listings magazine, Radio Times, reveals a mass of detail of the output of the corporation’s local radio stations.

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Because legislation to liberalise the publication of television and radio listings (meaning no broadcaster could use copyright law to prevent other publishers from printing their programme schedules) was twenty years away, in the early 1970s the BBC and ITV continued to enjoy a cosy duopoly of television listings magazines. Launched in 1923, the Radio Times naturally underwent many changes over the decades, and the launch of BBC Local Radio provided the impetus for the introduction of separate editions focused on individual stations. This became problematic with the introduction of new print technology in 1974, and the magazine reverted for some months to producing a single edition for the whole of England, with all twenty stations’ schedules displayed in brief on the single local radio page (Currie 2001). By 1982 the local radio listings had expanded to a double-page spread of all the local stations in a wider region, so readers in London and the South-East of England could see the schedules of Radios London, Medway and Oxford, while the rationalisation of the magazine’s operation necessitated by the introduction of competition has led to the much simpler approach of today, in which only six regional editions are produced for the whole of the UK. The London edition for the week 3rd–9th October 1970 includes an ‘opening day’ special for the new Radio London, including a coverage map showing the reach of the single 95.3 MHz FM transmitter at Wrotham and a short editorial feature on the mid-morning magazine Woman in Town. This was a most prescient act of scheduling as the BBC’s national women’s magazine, Woman’s Hour, was controversially moved to its current morning slot on Radio 4 only as late as 1991 (Hendy 2007: 332–6), having been a highlight of the afternoon schedules, first of the Light Programme and then of the speech network, since 1946. Woman in Town presenter Hilary Osborn promised the new offering would be ‘a young, friendly programme for housewives… made up of lively and interesting topics linked by music’. Running on weekdays from 10.45 to 11.20, regular features included a celebrity interview and a keepfit session on Mondays, women ‘from policewomen to strippers’ talking about their jobs on Tuesdays, an entertainment guide on Thursdays and a review of the week on Fridays. Every month ‘Londoners themselves will talk about topics chosen by them because I want the “woman in town” to know this is her programme’ added Osborn. Key points in this first schedule were the three daily news and current affairs magazines, Rush Hour (6.45–9am), Capital City (12.30–1pm) and Home Run (4.30– 6.30). At breakfast, Rush Hour was styled as ‘The programme that wakes up with London. An easy blend of news, music, people and information.’ ‘London’ news, meaning news of particular relevance to the capital

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rather than the nation, featured hourly but was kept separate from the top-of-the-hour relays of national news, and scheduled at 6.45, 7.45 and 8.45. Travel ‘prospects’, meaning what today we more commonly term ‘traffic and travel’, was broadcast at 6.48 then half-hourly at ten past and twenty to each hour, while a long-distance road report for those travelling out of the capital was at 6.55. Weather forecasts were hourly at ten to the hour and what’s on information at 7.30 and 8.30. This pattern of regular slots for milestone events during a lengthy sequence was typical of the local BBC stations’ approach to breakfast time. BBC Radio Stokeon-Trent, for example, used a similar format in First Edition, as did BBC Radio Derby with Up and About, BBC Radio Merseyside with Morning Merseyside and BBC Radio Leicester in Good Morning Leicester. The BBC Radio London schedule was typical of the wider network of stations in many ways, and dwelling for a moment on the one reveals much about the general approach of Gillard’s construct. At launch the approach described earlier of mixing scarce local content with relays of national network programming provided Londoners with an eclectic mix of programming. The day began at 5.30 with a relay of Radio 2’s Breakfast Special, a music sequence. Rush Hour was immediately followed at 9am by the Radio 2 news bulletin, then the tail end of Johnny Walker’s Radio 1 programme and then the beginning of Jimmy Young’s. To further confuse matters, after Woman in Town a ten-minute programme for the under-sevens, Listen Children, was followed at 11.30 by a news summary and then the end of Jimmy Young. The beginning of the lunchtime Radio 1 Club was followed by Radio London’s own, thirty-minute long, Capital City and then the whole of The World at One from Radio 4. Stripped across the week was a thirty-minute ‘musical conversation’, Lunch à la Carter, presented by David Carter, and then in the 2pm slot either a daily special or an earlier return to Radio 1, depending on the day of the week. The brand confusion caused by the relays of national programming was compounded by the unfortunate coincidence of repeated programme junctions, where one Radio 1 programme ended and another began, while Radio London was carrying the output of the larger station. This occurred again as Barry Mason’s Radio 1 show ended and Terry Wogan took over until Radio London’s Home Run reasserted the local station’s presence on 95.3MHz. As Radio 1 was relaying Radio 2 mid-evening, it was the latter station which was re-broadcast by Radio London from the end of its specialist programming, between 7pm and 8pm, depending on the day. The range of specialist programmes on the station was typically varied. In the launch week it included, in the thirty-minute weekday

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For schools

Tues Thu Fri

Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri

Source: Radio Times

Stoke

Manchester

Durham

Tues Fri

Sun Tues Thu Sat Sun Mon Fri

Fri

Fri

Sun Thu Sun

Farming

Bristol

Brass bands Thu

Sport preview

Birmingham Mon

Fishing Sat

Theatre/arts Tues

Sun Tues Sun

Wed

Jazz Wed Thu

Quiz Sun Wed

Sat Wed

Religion Sun

Sun

Sun

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri

Folk Thu

Sat Sun

Sat Thu

Children Mon Fri

Sat

Sun Mon Tues Thu

Citizens/consumers Thu

Mon

Mon

Education issues Tues

Sun Tues Fri

Books Tues

Sat Sun

Organ

Table 2.2 The scheduling of specialist music and thematic programming on a range of BBC local radio stations in 1970

Sun Fri

Mon

Classical

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afternoon special slot from 2pm–2.30, on Wednesdays education in Never Too Late, on Thursdays interviews with ‘some of the newer citizens of London’ in New Londoners and on Fridays ‘the art scene in London’ in Impulse. The early evening programming included such short, fifteen- or thirty-minute long programmes as Quest (‘Christian churches in action’), The London Gardener, Tight Lines (‘for anglers’), and Ten Million to One (‘the civic affairs of the people of London’). For the purpose of comparison, and because the programming styles in BBC Local Radio in 1970 have otherwise been lost to broadcasting history, Table 2.2 summarises how another five of the stations organised their output. Most of the programmes identified above were thirty minutes in duration, repeated once on another day of the week. In 1970 the stations switched in and out of national networks of their own choosing, in the manner described for BBC Radio London. BBC Radios Stoke and Bristol both carried the Radio 2 afternoon soap Waggoners’ Walk, while Radio Birmingham seemingly sought to thoroughly confuse listeners by taking Radio 4’s higher-brow drama Afternoon Theatre on Monday and Thursday and Radio 2’s Terry Wogan in the same 3pm timeslot on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. The simplest schedule of the five surveyed was that of BBC Radio Durham, which, somewhat radically for the era, was the most likely to strip programmes across the week instead of having different programmes on different days, as Radio Birmingham tended to do – and the latter didn’t even have a daily afternoon drive time programme, but instead a range of different thematic programmes before and after the 5pm news. For late evenings, BBC Radio Manchester produced its own City Scene from 10pm to 11.45, for ‘the ravers, and those who like to rave from time to time’, while Bristol broadcast a fifteen-minute recap on the day’s news at 10.30. Birmingham didn’t bother and typically began an all-night relay of the joint Radio 1 and Radio 2 service at 7.30pm, while Durham began the same relays at 7.15 and Stoke at 8.42. Naturally, schedules, like the radio stations which operate them, evolve over time. So to gain a perhaps more representative flavour of BBC Radio London once it had become established, let us turn now to the Radio Times of 9th–15th December 1972. Rush Hour, Capital City and Home Run had all survived the first two years on air. Rush Hour had been extended by thirty minutes to 9.34, at which time it was now followed not by a relay of Radio 1, but by an extended, two-hour long Woman in Town, no longer constrained by a meagre running time of thirtyfive minutes. To make the transition to a much longer duration, Hilary

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Osborn had been joined by two more, regular presenters, Susan Barnes and Helen Dickinson. The changes, combined with the introduction of a half-hour of music from 11.34 (Morning Melody), daily specials at noon and an hour-long phone-in programme, Call In from 1.30–2.30, had eliminated the mid-morning and lunchtime Radio 1 relays. This meant that with the exception of Radio 4’s The World at One, BBC Radio London was broadcasting its own material almost continuously from 6.45am until 2.34pm. The afternoon Radio 1 relay continued, with the end of the Johnny Walker show and the start of Alan Freeman. Evenings had been transformed, too, with London News Desk at 6pm, mixing national, international and London news over forty minutes. A nightly five-minute-long business round-up, Today in the City, was followed by forty-five minutes of specialist programming and then a repeat of edited highlights from Woman in Town and a new slot from 8.10–10pm which was occupied by jazz music, news and interviews on Mondays, a similar treatment for rock music on Tuesdays, a community access slot on Wednesdays, classical music on Thursdays and country music on Fridays. The specialist programming on weekdays included short, built programmes devoted to films, job vacancies, motorists, the disabled, Christians, the blind, amateur theatre, people ‘preparing for retirement’, anglers and a Friday-night preview of weekend sport in London. If that list of weekly rendezvous for specialist interest groups represented an impressive variety of programming, the weekend schedule was dazzling in its diversity. Daytime relays had been almost completely eliminated from the start of London’s own programming from 7am on Saturday and 8am on Sunday, until the station handed over its frequency to Radio 1 at 6.50pm on Saturday and to Radio 2 at 8pm on Sunday. The exception was a curious forty-eight minute relay of Radio 1 at 5.12pm on Saturdays, billed by the London edition of Radio Times as ‘David Simmons, a Radio London DJ – a Radio 1 spot’. Few programmes at the weekends were longer than thirty or forty-five minutes, and outside the few longer sequences the disparate nature of the schedule can perhaps be best understood from the following lists of titles, in the order in which they were broadcast as individual, built programmes: ●

Saturday – 7.00 Saturday Scene (news, weather, motoring and weekend what’s ons, part one), 7.45 Tight Lines (angling), 8.00 Saturday Scene (part two), 8.45 The London Gardener; then at 11.02 Shindig (children aged 7 to 13), 11.30 Sportsfield; and at 2.02 Motorists’ Forum (‘in which London’s motorists discuss mutual problems of motoring in the metropolis’).

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Sunday – 8.00 Sunday Scene (part one), 8.30 Orange and Lemon Club (children), 9.00 Sunday Scene (part two), 9.30 Quest (for Christians), 10.02 Guideline (for the blind), 10.15 Extra Time (sport), 11.02 You Don’t Have to be Jewish, 11.30 The London Gardener, 11.45 Time to Spare (preparing for retirement), 12.02 Honky-Tonk (rock ‘n’ roll), 12.45 Reggae Time, 2.02 Close-Up (films), 2.30 The Sky’s the Limit (‘Keith Gallier meets London’s part-time pilots – who breakfast at Biggin Hill and lunch at Le Touquet’), 3.02 Celebration (faith music), 3.30 Your Child at School (‘a weekly report to the parents of London on developments in their children’s education’), 4.02 Theatreboard (London theatre) and 4.30 Exposure (amateur photography).

Several of the programmes listed above were repeated either on weekdays at lunchtime or in the early evening slot, but the work required to produce them was considerable for a radio station with very meagre resources compared to those of the BBC’s national networks. The fragmentation of the programme schedule, especially at weekends, also worked counter to the station’s best interests, as even then it was wishful thinking to expect niche audiences to make a regular date with their own quarter-hour or half-hour programmes in sufficient numbers to justify on paper the effort required to produce them. To complicate matters, the final hour on Sundays was For Asian Listeners and presented in a mixture of Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. The Radio Times listing for that week featured a caricature line drawing of a bearded and twirl-end moustachioed ‘Asian’ in a bowler hat. Because the difficulties of attracting and retaining audiences with an essentially fragmented schedule were becoming apparent to the BBC stations, as the mid-1970s brought the sobering competition of commercial rivals setting up in many of their editorial areas, programme schedules began to be rationalised. This was made easier by a relaxation of the rules on needletime, which was in desperately short supply on BBC Local Radio when the first stations launched. The Radio Times of 29th May–4th June 1982 reveals that BBC Radio London broadcast continuously its own programming from 6.30am until 2.30pm, divided into just four longer sequence programmes described as Rush Hour (6.30– 9.00), Morning Star (9.03–10.00), The David Edwards Telephone Programme (10.03–12.30) and MMM… Maitland’s Midday Music (12.40–2.30). The World at One relay had gone, leaving a single, much less confusing afternoon relay from 2.30 to 5pm consisting only of Tony Blackburn on Radio 1. A ten-minute London News Desk at 12.30 complemented the hourly news bulletins, but the drive time news and current affairs

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sequence had been replaced by fifteen minutes of The Evening News at 5pm and then Music on the Move. A single half-hour special interest programme at 6.30 was followed by a daily hour of Black Londoners before relays of Radio 1 and then Radio 2 through the evening and overnight respectively. At weekends the fifteen-minute built programmes had all disappeared, as had some of the more specialised programming, but the morning schedules were still based largely on thirty-minute programmes from 7.30 on Saturday (8am on Sunday) when the Radio 2 relay ended, until a longer ninety-minute programme began after the 10am news. On Saturday this was All That Jazz and on Sunday, Echoes. The sequence of shorter programmes before 10am was as follows: ●

●

Saturday – 7.32 Good Fishing, 8.04 London Today, 8.33 The Boat Show, 9.03 Sergeant Pepper (album tribute), 9.30 Openings. Sunday – 8.04 London Today, 8.32 Close Encounters, 9.03 It Seems Like Only Yesterday (sixties nostalgia), 9.30 You Don’t Have to be Jewish.

On Saturday there was a special programme from 3.30 to 6.15, in which BBC Radio London mounted extended outside broadcast coverage of the Pope’s visit to celebrate mass at Wembley Stadium. The Radio Times again provides evidence of the station’s desire to be inclusive, however flawed circumstances might render such a proposition: the aim of the programme was ‘to bring the unique event alive for listeners, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.’ From 11.30 on Sunday, Bob Powell’s London Country and from 1.03 Tony Williams’ Reggae Rockers offered longer but quite specialised music sequences within two relatively popular but not mainstream musical genres, and at 3.03 there was a four-hour long programme dedicated to Sunday League Cricket, which covered matches between teams from the South-East England counties of Middlesex, Essex and Surrey, the latter playing against Leicestershire. The Asian programming remained to complete the weekend’s panoply of special interest programming, and was now entitled London Sounds Eastern. Although BBC Radio London was to change its style, format and target audience several times from those which we have observed, during that first period it was closest in all three to the rest of the network. For example, over that same week in 1982, BBC Radio Medway was also covering the Pope’s visit to England with extended local programming. On Saturday, it began uncharacteristically early, with Canterbury Prepares from 5am and a full outside broadcast from 7am, His Holiness the Pope in Canterbury. Regular programmes were resumed at lunchtime,

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with A Whole Lotta Country (1pm), Kent Gardener (1.30), Farm Scene (1.45) and Brass on Parade (2.00). Only at 2.30 did the frantic pace of specialist built programming give way to a more mainstream two-anda-half-hour sequence programme of ‘music for a summer Saturday afternoon’, followed by their own hour ‘for Asians’, Sangam. In the absence of a pontiff on its patch, BBC Radio Oxford’s Saturday schedule was as normal: relaying Radio 2 until 7am then relaying Radio 4 until 7.45, then two three-hour-long music and speech sequences targeted at the mainstream, rather than a market segment. From 8am until 11am, It’s Saturday had three presenters, ‘confusion and fun’. Boasting ‘Lots of music to cheer you up’, the more relaxed lengthier sequence-programme approach also included regular news, weather, sport, a featured ‘bride of the week’ and a comic parody of local radio called ‘Radio Chipping Norton’. This was followed by two hours of 202 Country, named after the station’s medium wave length of course, and then there was an hour of Sounds in Swingtime, a ‘line-up of the best from the swing era, plus a helping or two of jazz’. The afternoon concluded with a threehour music and sport sequence, Saturday Sounds and then an overnight relay of Radio 2 began at the rather early time of 5pm. Both Medway and Oxford had a more fragmented approach to their Sunday schedules. At the more curious end of the programming scale were Townswomen’s World (1.30–2.00 on Medway), ‘presented by the Thames and Medway Federation of Townswomen’s Guilds’, a half-hour documentary on ‘the skills involved in saddle-making’ (12.03–12.33 on Medway) and Melodies for You (3.00–3.30 on Oxford) ‘with Basil Cuthbert at the theatre organ’. Radio Oxford’s school quiz, Quest for the Best 82 (10.30–11.00), and Home in Kent (10.30–11.30), in which David Cornet visited a different village in the county each week, are examples of the way in which the stations were seeking to serve geographical sub-sections of their editorial areas, as opposed to the thematic differentiation of the specialist programming. This was also a feature of BBC Radio Medway’s weekday programming, with a five-minute-long Focus on programme each lunchtime at 1.55pm. The towns of Maidstone, Gravesham, Tonbridge and Dartford, each had their own weekly slot, running from Tuesday to Thursday. Three longer speech and music sequences preceded it on weekdays, Brian Faulkner (6.30–9.30), Don Durbridge (9.30–11.00) and Kevin Steele (11.00–1.55), while BBC Radio Oxford adopted a similar approach with Oxford AM (6.00–8.30), Dave Barrett (8.30–11.00) and Countywide (11.03–1pm). Both stations relayed Radio 4’s The World at One and BBC Radio Oxford even relayed the daily edition of Woman’s Hour which followed it, breaking away from the relay only to replace Radio 4’s

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five-minute-long shipping forecast at 1.55 with Coming Soon (‘What’s on in Oxfordshire’). Medway had a more fragmented, but locally-produced approach to the hour between 2pm and 3pm, with an assortment of quarter-hour or half-hour programmes, depending on the day, which variously included Sound On (‘for the blind’), Nature Trail, Chamber of Commerce Affairs, Personally Speaking (featuring an in-depth interview with a different local dignitary each week), Screen Scene, Competition Wheels, Walkabout, Ditty Box Days and Mid-Kent Mirror. Both stations filled the rest of the afternoon with a longer sequence programme, then from 6pm they broadcast a range of other miscellaneous specialist programmes before returning their frequencies to a relay of Radio 2 as early as 6.30 or, twice a week on Kent as late as 8.45pm or 9.15. BBC Radio Kent’s miscellany included an adult quiz, Firm Challenge (‘Whitbread Fremlin of Maidstone v. Southern Water Authority of Maidstone’), Good Fishing and Sportstide, while BBC Radio Oxford broadcast half an hour of Student News on Wednesdays. Although the fragmented approach to programming persisted, it was less prevalent than when these stations launched, and we ought to note here that while it probably did little to help the stations build and retain audiences, while stations were broadcasting their own-produced content this certainly was localness writ large. The range of programming across the wider network, as we have seen in the commentary above and in summary form in Table 2.2 provides clear evidence of the relative autonomy of the programme organisers at each station to schedule according to the perceived needs of their own editorial area, within the resources available to them. They even had the autonomy to decide how they would use their ability to relay free of charge the output of the national networks, and this not only accounts for the marked variations in approach but also demonstrates a real and enduring commitment at the BBC to let its local stations be as local as possible.

ILR, the IBA and its ‘heavy touch’ That permissive approach to its local network was not, of course, without an ulterior motive: the BBC was very effectively serving some privileged – and by and large quite populous – parts of its national audience with something distinctive from everything else on offer. The essential difference between BBC Local Radio and ILR was that the one was entirely dependent on justifying its existence by demonstrating that it will provide something that the free, essentially capitalist, market will not. The other was entirely dependent on the market, and could only

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provide what the market would pay for. Furthermore, the latter was almost certainly driven by the profit motive, and it was no coincidence that Philip Birch, formerly of Big L, should have been one of the first to win the race to secure a franchise to run an ILR station. A greater and more evident irony lay in the second of the stations to launch being branded as Capital Radio: although this station broadcast to the capital, London, to those who cared about the issue the branding was a constant reminder that it was private capital in the financial sense that was behind the station. What, then, would the market provide, and how would the essential ‘small c’ conservatism of the Heath government translate into the regulation of a new broadcasting sector that might otherwise realise the worst fears of those who had successfully thwarted the commercial radio lobby through the Sykes, Crawford and Pilkington episodes and all the fifty years from the creation of the BBC to the end of its monopoly? The rest of this chapter concerns itself with what many would characterise as the ‘golden age’ of local commercial radio. Ultra-tight regulation of content and ownership combined with the new enthusiasm to explore the possibilities of the medium in ways that engaged different audiences through variety of content and approach, foregrounding people, personality and popular music. All this existed in a relatively benign media environment, initially without daytime or even breakfast TV to compete with and when the first, tentative flight of a fledgling Sky TV was greeted with derision by all but the Murdoch press. It is not, however, over preoccupied with presenting a detailed chronology of the development of ILR, because others have attempted to do this with the luxury of more space affording greater detail – most recently one of the key players in the story, Tony Stoller (2010). More usefully, we shall consider how the free market set out to provide programming that would produce profit from popularity but was nearly hoist by its own petard as private enterprise met its nemesis, economic recession. We shall also see how small ‘c’ conservatism on the political left fought back against the march of capitalism on the right by attempting to strangle the emerging ILR, but was thwarted by the failure of BBC local radio to win large enough audiences in key metropolitan markets to reassert the case for the previous monopoly. It is often difficult to imagine a bygone age, especially one through which we haven’t lived, and therefore of which we have no prior experience. It is also easy to become reconditioned by our more recent surroundings, by the context which by its proximity has become more familiar and therefore whose culture and mores appear more familiar,

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and so, often, more reasonable. However, even though comparisons between then and now might invite such comparisons between the broadcasting regulators of today and of yesteryear, in the 1970s few would have thought to describe regulation by the Independent Broadcasting Authority as ‘heavy’. It is only subsequent regulators whose approach has progressively been typified as providing by comparison a ‘lighter touch’ that now invite suggestions that the IBA might have had a heavy-handed or over-burdensome approach. At the time, the regulatory constraints on the first Independent Local Radio stations seemed quite reasonable, largely because in the UK at least this was uncharted territory. Until very recently, it had been unthinkable that the BBC might lose its monopoly of radio and that commercial radio would be legalised at all, so comparisons with the United States and the way the FCC simply licensed stations to broadcast on available frequencies and imposed penalties for faulty transmissions interfering with other licensed stations, were quite inappropriate. The UK had roundly rejected the American model of broadcasting, so it was hardly going to adopt it in one fell swoop in 1973. Furthermore, the IBA had clearly laid out statutory duties to fulfil, around ownership, advertising revenue and programming standards and content. In short, nobody expected this to be the wholesale abandonment of cherished principles which has happened in more recent years. The new ILR stations, like the BBC and even ITV before them, were to have a public-service remit, and it was the job of the IBA to make sure they lived up to expectations. In its previous incarnation, as the Independent Television Authority, the regulator had wielded power that today would seem unthinkable, even undemocratic. Far beyond day-to-day surveillance of the ITV programme contractors’ schedules in order to ensure they were fulfilling their own public-service remit through an appropriate balance of education, information and entertainment, the ITA even previewed programmes it deemed to be sensitive before allowing them to be broadcast, rather than adopting the reactive stance of today, in which we expect the current regulator to investigate any significant complaints after a programme has been transmitted. Most famously, ITV’s ‘flagship’ current affairs programmes, World in Action (Granada Television) and This Week (Associated-Rediffusion, then Thames Television) received some of the closest attention from the ITA and later the IBA, particularly over sensitivities around the developing ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. In 1971, for example, the ITA banned outright South of the Border, an episode in the World in Action series, but programme makers had by then become acutely aware that in order to be shown, such a programme

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would first have to satisfy the regulator over its suitability. Starkey (2007: 30–4) includes a discussion of some of the implications for democracy around such heavy content regulation. In this, the authority of the ITA had been absolute, whereas more recently the nature of the multi-channel, multimedia environment in which we live today has meant that ITV can now bring far greater force to bear on any disagreement it may have with the regulator. Then, the regulator’s perceptions of a franchisee could be decisive in that company’s remaining on air or not, because not only did the regulator have the ability to close down a broadcaster in extreme circumstances, in a rather more sinister way, the renewal of a franchise was entirely dependent on a form of ‘beauty contest’ in which the regulator was judge and jury. Stoller, himself at different times a station Managing Director and a regulator, describes the resultant relationship as that between a master and a servant (2010: 102). This imperative to try and conform to the regulator’s expectations was not of course confined to radio: a 1988 edition of This Week, Death on the Rock, is widely considered to have been the reason for Thames losing its ITV franchise altogether in 1992 (Fitzwalter 2008: 106). As the IBA, the beauty-contest approach to franchise awards applied to both television and the new local commercial radio. It meant that franchises were awarded for fixed terms on the basis of a judgement made of all those private companies which applied to run them. The IBA would identify an area to be served by an ILR contractor, advertise the opportunity with a fixed deadline for applications to be received, and then set about a process of deciding which out of sometimes as many as half a dozen or so applications should be successful. There were numerous criteria applied by the IBA in making the selection, but the award of the franchise and the announcement of the eventual winner were so shrouded in mystery that it was difficult to be sure exactly which of the criteria had weighed most heavily in the IBA’s collective mind. This meant that applicant groups had to try and second guess which of the possible criteria were potentially the most crucial, and ensure as best they could that they were well catered for in their written application. Certain criteria were key: among them sound governance and financial credibility, as nobody in government would have wanted the new policy towards broadcasting to realise some of the critics’ worst fears and produce commercial radio stations that were run by persons of questionable character or that turned out to be financially unviable through lack of advertising income or the sound management needed to ensure that income covered outgoings and generated at least a modest profit. Writing a very early history of the birth of ILR,

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journalist Mike Baron commented that if some of the smaller stations were to close down due to overwhelming losses, it ‘would have serious repercussions for the entire network’ (1975: 163). That balance between income and expenditure was, of course, to be made more precarious by the public-service obligations that would be expected of the stations, not least because producing ‘quality’ speech is more resource-intensive than simply playing records. Not surprisingly, it was on those public-service obligations that applicants and the IBA were to focus very carefully: the applicants in striving to make their own applications distinctive from any others – and preferably better than rival bids – and the IBA in deciding which programme services would really do credit to its selection process and its governance of the sector. So the proposed programme schedule, and the way the station was proposing to go about serving its local audience with the public service it was supposed to need, was a crucial element. Speech programming, including current affairs, was to be an important element in this, even if it were to be mixed with music in order to make it more palatable – and more attractive – to audiences, but the highest profile in the schedule was inevitably going to go to the provision of local news. What else, though, did those local audiences need? Part of the beauty contest was a public consultation, in which the IBA would later hold public meetings and ask searching questions of local people in the area about what they wanted to hear on ‘their’ forthcoming local radio station. In many of the first such proposed areas, the BBC had already established the concept of local radio in the minds of contemporary local citizens, so the idea was not entirely novel: in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Liverpool and several others among the first cities to get ILR stations, local radio itself was not new. At one such consultation an uncomfortable silence greeted the comment from one member of the public that he would appreciate a new local radio station, as long as there weren’t any advertisements on it. Among the first areas to get ILR was also Swansea, where the BBC had not yet had any opportunity to establish a local presence, largely because of the proximity of the Welsh capital, Cardiff, but also because Wales was being treated differently from England and the provision there of local radio by the BBC was to be the preserve of Radio Wales, using a very different model, as we shall shortly see. Similarly, in Scotland, the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh were used to not having their own radio stations. For towns like Wolverhampton and Reading, this was to be a most unusual new experience.

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Local radio by local people Some early enthusiasts had already formed consortia ready to take advantage of a changed political climate if it were to come, an interesting example being Radio Barbican, which hoped to launch a financial news service for London and included the Financial Times and Charterhouse Securities (Baron 1975: 84). Because of the emphasis on localness, though, probably the most important element in the early ILR franchise applications was the composition of the applicant company. No matter who had instigated the initial project – an entrepreneur like Philip Birch who had already gained first hand valuable experience of the potential of commercial radio as a 1960s pirate, or a member of the local community who wished to bring the benefits of local radio to it – it was important to demonstrate in the application that the individuals behind the company had the very best credentials as worthy leaders in the local area who could be depended upon to put its best interests first, or at least not relegate them too far below the need to make a profit from the capital investment. So entrepreneurs needed worthy local figures to bring not only respectability but localness to their company, and the latter needed entrepreneurs, or at least investors with capital to help finance the venture if successful. Those local sources of capital could include other media businesses, in some of the earliest instances of what today we call cross-media ownership: being based in Manchester it made very good sense when The Guardian and Manchester Evening News Limited acquired a 10 per cent stake in Greater Manchester Independent Radio, having already bought a stake in the ITV franchisee in the East of England, Anglia Television. Although by now a national newspaper, this was a company with impeccable local credentials as having begun in Manchester with its original flagship title, The Manchester Guardian. As the first ILR franchises were about to be advertised, around Britain different groups of people set about forming companies they hoped would have the right balance of expertise, finance and local credibility to win them what they hoped would be a lucrative contract to make money from providing a service of commercial radio to a clearly-defined local area. Baron described this process in great detail, as well as additional background information about each of the first nineteen contracts to be awarded (1975: 87–159). Common to many of the successful bids were local Members of Parliament, local businessmen, local newspapers, ITV companies and even errant radio broadcasters who had recently left the BBC or been offshore pirates in their recent careers.

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Ironically but in another sense predictably, the first two franchises to be advertised were in London. As BBC Radio London was beginning to discover, though, the practicalities of creating local radio for an editorial area in excess of eight million people was stretching the concept of localness. Radio London, most conspicuously among the BBC local radio network due to its location, singularly failed to establish a large enough audience share in the capital to resoundingly justify the investment put into it by the licence fee payers and, on their behalf, the BBC. Strikingly, it is the BBC stations in the most regionally distinctive areas of the UK, and often that means the most distant from the capital, which have won the largest audiences in their own editorial areas. Consequently, Radio London has been re-launched and re-branded several times (as GLR in 1988, BBC London Live in 2000 and BBC LDN in 2001, while today it is known as BBC London 94.9), usually with little success. In 1973 the arrival of two ILR stations made its job of credibly connecting with a diverse population of Londoners even more difficult. Today London is arguably the most competitive radio market in the UK, but deservedly so, due to the higher concentration of economic activity in the capital city. Initially there had been calls for as many as six ILR stations in London and estimates that the population was large enough to support such a number financially, but the IBA was keen to open the network in a number of metropolitan locations to show that commercial local radio could work in a range of different contexts. So the two franchises were differentiated as London (News) and London (General). Five applications were received for the London (News) franchise and eight for London (General), and they were awarded to the London Broadcasting Company and to Capital Radio respectively. As a former Lord Mayor of London (as opposed to one of those to occupy the more recently created, elected post of Mayor of London), Chairman Sir Charles Trinder’s credentials as a ‘local’ worthy had clearly passed muster at the IBA for LBC, while Capital’s Chairman was the actor, director, producer and entrepreneur Richard Attenborough. As might be expected with radio consortia formed to serve audiences in the geographical capital, localness was a little hard to identify in some of the investors: the Observer newspaper held a stake in Capital and one of LBC’s shareholders was Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, who had submitted their own bid but been unsuccessful (Baron 1975: 85). Problems raising financial capital meant LBC also accepted investment from abroad: Selkirk Communications Ltd was a Canadian broadcasting company looking to enter the UK market. Selkirk built a small but substantial

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portfolio of investments in the first few years of ILR, establishing a number of significant principles that are particularly germane to this analysis, as will become evident later. It would be wrong to be overly cynical about these early days of the ILR network, though, and its financial backers. This was a very new industrial sector, and with the burden of regulation and the public-service commitment we have already identified, the financial model was not necessarily going to work exactly as that of the offshore pirates had done. Capital Radio’s investors also included Associated-Rediffusion, which did at least have a ‘regional’ media presence in London, and Local News of London, a group controlling 122 local newspapers.

ILR: the early years Outside London, local relevance inevitably became clearer, particularly as the beauty-contest process would probably count out-of-area ownership against an applicant group. Four applications were received by the IBA for the Birmingham franchise, four for Glasgow and three for Manchester. Philip Birch’s group, Greater Manchester Independent Radio, won the latter, and significantly chose to brand itself as Piccadilly Radio, named after part of Manchester city centre, where its first studios were to be located. Several of the first nineteen ILR stations to launch in the mid-1970s tried to relate to their local audiences in some way through their branding, seeking to find an appeal through geographical empathy, in the same way as the BBC local radio stations were all named after their own editorial areas, however tenuously. As with rivers (BBC Radio Medway, BBC Radio Solent) or their hinterlands (BBC Radio Merseyside, BBC Radio Humberside), the incorporation of a city’s name (BBC Radio Bristol) or even an administrative region (BBC Radio Cleveland) into a local radio brand can serve to firmly establish common ground with its target audience. In some cases such an approach can be more of a hindrance than a help: the name BBC Radio Newcastle resonates quite negatively in the rival neighbouring city of Sunderland, for example. In branding themselves on air, though, some of the successful applicant companies which won the right to set up pioneering ILR stations seemed to prefer relative anonymity, as was the case with Radio City (Liverpool), Downtown Radio (Belfast), Metro Radio (Newcastle), Beacon Radio (Wolverhampton and the Black Country), Radio Victory (Portsmouth) and Radio 210 (Reading). This at least had the advantage of not confining their identities to a single town or city and so enabling them to seek empathetic responses outside the editorial

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areas the IBA intended them to serve. Table 2.3 lists all the stations in the first wave of ILR stations, launching between 1973 and 1976. Of greatest importance for this analysis is the fact that although they aspired to form a ‘network’ and they shared a single source of international and national news, each station was owned and operated by a separate company which existed under separate ownership from all of the others. Appointing the first wave of ILR contractors and getting nineteen stations on air was not without its problems. Neither was the number nineteen intentional, nor did the term ‘first wave’ figure in the discourse of the era, because radio was once again to become a political football. However, in 1973 the next consequences of the politically tumultuous decade to emerge could not have been apparent, even to

Table 2.3 The nineteen stations in the first wave of ILR stations, launching between 1973 and 1976, with locations and first on-air dates London Broadcasting (LBC)

Greater London

8 October 1973

Capital Radio

Greater London

16 October 1973

Radio Clyde

Glasgow

31 December 1973

BRMB Radio

Birmingham

19 February 1974

Piccadilly Radio

Manchester

2 April 1974

Metropolitan Broadcasting (became Metro Radio)

Newcastle

15 July 1974

Swansea Sound

Swansea

30 September 1974

Radio Hallam

Sheffield

1 October 1974

194 Radio City

Liverpool

21 October 1974

Radio Forth

Edinburgh

22 January 1975

Plymouth Sound

Plymouth

19 May 1975

Radio Tees

Teesside

24 June 1975

Radio Trent

Nottingham

3 July 1975

Pennine Radio

Bradford

16 September 1975

Radio Victory

Portsmouth

14 October 1975

Radio Orwell

Ipswich

28 October 1975

Radio 210

Reading

8 March 1976

Downtown Radio

Belfast

16 March 1976

Beacon Radio

Wolverhampton

12 April 1976

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the sharpest of contemporary observers (Baron 1975: 160–6). Ironically, Baron reported that a number of Labour councils attempted to thwart the launch of LBC and Capital, by refusing planning permission for transmitter sites in North London (1975: 81). Launching in the midst of a worsening recession, and with the benefit of hindsight, the early years of ILR are best characterised as challenging. Heath’s government was not having an easy ride, and commercial radio seemed like one of the least important issues facing it. The political situation in Northern Ireland was deteriorating, there was a world-wide oil crisis in 1973, as industry and motorists alike were hit by rapidly escalating oil prices, and a dispute in the same year between the government and the mining unions led to power shortages and an enforced threeday week, in which the manufacturing sector was forced to reduce its output while electricity was rationed. This was not a good time to launch a sector which depends on a healthy economy, in order for advertising to be buoyant. Some of the stations struggled to raise enough capital to get on air, and in Teesside, Wolverhampton and Reading only one applicant company had submitted an application to the IBA following in each case the advertisement of the franchise to run an ILR service. Some of the successful applicants had to scale back their plans. If raising capital in London had been problematic for LBC, then in the provinces some stations faced an uphill struggle. Beacon Broadcasting Limited, owned by the Express and Star attempted but failed to attract sufficient private capital to launch the station through a rights issue, selling shares at £1 each. They had to abandon plans to move into a high-profile office block and bought a large house on the suburban Tettenhall Road out of Wolverhampton instead. Plans to employ forty-six staff were cut back to thirty-nine and they used Minis instead of Ford Escorts as company cars (Baron 1975: 153). In Reading, Radio Kennet was awarded the franchise but even with the three-day week long over, the UK economy was still a challenging environment. They, too, attempted and failed to raise cash through a rights issue. Changing the name of the company to Thames Valley Broadcasting, in order to better connect with local people, also enabled them to benefit from the greater resonance of the name of a much more familiar river, and following several months of uncertainty over finance the station was the last to launch, in March 1976 (Baron 1975: 154–5). Of course, the start-up costs of running a radio station include the capital expenditure needed to build or convert a building to house studios that will be fit for purpose, install production and distribution

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equipment including relays and cover the costs of a certain amount of time before the launch when people are employed but it is quite impossible to derive any revenue from the main source of income, because the station cannot broadcast advertisements before it goes on air. The cost of the broadcasting licence paid to the IBA was also excessive. The regulator had to be paid for its services and the licence fee included rental of the transmitter site, which it set up, owned and operated. The IBA set a rising scale of fees, related to its own estimate of the income potential of each station: the Birmingham licence cost £75,000 in the first year, rising to £95,000 by the third year and the London (General) contractor was expected to pay increasing sums around a third of a million pounds each year. Because producing speech was recognised as more expensive and likely to attract smaller audiences, the London (News) rental was approximately 40 per cent lower, starting at £185,000 (Baron 1975: 78). That, of course, was in addition to staff costs and payments to any freelancers, music copyright payments and a number of other regular overheads common to most private companies. Making money out of local commercial radio was not going to be easy. Philip Birch estimated the cost of missing a planned launch date as representing an additional expenditure of £2,000 per day and the delicate balance of even one of the most successful stations’ finances is illustrated by its first-year profit amounting to only £10,000 (Baron 1975: 115, 117). Pre-launch marketing can be expensive, too, and many of the first ILR stations chose to attract their first audiences through advertising on the existing media, mainly regional ITV and local newspapers. Stations employed their own advertising sales teams to sell their own air time to local advertisers, and national sales houses – initially AIR Services and BMS – sold air time on behalf of the local stations to national advertisers. Once on air, that revenue stream, one assumed, would begin to generate the revenue that entrepreneurs like Philip Birch, parent companies with sizeable shareholdings and small investors alike were hoping to earn from their flutter on the UK’S newest advertising medium. The expectation among the more bullish of investors was that radio would quickly establish itself as an alternative for national advertisers already used to placing large orders with the ITV companies, many of them using the whole network to gain national coverage. Because the medium of radio is relatively very cheap to produce and sustain compared to television, only a moderate diversion of national companies’ advertising budgets into radio would produce great riches for the ILR contractors. Unfortunately, and as theory is often rather wide of practice in many respects, the stations that reported profits in their first years of trading

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were few in number. One significant problem, in addition to the economic climate, was that unlike in the United States and many other countries where commercial radio had been allowed to develop earlier in the century, radio was simply not on the radar of many of the most important media buyers with advertising budgets to spend. Radio was, to them, an unfamiliar medium with which to place advertising spend, despite the recent, if brief, flourishing of the offshore pirate stations and the more durable but essentially peripheral example of Radio Luxembourg. Furthermore, even as the ILR network began to roll out across the country, a handful of stations amounted to only very patchy coverage of the UK. When the next kick of the political football restricted the network to the first nineteen stations, fewer than one third of the number originally proposed, it became clear that ILR simply could not deliver a national audience: a factor that will become significant in the next chapter, and one which meant that until the 1990s radio’s share of the total UK advertising market struggled to reach even two per cent. While in its first year of trading, 1974–1975, GMIR (or rather, Piccadilly) made a modest first-year profit, other stations did not. LBC 417 (after its medium wavelength, 417 metres) had the associated costs of running a national and international news service for an incomplete network, one which would anyway have taken years to develop a critical mass of subscribers to its service substantial enough to meet the full costs of supporting its aspirations. An initial fee of £20 per thousand listeners was an insufficient source of income to make the service work on the twenty-four hour, seven day per week basis that some of its subscribers needed, and which was, after all, one of the essential elements of a network with clear public-service obligations. Tim Crook rightly describes some of the considerable strengths of the service that Independent Radio News (IRN) became despite these financial handicaps (1998: 15, 25, 50, 266–7, 269), including the half-hour weekly documentaries Decision Makers which were broadcast by several stations on the network. However, IRN’s history, like LBC’s, has been a chequered one and it is one to which we will necessarily return later. For now, let’s merely note that IRN was trying to provide a credible service of international and national news with resources garnered only from an incomplete network of local radio stations whose own financial stability was most uncertain. Paradoxically, the BBC local stations were simply drawing their service of out-of-area news from a long-established and generously-resourced operation that was geared up to supply four national BBC networks and the separately-funded BBC World Service. Although IRN could rely on contributions from reporters in ILR stations

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around the UK to feed them reports when stories of national interest broke out in their own editorial areas or nearby (Starkey & Crisell 2009: 70), the credibility IRN managed to generate for its under-funded service was another great radio feat of smoke and mirrors. With losses estimated in 1974 to be running at £100,000 a month, the IBA had to concede to a rescue package of rental reductions for LBC. Capital’s hopes to gross £7 million in turnover in its first year proved to be wildly optimistic and its first audience survey showing only a million Londoners tuning in contributed to dampening its chances of success. Other stations struggled to justify the expectations of their investors and it was remarkable that the only ILR station to actually collapse and cease broadcasting altogether as the result of a failed business model was Centre Radio in Leicester, a station that launched in 1981 in a later, second wave of stations, and then closed down in 1983 (Stoller 2010: 124).

We interrupt this service … Before any expansion of the ILR network took place, however, a serious interruption to its progress occurred, which could have proven fatal to the existing nineteen stations for the reasons we discussed above, not having reached a critical mass in terms of number or of population coverage. The first general election of February 1974 was indecisive, leaving a hung parliament. Initially, Ted Heath clung onto power, but so tenuously that commercial radio must have been well down his list of priorities as he attempted to stitch together a coalition government agreement with the third largest party, the Liberals. Within days he resigned and Harold Wilson was returned to government with the largest number of seats by a small margin but crucially, without a working majority. Wilson called a second election for October of the same year, in which the Labour Party was returned with sufficient seats to remain in power until 1979. Perceived by some as the arch enemy of commercial – or at least offshore pirate – radio, Wilson’s return to power could have led to an ideologically-driven move against ILR. Radio, though, was only of moderate importance against a backdrop of international and national economic crises, the troubles in Northern Ireland, growing industrial unrest on the mainland and largely unexplained issues in Wilson’s personal life and health that led to his surprise resignation in 1976. His successor, James Callaghan, became the caretaker leader of the Labour party, taking over the role of Prime Minister until the party was beaten so decisively in the 1979 election that as a consequence it had to endure a period of eighteen years in opposition: an enforced

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exile that provoked much internal division and subsequently an ideological transformation so dramatic that it was never again to exhibit hostility to commercial radio. The demise of Harold Wilson, popularly characterised as the arch enemy of the sixties pirates (Starkey 2007: 29), did take the sting out of Labour’s initial antipathy towards commercial radio and a Local Radio Working Party was set up under Home Secretary Merlyn Rees. This was an important recognition of the value of local radio and the role it could play in local communities, as well as a significant concession to the commercial radio lobby, acknowledging as it did the need for ILR to expand in order to gain in credibility and in financial viability. Both the BBC and the IBA were represented on the LRWP and it recommended expansion in parallel of both BBC Local Radio and ILR, identifying an additional nine locations for which licences should be advertised. Then from 1979 the UK was governed by the Conservatives, firstly under the right-wing ideologue Margaret Thatcher and then from 1990 under the rather less decisive John Major, whose latter years in office were distinguished largely by a tiny parliamentary majority and an unfortunate over-dependence on a minority of maverick or miscreant MPs. For local radio, the Wilson years from 1974–1976 and their immediate aftermath meant a moratorium on the expansion of ILR and inevitable support for the BBC. During the period, the BBC may well have felt emboldened to a certain extent, but it was also aware of the political précarité of the era and whoever has been at the helm, and however real the ‘arm’s-length’ control of the corporation may have seemed, an organisation that is dependent on the government of the day for increases to the licence fee cannot entirely abandon the natural tendency to cast occasional glances over its corporate shoulder that was evident as long ago as during the General Strike of 1926 (Starkey 2007: 24). Although Labour was technically in power during the mid-1970s, the political uncertainty of the time continued unabated and the political direction of the country as the decade began to wane was by no means certain. Almost immediately the Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh regional opt-outs of Radio 4 were re-launched and re-branded as BBC Radio Ulster (1975), BBC Radio Scotland (1978) and BBC Radio Wales (1978) respectively, developing their own separate identities in ways that would have made little sense in continuity and branding terms as a mere opt-out from a national service. These stations operate today, together with sister stations in the Welsh and Gaelic languages, but on what the BBC terms a ‘national region’ basis, in that they each serve very large geographical areas which enjoy a number of different

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legislative and administrative characteristics, including a strong sense of nationhood, so that they will not detain us long in our discussion of local radio. They also enjoy a status in the BBC’s broadcasting hierarchy that means they are more generously funded than the same organisation’s local radio stations for England, naturally playing a significant role in presenting to the non-English regions of the UK an inclusiveness that would struggle to achieve credibility without significant production bases for both radio and television also being stationed in Cardiff, Belfast and Glasgow. However, a number of interesting parallel developments, particularly at Radio Wales and Radio Scotland are most pertinent to our analysis. Clearly, the proximity of local radio in England and by now in Swansea, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh contrasted rather obviously in the national regions with the relative remoteness of the regional stations that were supposed to serve relatively large, geographically and economically quite diverse whole regions. A solution to this paradigmatic dichotomy that neither patronised the Welsh, Northern Irish or Scottish, nor cost as much as would the introduction of fulltime local radio stations using the English model in what were often relatively quite sparsely populated areas was sought in the relatively benign period of Labour rule. In the mid-1970s the solution adopted was to reach out to sub-sections of those diverse audiences through the introduction of local opt-outs. Initially some of these were local opt-outs from the Radio 4 opt-out, so potentially acutely challenging from the perspective of branding and continuity. BBC Radio Highland launched to ‘serve’ Inverness & Aberdeen in 1976, followed by BBC Radio Orkney and BBC Radio Shetland in 1977, while BBC Radio Tweed for Selkirk and BBC Radio Solway for Dumfries launched in 1983. In each case these are very small operations which provide little more than extended local news bulletins within the more general diet of BBC Radio Scotland. BBC Radio Wales adopted a similar approach, although the question of whether minimalism of this kind really does avoid patronising audiences may be controvertible. In Wales the problem may be more acute, in that sizeable audiences exist in the North who feel not only geographically but also culturally remote from the South, and train travel between the two, for example, can require passengers to pass through the English midland towns of Shrewsbury, Ludlow and Leominster. BBC Radio Wales ran a number of temporary, experimental stations, including one in the depressed North-Eastern part of the principality, Radio Deeside 210, which was intended to provide

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support for a community that was struggling through an extended period of industrial action, and which operated from a portacabin in the car park of the local leisure centre. Subsequently BBC Radio Clwyd was established in 1981 and ran until 1993 as a permanent opt-out service from a newly-converted former school house in the nearby market town of Mold, and BBC Radio Gwent operated in similar ways from Cwmbran from 1983 to 1991. Some evidence does exist of the importance of even this minimalist approach to serving local audiences, including a public outcry at the closure of Radio Clwyd which was later taken up in the House of Commons by the then Wrexham MP, Ian Lucas, on 21 January 2003. Hansard records the following comments from some of his constituents quoted by Lucas in order to support his argument: ‘Why when I listen to Radio Wales do I feel a stranger in my own country?’, ‘BBC Radio Wales thinks “Wales” is just Cardiff and the Valleys’, ‘Since Radio Clwyd finished, there has been a void in people’s lives’, ‘We tune in to Radio Stoke and Radio Merseyside which have a far superior service than Radio Wales’ and ‘My wife and I listen to Radio Shropshire, which we think is an excellent example of what local radio should be, closely followed by Radio Merseyside’ (Hansard 2003). Meanwhile another committee, chaired by Lord Annan, considered once again the future of broadcasting, in a developing environment in which decisions around the provision of a fourth television channel to complement BBC-1, BBC-2 and ITV needed to be taken. The UHF (or ‘Ultra High Frequency’) transmitter network now used exclusively by the BBC and ITV had been developed with vacant slots for a fourth channel to occupy. In Wales, pressure was growing for that slot to be used for a dedicated Welsh-language channel, and on a small but significant scale, citizens were beginning to perceive themselves as consumers of broadcasting, more inclined than ever before to voice demands over what they thought they should be entitled to receive, rather than merely accepting what they were given. Annan’s main recommendation on local radio was that an entirely new regulator, the Local Broadcasting Authority should take responsibility for local broadcasting of all kinds (Hansard 1977). This was largely ignored, and because Annan may well have been ‘the high water mark for the social market philosophy of broadcasting’ (Stoller 2010: 3), when Margaret Thatcher triumphantly led the Conservatives back to power, the IBA was allowed to press on with developing the ILR network. The commercial radio lobby once again had those it regarded to be its true friends back in government.

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Back on track The next wave of ILR stations to launch consisted of the first nine sites recommended by the Local Radio Working Party: Cardiff, Coventry, Gloucester & Cheltenham, Peterborough, Bournemouth, Exeter/Torbay, Dundee/Perth, Aberdeen/Inverness and Chelmsford/Southend. In several cases, smaller, neighbouring towns were deliberately twinned in order to increase the successful franchise bidder’s chances of financial viability, and the IBA began experimenting with a new idea of twinned services offering separate programming at times in each half of the combined service area (Stoller 2010: 109, 116). Aberdeen and Inverness became separate franchises altogether. Before the first of the new stations could launch, in 1979 the incoming Conservative Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, authorised a further fifteen franchises: Ayr, Barnsley, Bristol, Bury St Edmunds, parts of East Kent, Guildford, Hereford/Worcester, Leeds, Leicester, Londonderry, Luton/Bedford, Newport (Gwent), Preston & Blackpool, Swindon/West Wiltshire, and Wrexham & Deeside. Despite the fresh impetus towards extending the ILR network to the extent that it would cover seventy-five per cent of the UK population, little progress was made in Londonderry, and the people of Barnsley had to wait until 2003 for the advertising and award to Dearne FM of a licence to broadcast. Nonetheless, it was full steam ahead and in its third report, the LRWP noted that two ‘quite distinct forms of local radio have grown up’, there being no ‘reason of principle’ why the BBC and IBA should not develop their own networks according to public demand – although they warned that ‘unreasonable burdens’ should not be placed on the frequency spectrum (1980). Table 2.4 lists the ILR stations in the second wave of development, according to the branding used by the successful franchisees for each area, together with their on-air dates. Expansion was not to stop there. Emboldened by the LRWP report and as the 1980s wore on, a more favourable economic climate meant most stations were financially stable and the application process was generally going well, so both the regulator and the potential licensees pressed on with the business of developing the ILR network according to the original public-service model. In 1981 the IBA proposed a further twenty-five areas which were, in turn, accepted by the Home Secretary. They were: Aylesbury, Basingstoke & Andover, The Borders (Hawick) with Berwick, Brighton, Cambridge & Newmarket, Derby, Dorchester/Weymouth, Eastbourne/Hastings, Great Yarmouth & Norwich, Hertford & Harlow, Huddersfield/Halifax, Humberside, Maidstone & Medway, Milton Keynes,

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Table 2.4 The twenty-three stations in the second wave of ILR stations, launching between 1980 and 1984, with locations and first on-air dates CBC

Cardiff

11 April 1980

Mercia Sound

Coventry

23 May 1980

Hereward Radio

Peterborough

10 July 1980

2CR

Bournemouth

15 September 1980

Radio Tay

Dundee/Perth

17 October 1980 (Dundee)/ 14 November 1980 (Perth)

Severn Sound

Gloucester & Cheltenham

23 October 1980

DevonAir

Exeter/Torbay

7 November 1980

Northsound

Aberdeen

27 July 1981

Radio Aire

Leeds

1 September 1981

Centre Radio

Leicester

7 September 1981

Essex Radio

Southend/Chelmsford

12 September 1981

Radio West

Bristol

27 October 1981

Westsound Radio

Ayr

4 December 1981

Moray Firth Radio

Inverness

23 February 1982

Chiltern Radio

Luton/Bedford

1 March 1982

Radio Wyvern

Hereford/Worcester

4 October 1982

Red Rose Radio

Preston & Blackpool

5 October 1982

Wiltshire Radio

Swindon/West Wiltshire

12 October 1982

Saxon Radio

Bury St Edmunds

6 November 1982

County Sound

Guildford

4 April 1983

GB Radio

Newport (Gwent)

13 June 1983

Marcher Sound/ Sain-Y-Gororau

Wrexham & Deeside

5 September 1983

Invicta Sound

(parts of) East Kent

1 October 1984

Northampton, North West Wales (Conway Bay), Oxford/Banbury, Redruth/Falmouth/Penzance/Truro, Reigate & Crawley, Shrewsbury & Telford, Southampton, Stoke, Stranraer/Dumfries/Galloway, Whitehaven & Workington/Carlisle and Yeovil/Taunton. The licensing process was onerous and time-consuming due to the necessary diligence required over frequency clearance, advertising, public consultation and decision making, so it was inevitably some time before several of those franchises which were awarded went on air. In addition to awarding new ILR franchises, the

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IBA had begun the task of reviewing the first-wave stations because all licences were for fixed terms that meant a parallel process of re-advertising and re-awarding each one added to the complexity of the IBA’s operations. Unkind commentators at the time seized on a suggestion that because the IBA oversaw the two ‘independent’ media, radio and television, radio was considered the poor cousin and received the Authority’s attention only on Friday afternoons. Without, in turn, wishing to be unkind to the residents of such places, it is striking that by the time of the 1981 list many of the inclusions on it look curiously unambitious in scale. In terms of commercial viability, where a business depends on generating money from the number of listeners it may ‘sell’ to advertisers, there is an obvious attractiveness to a market the size of Greater London. With its population hovering at the time around eight million, the capital had the potential to deliver very large audiences. The same could not be said for the neighbouring town of Basingstoke, which eventually got its own station in 1998, branded as Kestrel FM. However, appearances can be deceptive, and at this stage in our analysis it is worth noting the inclusion in the list of second-wave ILR stations of Swindon/West Wiltshire and the successful franchisee for the area, Wiltshire Radio, to which may be attributed by extension many of the most recent developments in commercial radio and of which much will be written in the following two chapters. Certainly, by 1984 a total of fifty ILR licences had been awarded and licensees were either on-air or about to launch. Stoller describes the mid1980s as a period of relative stability, during which a number of stations were financially successful, even with the obligation on them to fulfil public-service obligations to their local communities (2010: 124–5). In case distinctiveness was an advantage in the beauty contest, several stations had tried hard in the composition of their franchise applicant groups to be distinctive, and if in doing so they appeared to characterise the region in some way, then even better. Marcher Sound/SainY-Gororau Ltd which won the Wrexham & Deeside franchise included a number of former steel workers, who invested (and quickly lost) the redundancy payments they had received from the Shotton steelworks on Deeside. The launch Managing Director, the former lecturer Harold Martin, was the first to discover the grim realities of the practical gulf between winning a licence to broadcast and achieving financial viability for a new business without a ready constituency of former customers to approach for repeat business. Many of the new stations had an uphill struggle to establish themselves and in Wrexham & Deeside the situation was complicated by the station’s Total Survey Area (TSA) having been drawn with political considerations in mind. The station was to

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be located on the Welsh side of the border which ran through the TSA, even though the more populous and considerably more prosperous English city of Chester was located on the other. As Chester was also on the fringe of Radio City’s TSA and had figured in its launch marketing, it had been ruled out as the primary location for the studios, but it was expected to be a source of advertising revenue to sustain a station in and largely for the North-Eastern corner of Wales. Marcher’s shareholders included Radio City, and the Liverpudlian comedian Ken Dodd was on Marcher’s board of directors. At the time, that part of North Wales was considered unlikely to be able to sustain its own station without such an arrangement, but the compromise brought with it fears of possible attack from the Welsh Language Society, a group which had been campaigning most spectacularly for a Welsh-language television channel. Another Managing Director, Tim Halfhead, was appointed and left before a local entrepreneur with a sizeable business in scrap metal, Godfrey Williams, became the Chief Executive and later the Managing Director. Williams was undeterred by his lack of experience in radio and growing reputation as a maverick, and put his considerable Chamber of Commerce contacts to good use in attracting new advertisers and gradually turning round the station’s fortunes, soon achieving a modest level of profitability for the company’s board, which was chaired by the Liberal peer, Lord Evans of Claughton. This business acumen was to be handsomely rewarded later, as we shall see. Meanwhile, perhaps because in its first term the Thatcher government had yet to find its most aggressively free-market feet, the BBC was untroubled by such vexing issues. It was allowed to grow its local radio network in the cooperative climate that existed between it and the IBA under the auspices of the Local Radio Working Group. Because for reasons of cost it could never have reasonably aspired to operating the number of local radio stations being proposed for the ILR network, the BBC wisely sought to create county-wide stations in many areas, rather than focusing on single towns or combinations of them. Just as BBC Radio Merseyside had launched as a station for a sub-region rather than just the city of Liverpool, including the Wirral towns of Birkenhead, Wallasey, Bromborough and others in its editorial area an example of how this third wave developed is BBC Radio Shropshire. A station for just the county town of Shrewsbury would serve far fewer listeners than one also aimed at other towns in the county, such as Telford, Wellington, Whitchurch, Bridgenorth, Wem, Oswestry, Ludlow and Market Drayton. Radios Devon and Cornwall launched as replacements for the South-West England

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opt-out of Radio 4, which closed at the same time. Table 2.5 lists the BBC local stations in the third wave, many of which used this model or sought to reach even larger audiences of licence fee payers by targeting more than one county. The on-air dates also reveal a more leisurely pace of development than that adopted by the IBA, and the cautious approach dictated by the need to delicately balance the BBC’s income across its many different services has resulted in considerable vacillation over some services. For example, over its chequered history Radio Surrey has been both merged with and subsequently demerged from Radio Sussex (originally Radio Brighton), the two forming BBC Southern Counties Radio between 1994 and 2009 but often sharing or splitting programming depending on whatever configuration prevailed at the time. Table 2.5 The third wave of BBC local radio stations launching in the 1980s and early 1990s, with their original on-air dates Radio Norfolk

11 September 1980

Radio Lincolnshire

11 November 1980

Radio Jersey

15 March 1982

Radio Guernsey

16 March 1982

Radio Cambridgeshire

1 May 1982

Radio Northampton

16 June 1982

Radio Cornwall

17 January 1983

Radio Devon

17 January 1983

Radio Shropshire

23 April 1985

Three Counties Radio (for Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire)

24 June 1985

BBC Essex

5 November 1986

BBC Somerset Sound

11 April 1988

Radio Gloucestershire

3 October 1988

BBC Hereford and Worcestershire

14 February 1989

BBC Wiltshire Sound

4 April 1989

BBC CWR (for Coventry and Warwickshire)

January 1990

Radio Suffolk

12 April 1990

Radio Surrey

14 November 1991

Radio Berkshire

21 January 1992

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What’s on the other side? Radio Guide If ILR finally became UK radio’s officially-sanctioned ‘other side’, what kind of alternative was it offering, and to what did it consider itself an alternative? Clearly, one of the essential ingredients in any programming mix that was infused with public-service values would be news. IRN fed hourly news bulletins to its sister company LBC and to all the stations in the rest of the developing network, running to seven minutes in length at peak times of the broadcasting day, but with an opt-out point after three minutes. Most stations that carried the IRN bulletin live, received from London along permanent but costly audio landlines, took only the first three minutes. The biggest stations, and so most of the first to go on air in 1973 and 1974, would instead use IRN’s parallel service of copy sent via teleprinter for them to read locally in conjunction with related audio reports and packages, including longer ‘billboard’ package items. Editorial decisions would be taken locally by the local station’s duty news editor who had a certain amount of freedom within the individual station’s own editorial policy to apply a professional sense of news values and an awareness of the interests of the local audience to organise the available material into a coherent bulletin of international, national and local news. This meant that the stations the IBA considered were sufficiently well resourced to do so were allowed to ‘mix’ the national and international material with local stories sourced locally by their own news reporters. Unusually, with LBC also operating in London, Capital had its own news team when it launched, but its first cash crisis led to its closing down the operation and then, equally surprisingly, taking the IRN three-minute bulletin instead, as if it were a tiny provincial station operating on a shoestring. It was a symptom of the tight control – the IBA’s heavy hand – that marked the approach of the regulator to programme content, that meant specific permission had to be gained even for the right to mix bulletins locally, rather than take the national bulletin live and then follow it with, typically, a further two minutes of local news presented in the same style. The rather obvious problem which beset stations the IBA deemed too small and lacking in resources to be trusted to prepare whole mixed bulletins locally, became most acute in the event of a big story breaking inside or near the station’s editorial area. For example, a major incident that had broken out in the town centre could be threatening such chaos and perhaps even loss of life that meant it really ought to have been the lead story locally,

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but it might not have been of enough significance nationally for it to feature in the IRN bulletin. Listeners to this small- or medium-sized ILR station, then, would have to listen to three minutes of the IRN bulletin, including quite possibly a ‘funny’ last story, before hearing the local lead. It is also worth noting that the professionalism of most IRN newsreaders often brought into rather too sharp focus some of the less-experienced attempts of newer recruits to radio journalism in the provinces. In his memoirs, Shooting History: A Personal Journey, the celebrated journalist Jon Snow recalled his arrival at LBC in 1973: ‘There were builders everywhere, carpenters putting up partitions, electricians laying cables… I was standing in the bowels of the building in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where… (LBC) was to start broadcasting in eight weeks’ time’ (2004: 72). Snow recalls that few experienced BBC staff members had risked leaving the relative security of the corporation for what they considered a more risky proposition. Two days before going on air, an absence of newsreaders meant Snow was reassigned to the role because a large number of the voices the station had hired were Canadian or Australian. The programming was ambitious in many ways, depending for the production of speech radio on budgets that were very modest by comparison with those in the BBC networks. Paradoxically it was also unambitious in its dependence on lengthy, cheaply-produced phoneins. To be successful, these would, of course, depend on the skill of the presenter and also the availability of listeners who were inclined to overcome any shyness or other distraction in their daily lives for long enough to take the trouble to phone in (Starkey 2004: 83–8). There has to be a gatekeeping process in order to put only the most interesting of callers to air, but in LBC’s early days, especially at night, they were often few and far between. At least the other stations could play records, at least some of the time. In programming terms, the more typical early ILR station schedule also differed markedly from that of the BBC local radio stations. The most obvious distinction between BBC Local Radio and ILR, which we have already begun to explore, lies in the syndication – or relaying – of programming. Although in the first wave of ILR stations the IBA blatantly experimented with setting up a range of differently-sized stations in order to see how the ILR model might typically operate in a range of different markets, it was some time before stations began to be licensed which were small enough to require the relaying of programming from neighbouring stations in order to sustain them on air for reasonably long broadcasting days,

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but ensure their meagre financial and programming resources weren’t stretched too thinly for the main service to be credible and financially viable. The 1983 launch of Marcher Sound/Sain-Y-Gororau in Wrexham, for example, was conditional on the station relaying the programmes of one of its shareholders, Radio City in neighbouring Liverpool from 6pm until 6am, precisely so the smaller station could focus its resources on peak times during the daytime hours. Later, the IBA allowed Marcher to broadcast until 10pm, at which time the evening presenter (for a brief period this was the author) would raise a fader on the broadcast mixing desk in order to play out Radio City’s own news bulletin and the following programming, setting the burglar alarm and locking up the studio building on the way out. Before the period covered by this chapter had expired, the IBA’s confidence in the company had risen enough for it to be allowed to broadcast its own, locally-produced programming twenty-four hours a day. Mostly though, the issue over branding and confusing continuity which beset the BBC local stations from the start simply didn’t trouble ILR at first, and certainly not during daytimes. In most cases this truly was local radio for local people. Another distinguishing feature of the era was the distinctiveness of the different stations. Their approaches to reconciling the twin imperatives of public-service broadcasting and making a profit from it – or at least breaking even long enough to ride out the financial crisis of the mid-1970s – varied from station to station. The early restrictions on needletime, which meant a twenty-four hour station such as Capital Radio or Radio City could use commercial recordings covered by the agreement for only a minutage total of nine hours of the broadcast day, certainly did constrain the use of popular music, but not enough to prevent its being the mainstay of most stations’ output. Only LBC majored on speech. The first Programme Controller of Radio Tees, Bob Snyder, is quoted before launch as saying it was too early to be very specific about the programming, but that: ‘… generally during the day it will be broadly music. In the evenings it will broaden out a bit, probably towards rock’ (Baron 1975: 143). At Swansea Sound, Head of Music Terry Mann explained the rationale behind the station’s slogan being ‘listen to the music’: … music provides the ideal carrier for information, which is what local broadcasting is about. … Too much music and the point of having a local radio service is lost because it would be failing to inform its listeners. Too little music and the information becomes monotonous,

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driving away listeners who may have benefited by some of it. That’s why fifty per cent of our broadcasting day is music. Mann went on to describe the music policy as a playlist of ‘around 120 tracks, mostly singles’, top 40 with ‘leanings towards’ middle-of-theroad (Radio Guide issue 22, July 1975). Despite its more modest funding, in a fine example of radio’s ability as a medium to stretch limited resources to great effect, Beacon Radio 303 sounded big and brash on air. It was the most Americanised of all the early stations, but in the minds of commentators who consider this to have been a ‘golden age’ of local commercial radio, that was not at all at the expense of local content designed to connect with the people of Wolverhampton and the Black Country. Others, of course, would dispute that perspective. Writing in Marxism Today in November 1983, Thomas O’Malley criticised ‘narrow, consumerist and unchallenging’ programming which expressed the interests of the ILR shareholders. He clarified this view thus: Capital’s programme consists, largely, of white, sexist DJs playing a narrow range of commercially produced pop records in between advertisements. The desire to make profits dictates that programming is uncontentious, so as not to upset advertisers and that it is cheap. This type of broadcasting reduces radio to musical wallpaper, safe in its studious avoidance of controversy and conformist in its celebration of consumerism. (1983: 36) O’Malley’s perspective, albeit one of undoubted appeal to his target audience, is one that might have dismayed even the most commercially-minded local radio entrepreneur of the 1970s. If the political left were so disappointed with the result of ending the BBC’s monopoly in radio, the political right could hardly have been described as enthusiastic for the compromise which had been forced upon them, in allowing commercial radio to develop at all. The passing of time always brings with it the advantage of a longer perspective from which to make a more-informed judgement on phenomena that are better observed in context. So we now know that the burden of the original public-service obligation on ILR and the heaviness of the regulatory regime under the IBA ensured there was far greater variety in each station’s output then, than can be found in UK commercial radio today – as we shall see in subsequent chapters. In effect, O’Malley was well ahead of his time, and however much the range of 1970s ILR programming might

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have justified the ‘lowest common denominator’ label, it was certainly far more ambitious in its scope and depth than can be found in local commercial radio in the UK today. More commonly repeated criticisms of ILR in its early years used the pejorative expression ‘pop and prattle’ (Stoller 2010: 103), but the stations themselves would have roundly rejected accusations that all they did was to play pop music and ‘prattle’ on meaninglessly. So ambitious were the pioneers of UK commercial local radio that they were persuaded of the economic case for a programme listings magazine. A company called Travkarn Ltd was already publishing a monthly magazine for radio enthusiasts called simply Radio Guide. The editor, Nik Oakley, had also edited Script magazine and went on to edit Wavelength, which were firmly focused at first on the offshore pirate radio scene, but had also come to reflect a growing sense of excitement at the launch of the early ILR stations. In May 1975 Script was renamed Radio Guide after a programme listings feature in the former began to assume greater importance than offshore pirate memorabilia: although Radio Caroline continued to broadcast through much of the 1970s, Radio Northsea International had closed down in 1974 and the only real dynamism in UK radio was the birth, one-by-one of the new ILR stations. Radio Guide truly was, as its first strapline suggested, ‘the magazine all about radio’, but in May 1976 it became ‘the official journal of Independent Local Radio’. In an attempt to mimic the commercial success of ITV’s in-house listings magazine, TVTimes, it began to include celebrity, fashion and consumer items, typified by Shirley Conran’s piece in that re-launch issue, ‘From Mum to Superwoman’. From that issue, like TVTimes, Radio Guide was published in regional editions, each one grouping together a number of stations each of which was featured in its own double-page spread of listings and editorial about highlighted programmes. On page four the significance of the re-launch was summed up in a gushing tribute to ILR, headlined ‘Welcome to Independent Local Radio’: There’s a new sound on the radio waves of Britain – a new sound with 19 distinctive flavours. It’s the sound of the nationwide network of Independent Local Radio Stations, each reflecting the personality of its own area. Because this really is local radio, not a localised version of a national channel. Over 30 million people can now tune-in to a radio station that really belongs to them. And from now on they can also enjoy a radio

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magazine especially beamed in their direction. Month-by-month Radio Guide will bring you the stories and pictures of all your favourite radio personalities plus full details of programmes from your local stations. Above all Radio Guide intends to make your listening even more enjoyable. So stay tuned and join in the fun. Almost inevitably, Radio Guide failed to live long and prosper, but, with Script and Wavelength, its significance lies not only in the information it reveals about the programme content of early ILR stations, but also in the way it evidences aspirations of the era. At the time, the ITV companies were distinctive, they even scheduled many programmes that reached national audiences in different timeslots or on different days, according to their own perceptions of the interests and demand of their own region, and there was a sense in the 1970s that broadcasting could be devolved to distinctive communities in the provinces, even if in the case of television the cost of the transmission and distribution infrastructure meant that those communities were whole regions, rather than individual cities or groups of towns as in the case of radio. We must avoid an unthinking, nostalgic ‘golden-ageism’ in the pages of analysis which follow, especially as many of radio’s greatest achievements were – and still may be – yet to come, if not perhaps in local broadcasting. However, ILR in its first incarnation, and the rigour imposed by the IBA’s regulatory zeal do illustrate many of the possibilities of local radio as a medium which can serve and connect with local communities and the people who dwell in them. For Radio Guide and many others, one of the virtues of local radio lay very firmly in ‘reflecting the personality’ of a local area, and not merely being a ‘localised version of a national channel.’ As the editorial promised, this really was local radio, largely locally owned, almost entirely locally originated and certainly targeted at local people.

In tune with London, Liverpool or Litherland Systematic analysis of the programme schedules of the era reveals a range of programming elements that were common across many stations, and many other instances in which individual stations would innovate, bringing their own local identities to bear on their output. We have already discussed news in the sense of the hourly bulletin which had long been a convention of music radio, except in the case of BBC Radio 1 which then shared newsreaders with Radio 2 even when

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they weren’t sharing programming. Consequently the single BBC newsreader would read the Radio 1 bulletin on the half-hour, and then read for Radio 2 on the hour. Because many early ILR stations positioned themselves musically as a sort of ‘Radio 1½’, occupying a putative middle ground between the pop music of the former and the middle-of-theroad to light classics output of the latter, this was to suit many of the ILR stations later on when they quietly dropped half-hour headlines in favour of playing music while Radio 1 was broadcasting news. However, the commitments made by many of the ILR stations over news were ambitious and expensive to resource, if admirably suited to the purpose of serving local people by telling them what was happening in their communities. Peak times for extended bulletins, of up to thirty minutes in the case of several stations, many with titles typified by Radio City’s City at Six, were naturally on weekdays at lunchtime and what was becoming known as drive time, as audiences of returning schoolchildren merged with commuters also heading for home and the last of the daytime office or home-based listeners coming to the end of their daily routines. Table 2.6 shows some commonalities and some innovation in the scheduling of extended news bulletins in 1976, as well as the minority of stations which merely extended news bulletins at peak times without highlighting them with titles and identifiable slots in their programme listings. In addition, Beacon Radio ran Morning Report (07:45–08:03), Swansea Sound Newswatch at Eight (08:00–08:10) and City Morning Report (08:00–08:10). We should remember that a programme schedule is but a snapshot of a station’s output at a given point in time: by 1976 BRMB, for example, had abandoned its original commitment to seventy minutes of lunchtime news and sport daily. Just a year earlier, BRMB Sport (12:50–13:00) had promised ‘a preview of the afternoon’s sporting events and the day’s racing calendar’, to be followed by First Edition (13:00–14:00) ‘a mixture of news, listeners’ views by telephone and interviews. It digs deep into local news stories and listeners can ‘phone in and add their comments … and talk with studio guests’ (Radio Guide, issue 22, July 1975). Another source of both commonality and distinctiveness in programming lay in the provision of specialist music, normally outside peak times, away from the mainstream music programming of daytimes. Because of the public-service ethos in ILR, these stations were intended to provide something for everyone in the area, hence the notion of a ‘full-service’, despite the real-world impossibility of drawing and retaining large numbers of listeners from very diverse demographic groups. In many cases, the beauty-contest nature of the

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bidding process meant that the wider and more varied the provision, and so theoretically the broader the appeal, the more likely a bidding company would be to get the franchise for the area, although a small number of stations promised very little. Naturally, many stations found themselves committed – irrevocably or so it seemed at the time – to providing a large number of such programmes, and the mid-evening trough, at which time watching television was at its peak, provided an opportunity to schedule such programmes when they could do least harm to the station’s audience figures by driving away the larger audiences for the Radio 1½ approach to programming music. Often this requirement to produce specialist programming provided valuable opportunities for local music enthusiasts to get their first experience of radio broadcasting, and thus for local Table 2.6 The scheduling of titled, extended news bulletins on music-based ILR stations in early 1976, weekdays Lunchtime

Evening

Capital Radio

–

Radio Clyde

–

–

BRMB Radio

–

18:00–18:30 News and Sports Round-Up

Piccadilly Radio

–

17:30–18:00 News and Sport

Metro Radio

–

19:00–19:30 Metroworld

Swansea Sound

13:00–13:10 Newswatch at One

19:00–19:30 London Today

17:30–17:45 Newswatch at Five-Thirty

Radio Hallam

–

17:30–18:00 Newscene

194 Radio City

–

18:00–18:30 City at Six

Radio Forth Plymouth Sound

13:00–13:15 Forth Report –

17:00–17:15 Forth Report –

Radio Tees

13:00–13:15 257 Today

18:00–18:20 257 Tonight

Radio Trent

12:30–13:00 Trent News

18:00–18:30 Trent News

Pennine Radio

12:30–12:45 Newscene

Radio Victory Radio Orwell

– –

– – 18:00–18:30 Late Edition

Downtown Radio

12:45–13:05 Newsline

17:50–18:30 Newsline

Beacon Radio

13:45–14:03 Midday Report 17:45–18:00 Evening Report

Source: Radio Guide.

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people to aspire to develop a career in radio presentation by getting involved with their local ILR station. This was, after all, happening in an environment which relied heavily on drawing in established presenters from other stations elsewhere in the country to provide the skilled, mainline presentation needed to attract and sustain large enough audiences in peak times for the stations to be commercially viable. Paradoxically, Stoller noted the trend for the Managing Director to present the classical music programme if there was one (2010: 119). Table 2.7 tracks the scheduling of specialist music and thematic programming across the network in early 1976, mainly but not exclusively through stand-alone programmes of an hour in duration. Those stations which fulfilled the broadest of commitments to specialist programming ran evening schedules, typically between seven and ten o’clock, which consisted of an eclectic mix of different musical genres and presentation styles. Most strikingly among the stations surveyed, Beacon offered nothing that represented a significant departure from its more mainstream, daytime programming, and rival programme controllers of the day who noted the station’s ‘slickness’ and ‘Americanised’ sound, may well have been envious of the relative freedom allowed the station by the IBA. Some musical genres given prominence aren’t shown in the table: rock for example, which often featured in evening programming over extended durations as opposed to the hour or ninety-minute programmes which predominate in the table. Particularly interesting examples included Piccadilly’s Rokzac presented by Andy Peebles, the Great Easton Express on City and Capital’s offerings from Tommy Vance and Nicky Horne, whose Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It grew a large following in London. Both Clyde and Forth featured Scottish music in their off-peak schedules: Double Scotch ran from 18:00–20:00 on Forth and on Thursday in Ken’s Den, Ken Haynes played ‘contemporary Scottish sounds’. It was not only through specialist music that stations demonstrated their local credentials by offering something different. Programmes covering the arts in general or some sub-section such as books or the theatre were popular with the early ILR programmers. In several cases news teams produced weekly round-ups of the week’s news or current affairs, reporting on the various councils in the editorial area. A sports digest on a Friday or at the weekend was common. Swansea Sound had made a commitment to provide Welsh programming, and its schedules included eight minutes of Welsh at 6am Monday to Saturday, half an hour from the station opening at 8am on Sundays

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–

Fri, Sun

Mon

Sat

Sat, Mon, Tues

Sun

BRMB Radio

Piccadilly Radio

Metro Radio

Swansea Sound

Radio Hallam

194 Radio City

Sat

Wed

Radio Clyde

Soul

Capital Radio

Mon, Sat

Thu

Thu

Fri

Sat

Fri

Thu

–

Brass bands

–

–

–

–

–

–

Sat

–

Folk –

Sun

Tues

–

Sat

–

Mon, Tues

–

–

Classical Sun

Sun

Fri

Sun

–

Sun

Fri

–

Big bands –

–

–

–

–

–

Mon, Fri

–

Organ –

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

Jazz Wed, Sat

Wed

Mon, Wed

–

Wed, Sun

–

Sun

Sun

Religion Sun

Sun

Tues

Sun

Sun

–

Sun

Motoring Fri

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

Sun

–

Sun

–

Sun

–

Sat

Sun

Kids

Table 2.7 The scheduling of specialist music and thematic programming on music-based ILR stations in 1976

Country

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Citizens/consumers –

–

–

–

–

–

Wed

–

Sun

Sun

Fri, Sat

–

Tues, Sun

–

Mon, Tues, Wed

–

Books, hobbies, leisure, and/or arts

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–

Mon

–

Radio Victory

Radio Orwell

Downtown Radio

Beacon Radio

Source: Radio Guide.

Tues

Tues

Pennine Radio

Wed

–

Radio Trent

–

Plymouth Sound

Radio Tees

Sat

Radio Forth

–

Sat , Sun, Tues

Sat

Thu

Wed

–

–

Sun

Mon

–

Fri, Sat

–

–

–

–

–

–

Mon

–

–

–

Wed

Thu

–

–

Sun

Tues

–

–

Sun

Sun

Mon

–

–

Sun

Sun

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

Tues, Sat

–

Sat

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

Thu

Fri

–

–

Sun

Sat

–

Sun, Mon–Fri

Sun

Sun

–

–

Sun

Sun

Sun

–

–

–

Mon

–

–

–

–

–

–

Sun

–

–

–

–

–

–

Sat

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

Tues, Wed

–

–

–

–

Sat

–

Fri

–

Wed

74 Local Radio, Going Global

and ninety minutes each evening. There were also daily Welsh lessons for English speakers. One of the most imaginative schedules was created by the radio critic turned Programme Controller Gillian Reynolds at Radio City, and it included original comedy scripted by Alan Bleasdale, Scully, and by John Gorman of the Scaffold, P.C. Plod. There was also a weekly ‘Points of View’ style listener feedback show, Send Me a Postcard, Drop Me a Line, co-presented by Reynolds herself. Some stations experimented with primitive forms of what at the time was becoming known as ‘access’ programming, in which individuals or groups of people with common interests were encouraged to make original programming of their own, with, of course, what the stations deemed appropriate levels of support and supervision from the professionals. Plymouth Sound publicly rationalised its access programming as follows: Every Saturday evening a programme is broadcast in Plymouth that is unique to Plymouth Sound. No other radio station in the UK or even Europe, broadcasts anything like Whoever Next. For two hours every week Plymouth Sound hand over their transmitters and studios to members of the public. ‘They are invited to come in and talk, play music or do whatever they want, providing they don’t do something that means we lose our licence’, says Managing Director, Robert Hussell. (Radio Guide, October 1975) The article explained that in its first six months on air, the programme had been made by a local drama group, a blind theatre enthusiast, the Plymouth Polish Society, a film club, ‘elderly people’ recalling Plymouth’s history and even some amateur comedians who had written and performed their own comedy sketches. Having a large naval population in the maritime city, the station also programmed a forces programme on Saturdays, Forces Magazine (18:00–19:30). Likewise, several stations with substantial rural coverage included programmes for farmers, even incorporating daily stock price reports into news bulletins. Outside broadcasts provided early opportunities for stations to get out and meet their listeners and win over new ones, so some incorporated them into their schedules as regularly as every day. Radio City put ex-schoolteacher Norman Thomas on the road to record Venue, a daily programme of conversation and music, the conversation being with members of the live audience, who could then listen to the recording being played out on air between noon and 2pm the next day.

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Arguably the most expensive form of speech programming is drama, and so it was rare for a station to be able to invest in it. Scully was in effect a comedy monologue by a young Scouse lad played out between chart songs over an hour that was otherwise devoid of the conventional trappings of radio music sequence presentation (Starkey 2004: 58–83). Capital Radio, having avoided committing itself to playing a wide variety of specialist musical genres, did launch with a soap opera She and Me, in which a newly-arrived Canadian chatted with her ‘char’ and then the station launched another soap, The Bedsitter starring the popular actress Peggy Mount as ‘a landlady with a hard exterior, a heart of gold, a soft husband and a restless daughter’ (Baron 1975: 101–2). Both series, together with A King and his Mistress and Hazel Adair were abandoned when the first financial crisis hit the station. The station’s star presenter, Kenny Everett, whose comic genius and talent for producing humorous short radio sketches in his home studio had met with greater recognition through such television shows as Nice Time (Granada) and a certain notoriety in the press for incautious remarks on Radio 1, created Captain Kremmen. In an early example of syndication (or the playing out of a single programme on more than one radio station), this spoof sci-fi mini-soap was picked up by Radio City and played during the Great Easton Express. In June 1976 Radio Forth launched a daily serial, Mary Queen of Scots with a weekly omnibus for listeners to catch up on missed episodes. Apart from its use in radio commercials, though, drama was the radio genre which was, as time wore on, to become largely ignored by ILR and BBC local radio alike. Paradoxically, at first children were not ignored. A popular programme of children’s record requests, Junior Choice had long been simulcast on Radios 1 and 2 on Saturday and Sunday mornings, presented by the popular radio and television personality, Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart. Although Stewart was given the programme in 1968, it had run in various forms since it began on the Light Programme in the 1950s, and the programme’s popularity ensured it became one of those phenomena often widely referred to as a ‘great British institution’. Under Stewart’s stewardship the programme had become a family favourite, in an era when early morning television did not exist, and at a time in the week when no other medium was targeting children. So for many of the early ILR applicant groups it was not only a beauty-contest issue, but also a natural programming decision to include built programming especially for children, although few scheduled their own offerings against Junior Choice. Various catchy

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titles were used, to distinguish those programmes from the rest of the schedules: Tripe and Onions (Piccadilly), Hullaballoo (Capital), Children’s Choice (Clyde), Up and Away (Swansea Sound), Children’s Programme (Victory), Roundabout (Forth) and Family Favourites (Plymouth Sound) among them. Even LBC scheduled Jellybone, ‘the junior open line’, from 10am to midday on Saturdays and Sundays. Arguably only Tripe and Onions connoted some local specificity with its tongue in cheek reference to a regional delicacy much scorned in other parts of the UK. Some such programmes even appeared after the launch of a station. A fan of Radio City, Kathy Barham, in her book of personal recollections and diverse historical facts about the station interviewed Richard Eastwood, then around ten years old, about his memories of co-presenting Ring-A-Ding with his father Dave in the ‘early 1980s’. The programme was targeted at the under-twelves and according to Barham included ‘requests, birthday mentions, dedications, competitions and the Radio City Children’s Club’, before being replaced by It’s Cheggers presented by Keith Chegwin, who had by then already become a relatively conspicuous child actor in film and on television (2006: 88).

Everyone’s cup of tea? If some stations were slow to build audiences, others were quick to publicise their successes. In many areas, listeners were quick to warm to the various, often eclectic mixes of popular and specialist programming broadcast by their new ILR stations. The BBC certainly perceived the first big-city ILR stations as a threat and just as many ILR stations saw the BBC’s national networks as their main competitors, it was Radio 1 that the BBC used to counter the commercial threat, often broadcasting week-long specials consisting mainly of roadshow-type outside broadcasts from each area the week before the new ILR station was due to launch. This spoiling tactic didn’t last long, and as the ILR network rolled out beyond the first wave of stations many of the smaller towns and cities that were about to get ILR must have seemed relatively insignificant to the big guys running national networks from London. The reality, though, was that in many markets ILR did dent the BBC’s audience figures, even though the UK radio industry did not yet have a single ‘goldstandard’ audience survey that all stakeholders in both public and private sectors of the industry, advertisers and commentators in the press could collectively buy into (Starkey 2003). Put simply, the BBC

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did its own audience research and individual ILR companies, keen to demonstrate their worth to potential advertisers, commissioned their own. Various, often competing, claims were made, and some of the disparities will have been quite reasonably attributable to variations in sample size and construction, questionnaire construction and a range of other methodological issues (Starkey 2004a). Some of the headline data from this ad hoc audience research were captured in the contemporaneous reporting of the period, and the following are interesting examples worth considering, although the same methodological caveats around relying on comparisons between data collected according to varying methodologies preclude their being formally presented here in a table in any meaningful way: ●

●

●

●

●

●

In January 1974, Capital Radio published a NOP survey showing LBC’s weekly reach to be 448,000 with 226,000 listening each day. Until then LBC had been claiming to have a million listeners (Script issue 11, August 1974). A BBC survey carried out in the first week of September 1974 claimed the arrival of the six ILR stations then transmitting had had no effect on the audience figures for the BBC’s national and local services, and the Controller of Radios 1 and 2, Douglas Muggeridge said ILR had only 0.9 million listeners, significantly below their claim to reach a combined total of five million (Script issue 14, November 1974). Radio Hallam claimed to be beating Radio 1 in Sheffield, with 25 per cent listening ‘yesterday’ compared to 24 per cent. Radio 2 was on 26 per cent and BBC Radio Sheffield 19 per cent. Radio Luxembourg had a daily reach of 5 per cent in Sheffield (Script issue 17, February 1975). A NOP poll for Swansea Sound in the week ending March 8th 1975 showed the station to be the UK’s most popular station in its own area, with a weekly reach of 69 per cent. Radio 1 polled 40 per cent, Radio 2 26 per cent, Radio 3 6 per cent, Radio 4 18 per cent and Luxembourg 12 per cent (Script issue 19, April 1975). Radio Luxembourg countered the ILR research with a Gallup survey of listening in London that showed it had ‘20 per cent more listeners each day than Capital and 43 per cent more each week’ (Script issue 18, March 1975). Radio Forth reported a dipstick survey putting the station only two points behind Radio 1 after just four weeks on air. The daily and weekly reach figures claimed for Forth were 27 per cent and 49 per cent respectively (Script issue 19, April 1975).

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In October 1976 Downtown Radio reported an AGB survey showing a weekly reach of 68 per cent, compared with 45 per cent for Radio Ulster, 24 per cent Radio One and 17 per cent Radio Four (Wavelength issue 7, November 1976). The IBA claimed a survey of the ten stations operating in April 1975 showed a combined audience of ten million across the network. Individual stations reached between ‘around 40 per cent’ and 60 per cent of the available audience in their own areas, commented Tony Stoller, then Head of Radio Programming at the IBA (Radio Guide issue 23, September 1975). Radio Orwell’s Managing Director Donald Brooks claimed dipstick research showed that after just three months on air, ‘100 per cent of the local population knew all about us’ (Radio Guide issue 29, March 1976).

Clearly, if such research can be relied upon, one hundred per cent brand recognition in a market is remarkable. Even viewed more cautiously, there was a growing body of research data to suggest that the first ILR stations were attracting considerable audiences in their own areas. As more stations were due to begin broadcasting, there was a strong sense that, if allowed to grow in number, the Independent Local Radio stations would grow in strength and that the sleeping giant of local radio was finally going to demonstrate its potential. Once fully awake, stretching and rearing up to its full height, this giant had the potential to dominate the radio industry and dwarf the BBC’s ability to programme for and reflect local communities around the UK. The ILR mix of programming, in its many but essentially similar permutations, had demonstrated that it could win large audiences from the comparatively well-resourced BBC networks. Meanwhile the BBC’s nervousness about this new competition and the policy of running OB specials as either a spoiler designed to scupper the ILR launch or an opportunity for the corporation to demonstrate its commitment to regions while there was a particular focus on the area, depending on one’s perspective, shows they were taking ILR seriously. It was a national network leaving the capital to broadcast a number of special editions of regular programmes from the local area, from the relatively strong position of its higher profile as one of only four national stations, rather than the local BBC station that was the vehicle for such activity in those cases where there was one. The BBC, having benefited from its radio monopoly until as late as 1973, had plenty to fear. However, in the next chapter we will see that, while the

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mix of heavily-regulated, public-service inspired, locally originated mainstream and specialist content was popular with many but inevitably was not everyone’s metaphorical cup of tea, it was the least palatable of all among those who had the most to gain and the most to lose from the emerging sector. If only the giant among Lilliputians could throw off the ropes which constrained it, it would be even better able to respond to the commercial and economic challenges of the changed landscape in which it began to find itself.

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3 Growing Pains – Localness: Regulation, Deregulation and What about Automation?

A good handbagging The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 brought about a political revolution in the United Kingdom that few could have foreseen even in the first years of her premiership. At first, even having elected a woman as Prime Minister was such a novelty that it overshadowed many of the differences of style and policy that distinguished Thatcher and her party from their predecessors. The industrial strife and the accompanying public disorder which persisted after the general election, together with mounting unemployment and successive crises in the traditional heavy industries that were crucial to the country’s economic health, preoccupied both politicians and the media alike. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that political commentators of different persuasions became able in time to identify the principal themes and trends which came to characterise the Thatcher years. Thatcher herself was both strengthened and emboldened at home by successful battles with Argentina, in the form of the Falklands War (1982), and with the European Union, in its earlier constitutions as the European Economic Community (or ‘Common Market’) and the European Community (1983–1993). Elements within the largely pro-Conservative press routinely portrayed Thatcher as the ‘Iron Lady’ swinging into action to give foreigners a good ‘handbagging’: according to the discourse they promoted she was firmly on Britain’s side and she would certainly accept no nonsense from ‘Argies’ or ‘Eurocrats’, in the case of the latter most famously over the UK’s contribution to European finances. She also set about shifting the balance of power in domestic industrial relations between 80

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employers and employees, enacting legislation specifically designed to curb the rights of trade unions to engage in industrial action: most visibly by introducing the requirement for a secret ballot and at a stroke removing the power of trade unionists to cause maximum disruption inside and outside the workplace by the calling of wildcat strikes. The ‘flying picket’, a caricature of the peripatetic trade unionist travelling with others en masse to a completely unrelated workplace in order to support someone else’s industrial action, was outlawed under Thatcher, and despite understandable fury on the political left, consequent gains in popularity among electors located in the centre ground of British politics were easily translated into parliamentary seats in the subsequent general elections of 1983 and 1987. With the Thatcher era came the pre-eminence of the right and a decade of deregulation in commercial radio. British politics became more polarised, as right-wing Conservative ideologues became more powerful and the notion of the ‘One Nation Tory’, typified by Edward Heath and his predecessor in office Harold Macmillan as relatively benign right-of-centre politicians concerned to rule for the good of the whole country, became synonymous with weakness and ignominy. A raft of publicly-owned utilities, from telephones and gas to electricity and water, were privatised and one by one private enterprise took over fundamental sectors of the country’s infrastructure that few people would previously have considered potential free markets. All of this met with the raucous approval of the right-wing press, including the growing number of titles under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch. He pioneered the move away from ancient hot metal printing practices towards electronic page layout and the use of modern printing presses that in turn revolutionised the print industry. This was not a good time to be a typesetter by trade. Murdoch’s meteoric rise in both fortunes and notoriety among left-wing commentators was achieved by taking on the print unions in a controversial move of his newspapers to a fortified printing plant at Wapping in East London and standing firm in the face of their protests in noisy confrontations outside the factory gates. Even the distribution of Murdoch’s newspaper titles was transferred, from the unionised, publicly-owned railway network, to the growing privately-owned fleet of lorries of TNT. Against this background the ‘small c’ conservatism that led to the very cautious introduction of ILR in 1973 began to be eroded. Of all the great British institutions that might have been considered suitable for privatisation in the Thatcher years, the BBC was and remains one of the least likely, because of the emotional attachment of the British public to it

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and a widely-held view that its many qualities stem from the uniqueness of its governance as a public body benefiting nonetheless from ‘arms-length’ separation from governments, of whatever political flavour. However much that uniqueness may not remain unassailable in perpetuity, and we will consider some possible future scenarios in a later chapter, even Thatcher knew the time was not right for the privatisation of the BBC. This made the duopoly all the more natural, and the previous BBC monopoly of radio all the more anachronistic in hindsight. There is a further implication to this: the inevitability of parallel private sectors in both television and radio is reinforced if the boundaries of the state are being rolled back in favour of free market provision of other arguably equally ubiquitous, essential services – and so the rise of the political right was inevitably going to provide a pretext, if one were sought, for the rolling back of state control of commercial radio. In short: if a duopoly is considered essential in an industry, perhaps its two elements ought to be as dissimilar as the market and other circumstances might allow. If anything was surprising about the next decade, with publicsector sacred cows falling to wide popular acclaim to the private sector, it is the caution with which change in commercial radio was eventually brought about. In his detailed chronology of the history of Independent Radio, Sounds of Your Life, Tony Stoller identifies a meeting of the Association of Independent Radio Contractors (AIRC) on 23 June 1984 as pivotal in the development of the sector from its beginnings as ILR to something quite different: the commercial radio industry of today (2010: 144–53). The conference, at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel at Heathrow Airport, provided both a focus for unease amongst chairmen and managing directors of the existing ILR companies and a catalyst for change. Among their key concerns was renewed talk of possible legislation to establish a service of Independent National Radio, so different from that of the 1970s had the political environment now become, and it was widely believed that any credible ‘INR’ would inevitably bring increased competition for national advertising. They were also suspicious that improving revenues in ILR might be used to finance INR’s launch. The most financially successful stations in the ILR network were already supporting less successful ones, through a system of ‘secondary’ rentals paid to the IBA once certain thresholds had been crossed in terms of profit, and the IBA in turn was redistributing this income ‘in the interests of the system as a whole’ (Stoller 2010: 38). Meanwhile the duopoly was being externally challenged by a number of offshore pirates which had reappeared

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and continued to broadcast in contravention of the Marine Offences Act, and a newcomer, Laser 558 which was proving particularly popular with audiences in the South-East of England. The significance of the list of demands that emerged from the meeting at Heathrow was greater than the sum of its parts, because both the companies and the regulator had become accustomed to a quite different relationship from that which ensued. Until Heathrow, the relationship largely reflected that which had previously been established in the beautycontest bidding process: the regulator was in charge, and because ILR licences were time-limited and bound by law to be re-advertised, it made sense that the judge in the inevitable next contest was to be appeased whenever possible. Metaphorically, Heathrow was a tipping point or a ‘camel’s back’ moment, and there would be no going back. No longer would the IBA automatically have the upper hand. There is of course considerable irony in the ILR companies suddenly discovering new strengths in collective bargaining, at a time when the government was seriously curtailing the ability of trade unions to use collective might to add weight to their own bargaining positions. Yet because the government’s instincts were in favour of the free market and not state provision, those who might have wished for the IBA to resist the AIRC could hardly have hoped for government support in such an endeavour. At what subsequently became known as the Heathrow Conference, the companies agreed to demand the following: ●

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the government and the IBA should ‘take full account’ of the possible effect on ILR of any change to independent radio as a whole; money paid by ILR stations to the IBA should not be diverted into the development of INR; tougher action should be taken by government against pirate radio stations or the members of AIRC would ‘reconsider’ their own statutory and copyright obligations to pay IBA rentals and royalties, then costing over £13 million per annum; reasonable commercial freedom in a market to operate in ways allowed by all relevant legislation, without unnecessary ‘interference’ by the IBA over programming, broadcasting hours, advertising, technical standards, capital structures, shareholdings and diversification; alignment of regulation by the IBA with the ‘easier’ controls on the emerging cable sector, any new community radio sector that might emerge and any further ‘new forms’ of broadcasting in the UK;

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substantial reductions in rentals paid to the IBA; a recognition of the differences between commercial television and radio, and consequently permission to accept sponsorship on radio (West 1984).

As well as making demands of the government and the regulator, the AIRC resolved to commission a consultancy firm, EIU Informatics, to examine the financial implications of regulation. The subsequent report, released in November 1984, considered four different regulatory scenarios: the heavy-touch regulation that had prevailed since 1973; a two-tier regulatory model with heavier regulation for the more profitable stations and a considerably lightened burden on the others; an overall ‘medium-touch’ granting stations more autonomy over content, economic and technical standards, but leaving the current heavy controls on finance, frequency allocation, ownership and management; and ‘light touch’ regulation that only concerned itself with frequency allocation, more like that of the FCC in the United States. Stoller chronicles in detail the events which followed the Heathrow Conference, including for the first time, direct contact between the contractors and the government, and also the way in which the relationship between them and the IBA changed forever to one of confrontation (2010: 146–52). What was the significance of this realignment of the previous ‘master and servant’ relationship? If, in our analysis, we may for a moment characterise the Independent Local Radio network of the mid to late 1980s as a microcosm of the UK economy, it was struggling at the same time as the developing creed that became known as Thatcherism was beginning to assert itself, to free itself of anti-competitive and restrictive practices standing between it and the maximisation of profit. Just as state provision of essential services had depended on highly regulated, public-serviceoriented state corporations, operating in an environment in which strong trade unions exerted influence over day-to-day operations, so ILR was seeking to break free from state control and gain greater commercial freedom to operate within, and even to exploit, a relatively free market in commercial radio. Because the impetus for change came from the companies themselves, in this context it was they who dealt the status quo a good handbagging – and how could Thatcherite politicians object? In turn, change became inevitable, initially proving conducive then later becoming toxic to localness in radio. Leaving aside for the moment the relative merits of such

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change, the rest of this chapter explores the dichotomy of rampant growth in a rejuvenated commercial radio sector, struggling to break free from the regulatory constraints it perceived as limiting profitability, and in turn a burgeoning new technology offering enticing economies of staffing and scale.

Localness and distinctiveness The characteristics we have observed in the programming on both BBC local radio and the early ILR stations, which best express local identity and address local need, were often most noticeably evidenced by distinctiveness. It is arguable whether local ownership of a radio station is immediately apparent to audiences in any other way than through the station’s output. In more recent years, as we shall explore in the next chapter, a view has gained credibility that content may be local even if the process which generates it is remote. Of greater significance to audiences than who owns a radio station may be the nature of the content and how much it appears to be unlike content produced for other people in other communities. Early ILR’s wide range of specialist music programmes – scheduled mainly in what inevitably became off-peak programme ghettos of small but appreciative audiences sharing a common interest – were not the only ways in which the stations served their communities with bespoke programming aimed at them. Distinctiveness also lay in the more mainstream programming, too. Each station developed its own on-air branding, using jingles produced by specialised companies in the UK, such as Alfasound Tapetrix, or the United States, such as PAMS in Dallas Texas. It was unusual for two stations to use the same ‘package’ of jingles, even though it is common practice for jingle production companies to cut costs by licensing packages to several stations that are geographically distant. This has the advantage that once the music or effects have been composed and recorded, the remaining creative production costs are limited to arranging for the station name and wavelength (or, since the late 1970s, the frequency) to be re-sung for each additional station choosing to buy the rights to use the jingle package. Unusually, at launch Marcher Sound and Radio Mercury shared a package produced by British composer David Arnold, the centre-piece of which was a two and three-quarter minute-long orchestral theme tune produced with Paul Hart and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Initially, many stations’ jingle packages included such lengthy station themes to be played at the start of the day and at closedown, but an increasing trend for twenty-four hour

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operation made such extravagances redundant. Radio City launched with jingles sung by the soul singer Madeline Bell, one of which survived as the top-of-the-hour news banner until 1991, for much of its lifetime anachronistically identifying the station with its AM wavelength, 194 metres, rather than the AM frequency 1548 kilohertz, or its FM frequency 96.7 megahertz. Beacon’s ‘Americanised’ sound was partly attributed to its tight, fast-paced PAMS package and the short, sharp news banner based for no reason that would have been apparent to its audience other than the sense of urgency the arrangement conveyed, on the most recognisable notes in the Isaac Hayes theme from the blaxploitation movie, Shaft. Stations were also free to adopt strap lines of their own choice, positioning themselves in terms of their own perceived unique selling point of appeal to their potential audience. Capital was ‘In tune with London’, Piccadilly claimed ‘Nobody does it better’, Beacon’s main theme proclaimed it was ‘The Sunshine Sound’ and in Bristol (mistakenly as events went on to demonstrate), Radio West’s car stickers claimed it offered ‘The music you want, the information you need’, while its jingles proclaimed that ‘We got a good thing going’. Since 1984, the original Radio Mercury strapline ‘The heart of the south’ (re-sung for Marcher as ‘Your station, your sound’), has developed a certain irony that will become apparent in the next chapter. Various other framing devices in their programming, such as each station’s house style for the highlighting of oldies (referring to them as ‘Radio City Gold’, ‘Beacon Supergold’ or ‘Piccadilly Magic’), added to their distinctiveness. Several stations had their own record charts, too (for example the Piccadilly Hit 40, Metro’s Pop 30 and the Radio City Twenty-Twenty, the latter consisting of an equal mix of singles and albums), rivalling in their own areas the Radio 1 and Radio Luxembourg charts that had for so long dominated the UK’s music retail sector. Some charts were based on actual sales in a number of local record shops, some were based on the station’s own airplay and others represented mere guesswork by the station’s own Head of Music. Having a ‘prediction chart’ that managed to elevate songs to the number one spot a week or two before they made number one on the BBC’s official national sales chart was thought to create an impression that the commercial station was leading, rather than following the music scene. Swansea Sound Head of Music, Terry Mann identified ‘several advantages’ in this: ‘perhaps the most important of these is the ability to remove records which have stopped selling, rather than watch them drop down the chart a couple of places at a time, and this relieves the tired listener who will scream if he hears “that” song again’ (Radio

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Guide issue 22, July 1975). It was also possible to reflect, either genuinely or artificially, local differences in musical taste. Clyde’s Tartan Thirty suggested a much greater relevance to the likes and dislikes of its Glaswegian audience. Because the music policies of each station were determined locally, by the Head of Music, the Programme Controller or a senior presenter, that autonomy of choice was reflected in each station’s musical output. Generally, individual presenters chose the oldies they played between the playlisted songs, even in daytime, so in turn they inevitably stamped their own preferences and perceptions on the station for the duration of their own shows. Visual framing devices, including logos on car stickers, premises and stationery, also provided opportunities for stations to reinforce their own identities in the way they presented themselves to their various local communities. Reminiscing later on the star quality of the original Piccadilly Radio at which he first learnt his trade, the presenter Chris Evans described the station’s logo as ‘really funky and could have come off a Pink Floyd album cover’ (at the 2010 Radio Festival, Salford Quays). He went on to describe how as a teenager he was overawed by the experience of chance encounters with the station’s presenters in the Piccadilly Plaza shopping centre at which the original Manchester city studios were located – and from the side of which larger than life photos of those presenters looked down on shoppers in the street below. The young Chris Evans was clearly inspired by the heady mix of celebrity and localness – ‘Pete Baker was from Warrington’ – which was a new experience for many like him in local communities around the UK. Celebrity is of course relative: just as one may be well known in the western world for one’s appearances on film, hit records, success in developing software or dexterity with a football, one can equally be unheard of in the ‘third world’. It follows that one may be a celebrity within certain geographical limits and unheard of outside them, in the manner that regional television newsreaders may be instantly recognisable on one high street but unknown as few as thirty or forty miles away. As McQuail noted, ‘the fact of being known is often more important than the content of what is known and is the only pre-condition for celebrity’ (2010: 72). For the first time in their own personal experience and somewhat paradoxically, celebrity had come to those audiences, rather than being a national, and hence remote, phenomenon. Such is the magic of radio that many of the presenters even sounded larger than life, and many of the stations sounded every bit as impressive as Piccadilly did to Evans. The various framing devices, jingles, logos, corporate identities among them, and the star quality of much

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of the music that they played bestowed on local ILR station presenters a stature in their own communities that had previously been the preserve of Radio 1 and the much larger, regional or quasi-national offshore pirates that preceded them. Occasional record company promotions carried on in the regions afforded local stations welcome opportunities to benefit from the local equivalent of national brand recognition, whether it be an appearance of the pop group the Wombles to sing Wombling Merry Christmas in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens or the re-singing of Pilot’s 1975 hit record January to incorporate within the better known lyrics the words ‘This is the station with style, 261 on your dial, Piccadilly…’. Almost exclusively, these were home grown celebrities, as opposed to ready-made ones co-opted from other media. They grew in stature with the stations which showcased them, and because one of the greatest strengths of the medium of radio is its ability to connect on a personal level with individuals within its audiences (Crisell 1994: 68–9) and exploit that personal relationship in a number of ways (Starkey 2004: 78–83), they developed not only a closeness but also a special status. There was a transfer market, in that new stations launching needed presenters with experience, so they would appoint or hire (depending, respectively, on whether the presenter was to become a member of staff or a freelancer) one or more from existing stations. In this way, for example, the former Swinging Radio England, Radio Caroline and Radio Northsea International presenter, Roger Day, launched Piccadilly’s breakfast show but had moved on in turn to BRMB, Radio West and Invicta Radio by the end of the 1980s. Unless audiences remembered him from his offshore days, and the audiences for the post-1967 pirates were relatively very small, in each station he has joined, Roger has had to grow a following from scratch: in essence to develop the status of celebrity from relative obscurity. Despite this considerable disadvantage in pursuing a career that on the one hand depends on celebrity but on the other confines that celebrity to relatively modest geographical areas, Roger has enjoyed considerable success on most of those stations and several others which have benefited from his talent and experience since then. However, only in Kent could he truly be described as particularly ‘local’ to the area and its people. Back at Piccadilly, of course, that hadn’t deterred Chris Evans in his excitement at a chance encounter with the person he instantly recognised as Roger Day. Nor had it diminished Day’s considerable contribution to Piccadilly’s immediate impact, both on potential audiences in Greater Manchester and commercially, as evidenced by its obvious commercial success.

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This obstacle to wider celebrity, intrinsic as it must inevitably be to local broadcasting, is not one that applies only to any particular individual. The transfer market in UK commercial radio, as individuals sought to either progress in their career from smaller stations to larger ones, secure better remuneration, exploit opportunities to take on management responsibilities or simply bring about major change in their professional or social lives, became notoriously active, even in the 1970s. As ILR grew in size, so did the transfer market, although the term itself is a little misleading: the professional mobility it represents reflects little of the market element that relates to the transfer of professional footballers from club to club mid-contract, with handsome payments often in six or more figures being made in deals between the clubs themselves. There have indeed been such instances of compensation being paid by one station to another for the loss of a valued presenter before the expiry of a fixed-term employment contract, but sums have been modest and normally confidential to the parties involved, and the practice is uncommon. Most presenter moves have happened on expiry of contracts, rather than within the period during which the presenter has a continuing legal obligation to the first station. Furthermore, presenter mobility has by no means been solely voluntary, confined to presenters’ own initiatives or the lure of more attractive offers elsewhere: the ‘carrot’. Many have been assisted in their mobility by programming decisions by the radio station management, who in the case of freelancers have simply not renewed their contracts beyond their legal termination: the proverbial ‘stick’. Many presenters have suffered the ignominy – or in some cases what they might prefer to call notoriety – of being sacked or having their contracts terminated early. Often this happens as a result of something they have said or done on air, perhaps an infringement of the relevant code on standards of broadcasting practice. Alternatively, it could simply be that their listening figures have been disappointing.

Listen who’s talking An effect of such widespread presenter mobility, even since the earliest days of ILR, has been to lessen an element of localness in most stations’ output because if a radio presenter is geographically generic, in being able to operate professionally and with some success on any station, irrespective of location and origin, that presenter’s ability to be locally-specific is therefore limited. Any presenter may talk on air about local phenomena: public events, private experiences, widely-held local opinions (such as

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over the performance of a local football team), the weather, traffic conditions affecting drivers and users of public transport in the area and so on, but however professional, few presenters who are not from the local area can be unequivocally perceived to be of the area. Arguably, though, as commercial enterprises with an absolute requirement to operate profitably the stations were right to insist on programming on-air talent in order to maximise audiences, rather than fulfil some notion of required indigeneity in employing presenters. Quite simply, there was a scarcity of talent and experience in radio presentation that meant programme controllers would inevitably have to consider, and probably employ, people from outside the local area – and despite the heavy touch of the IBA, with its requirement for programmers to submit schedules for their approval, they did not insist on localness as a criterion for such crucial programming decisions. Another example from Piccadilly 261 was Pete Reeves, who was born in Hammersmith, West London and grew up in Southampton where his father was in the Merchant Navy. He moved to Bristol for a couple of years before going back to London to work on the factory radio station UBN (United Biscuits Network), set up to provide round-the-clock music for workers at the company’s factories. His UBN show was the very first to be sent down the line, in September 1970. After a spell running a radio commercial production company in Soho, Reeves then moved to Manchester to join Piccadilly’s launch line-up. Before its closure, a number of presenters cut their teeth on UBN before moving on to the new ILR stations. Table 3.1 provides a snapshot of the geographical origins of the presenters on a range of early ILR stations in 1976, in the weekday breakfast, mid-morning and drive dayparts which can be considered to be peak broadcasting times in an era which predated breakfast and morning television and the multichannel television environment we currently enjoy. Inevitably, because of the historical nature of this analysis, because families often move when children are young, and because individual circumstances change, some assumptions have had to be made in a number of cases, in particular where often-controvertible published biographical data is ambiguous on the issue of ‘origin’. Station press releases and promotional literature of the era rather predictably tended not to emphasise incongruity in their presenters because to do so would run counter to their key pitch to potential audiences as being local. Of greatest interest to this analysis, rather than place of birth, is whether the presenter would have grown up in the station’s TSA, and therefore developed a greater natural infinity with the indigenous population than someone moving into the area with the express purpose of presenting a local radio

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Table 3.1 The geographical origins of the presenters on a range of first-wave ILR stations in 1976, in weekday breakfast, mid-morning and drive dayparts Breakfast

Mid-morning

Afternoon drive

Capital Radio

Graham Dene (in TSA)

Michael Aspel (in TSA)

Roger Scott (in TSA)

Radio Clyde

Dave Marshall (in TSA)

Steve Jones (Cheshire)

Brian Ford (Edinburgh)

BRMB Radio

Adrian Juste (Leicestershire)

Ed Doolan (Australia)

Nicky Steele (in TSA)

Piccadilly Radio

Roger Day (Kent)

Pete Reeves (Southampton)

Andy Peebles (Hertfordshire)

Metro Radio

Bill Steel (in TSA)

Len Groat (London) Giles Squire (Sussex)

194 Radio City Arthur Murphy (Dublin)

Norman Thomas (in TSA)

Roger Blyth (in TSA)

Radio Trent

Peter Quinn (in TSA)

Kid Jenson (Canada)

John Peters (London)

Sources include: Radio Guide and Rusling & Rusling (2001).

programme there. Where possible, biographical data has been verified through triangulation with other available sources. One clear manifestation of localness is accent. David ‘Kid’ Jensen, as a former Radio Luxembourg presenter, has often been mistaken in the UK for an American, but he is also known for his understandable keenness to assert his origins as a Canadian. The big, brash sound of Luxembourg in the 1970s was one which easily accommodated transatlantic accents: it was, after all, an international station based in Europe, it had an almost national reach in the United Kingdom and other high profile presenters of the era had included Bob Stewart, a Liverpudlian with an affected American accent, and ‘The Royal Ruler’ Emperor Rosko who actually was American. When Jensen joined Radio Trent in Nottingham he sounded very unlike the vast majority of the indigenous population in this mature mining community in the English East Midlands and now he was a relative outsider working in local radio. Trent turned out to be a mere stepping stone en route to Radio 1, which he joined later in 1976, but while at the ILR station his voice, and one might be tempted to assume, many of those attitudes he expressed either wittingly or unwittingly on air reflected little of the localness of the station. Sounding so unlike his audience of course made Kid Jensen

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particularly incongruous in Nottingham, although his was but a single extreme example of a phenomenon found throughout local radio both then and today: local radio presenters who sound very obviously not local. As accent is very often an indicator of geographical origin, it is worth considering how significant local accents might be in reinforcing rather than merely signifying localness. An important consideration here, particularly in the context of the era which we have been examining, lies in audience expectation. Clearly with very few local accents in prime time on ILR, if this had been an important criterion for their audiences in deciding what to listen to, the stations would have struggled to achieve the listening figures cited earlier and derive from them the advertising revenues that supported them. Because until the arrival of local radio, listeners were unused to hearing local, or rather ‘regional’, accents on the broadcast media, the act of broadcasting may have been more closely associated in listeners’ minds with more neutral, perhaps more middle-class speech. The BBC’s insistence on the adoption of a ‘received pronunciation’ by its earliest presenters is well documented, and some of the earliest recordings of sound broadcasting appear amusing today simply because of a different incongruity to that which we have been discussing: there is almost a disbelief today that ‘real’ people could once have spoken colloquially with the clipped, refined tones and precise elocution of such once nationally-famous radio personalities as Jack de Manio and Alvar Liddell. Ironically, de Manio’s parents were of Italian and Polish origin, but his pronunciation, like Liddell’s, were once as much part of the sonic branding of the BBC as the Greenwich time signal and the theme tune to The Archers. Crisell noted the relaxation over time of the original formality in what he termed ‘broadcasting style’, a progression from ‘declamatory’ to ‘intimate’ (1994: 12). Certainly, as radio changed from the original ‘wireless’ to the ‘tranny’ (or transistor) the relative informality in presentation styles on Radio Luxembourg, the offshore pirates and eventually Radio 1 may have accommodated more familiar modes of address, but paradoxically regional accents on these mainly national or quasi-national stations were very rare even in the 1960s and 1970s, and were conspicuously limited to such exceptions as the unreconstructed northerner Jimmy Saville who was born in Leeds but moved to Salford, Greater Manchester, before joining Luxembourg in 1958. Hendy records the resistance in the mid-1970s to regional accents on BBC Radio 4, which as a national network seemed to generate among substantial numbers of its listeners an expectation that presenters should sound geographically neutral (2007: 110). Particular

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antipathy existed to Northern Irish accents because of the developing ‘troubles’ in the province, but there were also suggestions that this issue was a means of restricting working-class people’s access to the airwaves. Whatever non-negotiable expectations listeners may have had of ‘their’ new local radio stations, they do not appear to have included one that the presenters’ voices would have to be regionally accented: even though their neighbours and friends may have spoken with an accent, in their prior experience, the radio and television both tended towards regional, if not a ‘showbiz’ neutrality. It would be incorrect, though, to assume that the presenters listed above all spoke with the accent of the regions of their origin, as many will have sounded more if not completely neutral than many of their working-class neighbours, for accents are often less pronounced among the middle classes. Alternatively, in an era in which regional accents were perceived as unwelcome in the media, many may have undergone voice training or merely adapted their own speech patterns voluntarily in order to make themselves more employable in their chosen career. Because the advice of the era for would-be radio presenters, or ‘disc jockeys’, even from the unlikeliest of sources (Rosko 1976: 194–5), was to be oneself, few will have adapted their speech for radio to such an extent as Bob Stewart, and although some critics of ILR spoke of ‘mid-Atlantic’ accents, in reality few ILR presenters actually feigned Americanised speech. More common, and notwithstanding the presenter mobility we have already discussed, was the presence of a single prominent local voice in a peak timeslot: a programming decision which could be interpreted negatively as tokenism. There were many examples of this in the 1970s and 1980s, almost as if the presence of the single ‘local’ were widely considered among ILR programmers to address a key criterion in establishing localness. Billy Butler, Johnny Kennedy and Pete Price all featured with strong Scouse accents on Radio City at various times in the station’s history, each one often as the only apparent Scouser in mainline weekday presentation. Mel Scholes on Signal in Stoke-onTrent, James Stannage on Piccadilly, Roy Norry on Marcher, Les Ross on BRMB and Alan Robson on Metro may all be considered to be further examples, each enjoying considerable success in terms of audience ratings and typically remaining on these local stations for longer than many of their less distinctive colleagues. The nightly phone-in programme Night Owls has been broadcast on Metro Radio since 1974, and presented by local personality Alan Robson since 1983. At the time of writing, Robson’s enduring popularity with radio listeners in the region attests to the programme’s importance as a conduit for popular culture,

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mores and expression. Benefiting from consistently high listening figures, Night Owls has proven to be compelling late-night listening for generations of North-Eastern people, principally in the conurbations of Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland, but also in the wider region, extending from parts of Northumbria to the North and County Durham to the South. Robson often features ghost stories and suggested hauntings in Night Owls, as well as presenting a weekly rock show on the station. Mel Scholes, although actually from Manchester, some thirty or so miles to the North of Stoke-on-Trent, was one of the launch presenters on Signal in 1983 and he remained with the station until shortly before he died, twenty years later. The dockworker turned Merseybeat singer and Cavern Club DJ, Billy Butler, has consistently been one of the top names in local radio on Merseyside since the 1980s, hopping between Radios City and Merseyside. So attached were they to their local areas (or perhaps because the formula which works for them on air would fail elsewhere), presenters such as these who on air seem to epitomise localness, have been surprisingly rare among the transient population of local radio presenters in the commercial sector. Another criterion that established the localness of early ILR was not negotiable with the IBA. That presenters addressing their audiences should be located in a station’s TSA was essential, unlike their originating from it. At least to some extent they were living the lives experienced by their listeners in that there would be geographic commonalities between their respective interfacing with the societies around them, if not exactly parity of lifestyle. Either instinctively or following encouragement from their programmers they were able to exploit such experiential similarities in connecting on air with a maximum number of listeners, in the manner described by Crisell as being one of the essential characteristics of radio (1994: 69). This was unavoidable. In early ILR technological and regulatory barriers to programming originating from outside the station’s editorial area meant that programmes were produced and presented almost exclusively by the individual station from studios in its own TSA. Exceptions included some syndicated programming, such as LBC’s Decision Makers and relays enforced on smaller stations by the IBA, such as Marcher relaying City, as we have already seen. Local news was produced and read locally, and newsrooms were based in the TSA. The specialist programming we identified earlier was also produced and presented locally, rather than a single programme in each of the different musical genres being produced by one station and syndicated around the network. Such an approach might have been rationalised as follows: country and western originates predominantly

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in Nashville, Tennessee, so there is no need for the same base material to be packaged in many different ways in each of several ILR locations around the country, and neither is it necessary for other musical genres to be re-presented in similar ways on different stations. However, to do so would have run counter to the prevailing ethos of the time. Furthermore, stations were as able to bring their own distinctiveness of style to the specialist programmes, whatever music they featured, as they were to the more mainstream programming, irrespective of the geographical origins of the presenter. They could also include local gig guides as a service to listeners seeking live performances in their own area that they could attend. The wide range of locally-originated content broadcast by ILR stations provided almost unlimited opportunities for the stations to express and reinforce their localness and therefore proximity to their listeners, and in winning new audiences from the BBC and from Luxembourg this proximity was a trump card: a way in which the new phenomenon of local radio could both establish an identity and create a market for the one asset it had to sell, commercial airtime for the purposes of advertising.

Reinforcing localness: the hard sell Ironically, the advertising which is primarily intended to provide the main source of income for the new stations was, and is, one of the most incontrovertibly local aspects of local commercial radio. Again, local accents in advertising were, and remain uncommon, not least because the most successful voiceover artists, who began to develop quite lucrative careers travelling from booking to booking around the commercial production departments of the growing network of stations, tended to sound geographically neutral. In the 1970s and 1980s a relatively tightknit community of voiceover artists developed within very broadly drawn, self-defined regions of activity, limited only by the distances these individuals were prepared to travel for this quite lucrative work. As fees were governed by the actors’ union, Equity, the fee for each individual advert recorded to be played out on a single local station was not large – under ten pounds for much of the period. However, in order to attract the best, and in their minds the most professional-sounding voiceover artists, the local commercial producers in each station would organise their working week around a single or perhaps two or three recording sessions a week. This meant that the visiting voiceover artist could rely on being asked to voice as many as a dozen or more scripts in a session lasting little more than an hour, which would make the trip worth their investment in time

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and travel. As the number of stations multiplied, careful route planning by a voiceover artist – or by an agency representing a number of such clients – made this peripatetic work even more rewarding. Although most successful voiceover artists could act and had a repertoire of accents, personas and expressions they could adopt when the commercial scripts so demanded, the majority of this work required a straight delivery, and in line with the expectations of the era, naturally one which sounded geographically neutral. Talented though they were, it would have been unwise for the dozen or so scripts recorded in a session to all have been recorded in an affected local accent: to do so would have strained the genuineness upon which the close relationship between the radio voice and the radio listener depends (Crisell 1986: 10). Certainly, local advertisers were not asking for local voices on their commercials in significant numbers, and another reason for this may have been the proximity of their own commercials to national commercials sent to the stations by agencies which were predominantly based in London. One of radio’s great advantages over other media lies in its ability to create a big sound without the need for big budgets: a professional voiceover artist voicing a decent script over a standard track of production (or ‘library’ music) could sound as polished a production as anything emanating from London, and of course the possibilities of presenting the advertising message in the form of a short drama script are well documented elsewhere (Starkey 2004: 150–3, 157–8). So, and largely because they could afford to, local advertisers wanted their commercials to sound every bit as professional as the few national commercials played before or after them. Fairly common exceptions to this rule were the handful of entrepreneurs who, often despite gentle discouragement by the station sales executive handling the account or the commercial producer, insisted on appearing in their own radio commercials. Thus in the mid-1980s ‘John Sparky of Sparky’s in Sparkhill’ proclaimed in song to Beacon’s listeners over a tune of his own composition the virtues of his piano retail business, and a carpet retailer named Spencer Mason (‘It’s The Boss at Great Western Carpets’) offered Marcher Sound listeners, over a library music bed of Spanish flamenco, deals on carpets that included ‘free guitar lessons’. Even today, some advertisers repeat this gimmick or even just seek to give the impression that the voice on the commercial is that of the owner of the company, and so in North-East England audiences are divided over whether the voice on radio and television adverts of ‘Frank’ from Frank’s Factory Flooring is an asset to the company or an irritant factor, with its strident catchphrase ‘I love carpets, me’ (Northern Echo, 2004).

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With or without a Frank or a ‘Boss’ local radio commercials perform a particular function beyond the monetary motive for commissioning their production and booking the airtime during which they get played on the radio. In almost every case, these are local business people speaking personally to their actual and potential customers, either directly or through the intermediary of the voiceover artist. They bring the sense of personal address that is particular to radio and which we have already considered to be one of the medium’s assets. Just as local newspapers seek whenever possible to reinforce their relevance to the editorial areas in which copies are regularly distributed, through the inclusion not only of local stories, but also through the inclusion wherever possible of place names, street names and pictures of familiar locations, so local advertising reinforces on a systematic basis the localness of the radio station on which it is broadcast. The high rotation of such ads lends constant repetition to such names, places, local addresses including business premises or nearby landmarks and even local telephone dialling codes. The first listeners to 194 Radio City may have been surprised to hear early on 21 October 1974 the first advert, beginning with the chant ‘Birkenhead, Birkenhead, Birkenhead Co-op’. Truly this was the moment when local commercial radio arrived in the town of Birkenhead, the run-down near neighbour of the city of Liverpool which lies across the stretch of water popularised by the 1964 Gerry and the Pacemakers hit Ferry Cross the Mersey, the former being distinguished in many locals’ minds by little else.

When some speech was meaningful We now return to the tight, even heavy-handed regulation of the IBA as the first regulator of ILR, and a phenomenon known as ‘meaningful speech’. Stoller recounts the origin of this term and the way in which it became used to define speech which was worthwhile and therefore contributed to the general justification for the existence of commercial radio, as opposed to speech which bore little such intrinsic value as a criterion by which the network might be judged (2010: 103). He explains that, when it was the ITA, the regulator had devised a model for analysing the output of the ITV companies in order to be able to measure their compliance with the public-service obligations that had been placed upon them. An ‘entire department’ was busily compiling detailed statistical analyses for independent television, and so in 1976 a parallel methodology by which the Radio Division might begin measuring radio output was devised. A pilot analysis of ten stations

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concluded that on average 46 per cent of their output was music, 10 per cent news, 3 per cent sport, 6 per cent advertisements and the rest was other speech. By separating the other speech into that which was ‘meaningful’ (19 per cent of total output) and that which was not (16 per cent), a complementary concept was born, (although not one which was as widely used), which Stoller wryly observes was that of ‘meaningless speech’, effectively the ‘prattle’ identified by some early critics of ILR as one of its inevitable weaknesses. In determining these percentages, the IBA deemed ‘meaningful speech’ to consist of the following: current/social affairs, community information, features/arts/ interviews, listener/consumer service, traffic, weather/public service, competitions/quizzes, religion, education, programme information and serials/drama. Once they had some data to work with, the IBA began to exhort the stations to do even more to deflect criticism that relied upon the ‘pop and prattle’ label. According to the IBA methodology, the stations responded more or less positively, with significant improvements recorded in 1978. Music was up to 53 per cent and meaningful speech was 18 per cent, while the newly designated ‘light’ speech was down to only 9 per cent (Stoller 2010: 103–4). Beyond the dry category labels determined by the IBA statisticians, what did all that meaningful speech consist of, and was it, by nature of its being produced almost entirely in the locality, a significant contribution to ‘localness’? Inevitably, phone-ins, the newfangled interactivity of the era, were very common. Because of the relative cheapness of what we might today deem to be moderated user-generated content and its potential to qualify as meaningful speech, the phone-in was very popular among programmers as a built programme separate from others. Although ILR did not invent the phone-in, it certainly played a large part in popularising it in the UK in the 1970s for the reasons we have already identified, as well as a certain novelty it brought to the schedules. Hearing other listeners on the radio, calling from a recognisable, nearby location, further exploited the localness of the ILR station and its potential to establish positive synergies with the target audience. Then, the act of users generating content was of course entirely linear, unlike today, when different users may be creating on-line content simultaneously: in most circumstances only one person can speak effectively on radio at a time, and so normally only one caller would be speaking in conversation with the presenter, who is effectively moderating the content, deciding when the caller may speak, asking questions in order to determine the unfolding of the narrative discourse developing between them, and ultimately deciding when that caller’s contribution should

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come to an end. In this way, even if there should happen to be a producer giving the presenter instructions from a separate control room, the centrality of the presenter in this genre of radio programming is not negotiable (Starkey 2004: 83–8). From its launch, it was clear that LBC would depend heavily on phone-ins. Perhaps predictably, Holiday 417 (named after the station’s original wavelength on the AM band), offered Saturday and Sunday morning callers advice on travel. However, the phone-in also featured prominently in the weekday schedule, which included Open Line, a topical current affairs-based phone-in to George Gale from 10am to midday, and Nightline from midnight to 4.30am. Capital also had a nightly phone-in, which was also called Open Line but was hosted by Brian Hayes, while BRMB’s Open Line was both a consumer advice programme on weekday afternoons and a Sunday night religious phone-in with the Reverend Alan Nin. Clyde’s offering was simply entitled Phone In. City had Hotline; Hallam Call In. Some such programmes had less predictable titles: Piccadilly launched with fifteen minutes of news in the afternoon drive daypart followed by sixty-five minutes of Piccadilly Line from 5.45pm. Metro’s Talkback on weekdays at 9pm majored on the arts on Tuesdays, sport on Wednesdays and the press on Fridays. Surprisingly, on some music stations the phone-in figured more prominently in the daytime schedule. On Plymouth Sound, Programme Controller David Bassett ‘chaired’ Phone Forum each weekday from 10am to midday: ‘by the people, for the people. A vehicle for spontaneous comments on events of the moment’ (Radio Guide issue 22, July 1975). Each lunchtime on Swansea Sound, at noon, Gorseinon 3031 was broadcast, Gorseinon being the local telephone exchange to where the studios were situated. The programme was named after ‘the number to ring to give your opinion on matters of the moment, and on Mondays to get your buy and sell items on the air in our bumper edition of Take It Away’ (Radio Guide issue 22, July 1975). Take It Away was also a feature running throughout the Dave Bowen mid-morning show which preceded the lunchtime slot, so we may assume there was considerable appetite for this lighter output, which was obviously less intellectually challenging than the topical debates on current affairs. Undoubtedly, the use of the phone to put listeners live on air anywhere in the ILR schedules enabled the precious needletime allocation to be spread more thinly, but just as Bowen ran Take It Away in short bursts throughout his daily show, it was used much more widely as a feature within a longer sequence programme than as a shorter ‘built’ programme of the kind we have just discussed above.

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Here lies one of the essential dichotomies around the use of the term ‘meaningful speech’ as a criterion by which public service was measured by the regulator and by the stations themselves. If current affairs could seem dry and unappealing to audiences situated in the C2, D and E bands of the most widely-used social demographic scale of the era, competitions, telephone dedications of songs to family and friends and opportunities to buy and sell second-hand goods in a telephonic car boot sale did not. In fact, this kind of programming could well have been as popular as the music which surrounded it. Certainly, it could be argued that it was local content: the callers were local, the locations they were identified as calling from were local, and this constant reinforcement of local identifiers achieved for the radio stations that featured their listeners on air in this way the local newspaper effect of neighbourhood recall. The telephonic (or ‘virtual’ as it might be deemed today), car boot sale was one of the most popular ways in which programmers in early ILR sought to provide meaningful speech. On the IBA list of criteria it could certainly be described, if generously, as ‘community information’, a ‘listener/consumer service’, or a ‘public service’ – in the narrow sense of providing a service to members of the public, much as a newsagent’s window full of ‘for sale’ cards might do. Known variously as Tradio (BRMB, Plymouth Sound, Radio Tees) and Trading Post (City), on Downtown there was a variant, Swap Shop, and on Forth yet another, where listeners may not have noticed the typographical pun in the title Swop Shop. Meaningful speech persisted as a term used in ILR well into the 1980s, and as more stations came on air, new and sometimes more inventive ways of being ‘meaningful’ while also maintaining popular appeal were devised. Most interviews, with the exception of the cynically banal, fell into one or another of the meaningful speech categories. Mid-mornings weathered a long test of time as a suitable slot in many schedules for guests dropping in to the studio, and the range was broad – from actors to more colourful politicians, from local historians to musicians, from event organisers to charity walkers and from comedians to authors. As shorter, built programmes began to give way to longer, more varied sequences, afternoons also favoured regular guest slots, in which a gardening expert might appear every Monday, a vet on Tuesdays, a solicitor on Wednesdays, a nutritionist on Thursdays and a fashion expert on Fridays. Cookery ‘experts’ would talk listeners through recipes, and it was not uncommon for mini-outside broadcasts to come from the radio stations’ own kitchens as exotic dishes sizzled away on gas cookers and station staff gathered round to be among the first to try the

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result. Some more adventurous stations sent reporters out with a radio car if they had one, a vehicle equipped with a VHF transmitter and a telescopic aerial which could send live material back to the studio. They would begin with a live two-way chat with the presenter in the studio, then go on to interview subjects on location. Depending on the staffing resource available, the roving reporters sent out had varying levels of support. One reporter returning to Radio City forgot to lower the aerial before entering a multi-storey car park, and the roof was ripped off the car. Sadly a death occurred when the operator failed to notice before raising the aerial that there were power lines overhead. Some stations cleverly drew on external resources to help sustain their speech output at levels which convincingly ticked the ‘meaningful speech’ boxes. Small teams of contributors were set up within stations that were financed by public money along the lines of an Action Desk, an Action Line, or some other formula which implied community action being undertaken by the station for the benefit of the local community, but was actually financed through local government grants or by the Community Service Volunteers (CSV) organisation. Founded in 1962, CSV aims to develop its teams of volunteers through confidencebuilding initiatives, and radio provides an ideal vehicle for this to take place, as we shall see in the last chapter. During the 1980s other initiatives designed to ease the consequences of the mass unemployment with which the country was having to come to terms provided willing trainee producers and reporters who undertook a range of roles in content production, from interviewing other community workers about what they could do for the unemployed to simply compiling ‘What’s on’ information to be read out by a station’s regular presenters. Undoubtedly, this kind of initiative produced some worthwhile outcomes, and a corpus of evidence began to be generated, if not necessarily recorded in any systematic way, of the public good that could be done by radio. At the time of writing, it is far more common to find a CSV Action Desk in a BBC local station (for example Radios Newcastle, Lincolnshire, London, Leicester and Gloucestershire), than in a commercial radio station, so different now are the expectations of and conditions imposed upon the commercial sector. Not every ILR station and every presenter valued the contribution made by its Action Desk, and some programmers were keen to drop what they considered to be ‘worthy’ content as soon as they could. Indeed, it would be easy today to dismiss much of this locallyoriginated content as a product of a bygone era, one in which production values were lower than today’s and when needletime restrictions

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and regulatory expectations meant such programming was essential. However, this was the localness that contributed to the distinctiveness of each station and which some may argue is missing today. So tightly controlled in almost every detail were these early schedules in ILR that even minor changes to them had to be agreed in advance with the IBA, who used their powers to approve or reject programming decisions in what they considered to be the best interests of the stations’ local audiences and the reputation of the growing network over which it presided (Stoller 2010: 104). The stations which launched during the late eighties brought innovation to the ILR mix, but also repeated formulae that worked either for their audiences or for the regulator or both. In scheduling programming, the tendency throughout the network continued to be to favour longer sequences and significantly fewer built programmes. As we have already seen, though, in more obvious ways resistance to regulatory micro-management was emerging.

Success or failure? Now who’s listening? Before we move on, it is worth pausing to reflect on the progress made by the stations in the network and by the IBA in their own different ways immediately before the sea change represented by the tail end of the 1980s and the onset of the 1990s. The ad hoc surveys of listening commissioned by the stations, using a variety of methodologies, which produced the headline data exemplified at the end of Chapter 2, were clearly inadequate if a credible picture were to be constructed which might point to any progress towards national coverage of the kind that would be of greater interest to big spending clients already used to advertising on ITV (Stoller 2010: 87). A new body, the Joint Industry Committee for Radio Audience Research (JICRAR) was set up to provide both stations and advertisers with a standardised set of data covering the network in its current state, even with great gaps in geographical coverage. By Spring 1982 it covered a total of 32,819,000 adults and a further 6,651,063 children aged 5–14. The adult population had grown by five million in the previous three years. By aggregating the audiences of all the stations on air, data for an ‘all ILR’ audience were constructed, which was then compared with different BBC networks, as shown in Table 3.2. This of course told a very positive story, because among adults ‘ILR’ as a whole beat each of the BBC national networks in those areas where ILR was available. When the Association of Independent Radio Contractors (AIRC) released this data, both the reach and share of ILR were expressed as percentages within the Total Survey Area (TSA) of

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Table 3.2 The ‘league table’ of radio audience research published by JICRAR for Spring 1982 Share of listening %

Weekly reach %

Number of listeners

Average hours of listening (per listener)

1 ILR

33

52

17,189,000

13.5

2 BBC Radio 1

24

45

14,870,000

11.5

3 BBC Radio 2

21

39

12,956,000

11.5

4 BBC Radio 4

12

24

7,837,00

10.5

5 BBC Local Radio

6

18

5,775,000

7.6

6 BBC Radio 3

1

8

2,684,000

3.7

7 Radio Luxembourg

1

4

1,416,000

3.3

32,819,000 adults, not the whole population of the UK. In many ways this was a fair comparison, as otherwise the non-availability of an ILR service in large swathes of the territory would have skewed the findings, but as always with statistical analysis, it is important to be aware of what is being discussed. If ever one were needed, this JICRAR survey release represents a timely reminder that statistics can be misleading. It is worth noting that aggregating the data for the BBC Local Radio stations included in the combined area leaves them in fifth position, but of course some parts of the ‘ILR area’ had no BBC locals, for example Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow, so this result is to be treated with some caution. Even within the ILR TSA, a similar aggregation of the BBC’s national networks would have dwarfed the overall figures for ILR, although it is not possible to tell from the data in the table as it was released what the size of the combined audience for BBC Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4 would have been, without applying some elementary maths: simply adding up the number of listeners to each of those stations or adding up the reach would be misleading, because some listeners would have been double – or even triple – counted in the process, if they had listened to more than one BBC station. Because share of listening data relates to a simple subdivision of a whole that is 100 per cent in total, we know that missing from the release as it was expressed is an eighth category of ‘other listening’ to stations not listed elsewhere – possibly pirates or international radio stations – and that that represented 2 per cent of the

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whole listening ‘cake’. We can also deduce that the combined share of the BBC’s four national networks was 58 per cent – not a story the AIRC would have wanted to publicise, but then the BBC did benefit from the considerable advantage of having four distinct, parallel services with which to build that combined national network audience. It is partly in the interest of clarity, but also because the BBC and the commercial sector both wished to have a single set of audience data upon which they could agree, that they later aligned audience research methodology and data presentation under a single, jointly owned body, Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR), in 1992 (Starkey 2003). Such significant caveats aside, it is, however, clear that ILR was by crude measures of listener consumption, successful enough to demonstrate its ability to draw significant audiences. The survey release also stated that the audience among children consisted of a 47 per cent reach, that is 3.126 million, who listened on average 8.4 hours per week each. In terms of using this data or other data from the era to attempt to gauge the success of the full-service, public-service approach of all the ILR stations but LBC and compare it with the performance of the commercial radio sector of today, we must first sound a note of extreme caution. The research methodology and the construction of the sample used to collect data have changed dramatically since 1982, with all the attendant risks explored and rationalised in greater depth in Starkey (2004a). However, the average hours figure of 13.5 per week would be eyed enviously by many a programmer, station Managing Director or shareholder today. The bullish press releases distributed by the AIRC with each set of audience data showing a growth in the number of people listening to ILR certainly conveyed a confidence in the network’s ability to continue to build its audiences (Starkey 2003a: 305). What happened next, was not, as some might have expected, a simple continued growth in the coverage and, hence, reach of the ILR offering, building steadily on the audience gains made so far. Change was coming, and it was to bring with it a far more complex set of circumstances than Edward Heath or any of the other original architects of legal commercial radio in the UK could have imagined.

Time for change: what Heathrow did for the pheasants In the case of the BBC, the distinctiveness that might outwardly manifest localness is to a certain extent guaranteed by the corporation’s statutory duty to serve its various audiences. As a result, many of the original principles of BBC Local Radio programming are still apparent

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today: little has changed in the stations’ approach to producing local content for local audiences, certainly when compared to the significant changes that have occurred in ILR since the era we have been describing. That is not to say that the history of BBC Local Radio has been uneventful, nor indeed that the amount of local content they produce at any given time can be taken for granted. BBC Radio London, the subject of our close scheduling analysis in the previous chapter, was one of the BBC’s least successful – indeed its most troubled – local radio stations. It may have been the obvious lack of cohesion evident in those ambitious but essentially flawed early programme schedules, with the persistent lack of consistency that would otherwise have enabled the station to build and retain audiences instead of expecting what were essentially minority interest groups to rendez-vous with their ‘own’ programmes and not then be deterred by the subsequent offerings in the schedule from coming back. It may even be that London was itself too diverse and multi-layered a community to be cohesive enough to share a common passion for a radio station that tried hard to offer something for everyone, if only for some of the time. Whatever the reason, the station’s listening figures have rarely even approached those of the best performers in the network, and it has subsequently been re-launched several times, as we have already seen, most recently as BBC London 94.9. At various times in their history, directives have gone out to the stations in the network to reduce the amount of music or to increase it again, even insisting for a time that they become all-speech stations. Essentially, though, the BBC maintains these stations to reinforce its relevance to communities in the areas lucky enough to benefit from them, so localness has rarely been under threat. From his well-informed vantage point as a persistent researcher in the BBC archives, David Hendy describes in detail the internal debates which occurred in 1979 around a series of options for reorganising BBC network radio, one of which threatened for a brief period to cannibalise local radio in order to exploit to the full scarce resources at a time of austerity (2007: 258–9). However, the proposal was quickly abandoned until the debates were revived in a different form in 2011. Further guarantees lie in the BBC’s accountability through various means to a range of stakeholders, among them the creation of the BBC Trust, which today regulates it on behalf of the licence payer. For early ILR the localness guarantee lay in the heavy hand of the IBA, with its beauty-contest selection and licence-renewal processes, and the tight rules on content and ownership that it enforced. To return for a moment to the Heathrow Conference, by attempting to assert its independence,

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or ‘freedom’ as the then Managing Director of BRMB David Pinnell called it in 1984, the commercial radio sector was, of course, campaigning against the very constraints which guaranteed its localness. This was perhaps inevitable, if there is any mileage in the analogy of the sleeping giant. For a giant which stirs begins sooner or later to discover its strength: an asset which it may then go on to use either for good or for evil. To borrow another image from popular rhetoric, sometimes it is preferable to experience the lesser of two evils, and as the 1980s wore on without economic success being particularly conspicuous in the UK and, unbeknown to all, the deep recession of 1991–1993 lying ahead, the financial failure of a station is arguably a worse evil than some loss of local speech content. Logically, in many ways, seeking ‘freedom’ made perfect commercial sense, as Pinnell’s rhetoric suggested in a paper he presented at Heathrow: We should not be afraid of freedom: ILR has nothing to lose but its chains. Freedom is unlikely to kill any cherished pheasants or make the cows go dry. It might radically increase their yields. (Stoller 2010: 144) In fact, in introducing another colourful metaphor, Pinnell was quite wrong. The cherished pheasant of localness has indeed been all but killed off since then and what many would still regard as the cream of UK commercial radio broadcasting, locally-originated speech content, began to run dry. This did not occur immediately, and indeed it has been a very slow process: one which has taken twenty-six years. As in turn the Independent Broadcasting Authority gave way to a new regulator, one dedicated to radio called the Radio Authority (1991–2003) and then to yet another, the Office of Communications (or Ofcom), successive legislation has relaxed rules on ownership so ever larger groups of stations formed and both production and management began to move outside the editorial areas in which they had been firmly located. The abandonment of the ‘full service’ principle and the targeting of stations at ever-contracting niches may have been an inevitable consequence of the increasingly competitive mediascape that developed around the turn of the millennium. Nonetheless the throwing of anti-competitive caution to the wind meant the original ‘heritage’ ILR stations faced new competition from a number of directions: three national commercial stations; so-called ‘incremental’ stations, which were near neighbours with overlapping editorial areas; a class of stations benefiting from what were called small additional local licences (‘sallies’) on their own turf and regional commercial stations benefiting from much larger geographic

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areas and hence synergies with ITV regions. Meanwhile a revolution in production and distribution technology seemed to promise instant and more effective ways of making more money out of less effort. Why pay a person to play the music, when a computer can do it ‘for free’? All this, though, is to telescope into too few words and too little detail a trend which began at Heathrow and in practice dramatically changed commercial radio in the UK into a sector quite removed from the original vision of its creators. Without attempting a detailed chronology in the manner of Stoller’s history of ILR (2010), it is important for our analysis to identify the key milestones in the new direction taken by governments and regulators alike and which have resulted in the local radio landscape of today. One of the motives for sacrificing localness in favour of financial stability was established in the wake of the first actual closure: Centre Radio in the city of Leicester, ironically the birthplace of BBC Local Radio, sounded the first death knell of localness in ILR. Other stations had struggled financially, CBC and Radio Aire among them, but while others were rescued, on 8 October 1983 Centre Radio was allowed to collapse after just two years on air. Although a new contractor, Leicester Sound, was quickly found, such events did little to enhance the reputation of the IBA or ILR as a concept, and because the intention was now to continue to grow the network, too many spectacular failures would inevitably frighten potential investors and threaten future growth. Since the first struggles to raise sufficient capital to launch LBC, and the concession that sources of investment and therefore part-ownership might reside outside stations’ own areas (including in the case of Selkirk outside the UK), a limited market existed for shares in the ILR contractors. Struggling stations needed to raise additional capital to survive, and some were saddled from the initial writing of their franchise application with unrealistic internal structures. One was CBC in Cardiff, which was based on the principle of ‘democratic’ governance by its staff that proved unworkable in practice. The Preston contractor Red Rose Radio, successful in its own Lancashire market, found itself in a position to take control not only of CBC and its neighbour, Gwent Broadcasting in Newport, but also of Radio Aire in Leeds in a twentieth-century rerun of the Wars of the Roses. The majority shareholder of Leicester Sound was near neighbour Radio Trent, with whom the new station shared twelve hours per day of off-peak programming as well as accounting, administration and commercial production. Stoller suggests that ‘such almost covert takeovers began to be routine as the eighties progressed’ (2010: 124). The most significant was perhaps that of Radio West by its

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near neighbour, Wiltshire Radio, early in 1985. The former station had miscalculated the appeal of its laid back style, expecting to repeat in Bristol the relatively easy success of Radio 210 from where a number of its staff originated, including the Managing Director, Chris Yates. When its ability to sustain itself ran out, and Yates had been replaced as MD, West was effectively taken over by Wiltshire Radio, now led by a former journalist, Ralph Bernard. This acquisition was originally sanctioned by the IBA as the formation of a ‘closer association’ (Stoller 2010: 142–3), but the new MD of Radio West soon left and the experience clearly gave Bernard a taste for empire building. It is reasonable to ask what happened to the promises made by the formidable array of local directors and supporting dignitaries named in Radio West’s winning application (or rather that submitted by the successful applicant group, which was called Radio Avonside Limited, after the river running through the TSA), when the newly-merged operation was rebranded GWR. Although this was a takeover, rather than a cooperation agreement, the licence remained in the hands of Radio Avonside and the programming promises were reinterpreted within an East-West split of the combined stations’ output. In the wake of Heathrow, the IBA was letting mergers and acquisitions take place which pushed at the very boundaries of acceptability in its own understanding of its stewardship of ‘independent’ broadcasting. This was not ILR as it had been originally conceived, and nor was it the cautious response of the early 1970s to the repeated calls during the monopoly years for the introduction of a private, commercially funded sector to compete with the BBC. However, the political climate had changed considerably, and the once all-powerful regulator, the IBA, found that its days were numbered. In 1990 it was dismantled, as we have already noted, and replaced by a new regulator dedicated to commercial radio: the Radio Authority. Inevitably, because it ran in parallel with continued expansion of the network, the trend for mergers and acquisitions became unstoppable. In turn Bernard’s appetite for expansion seemed insatiable, stimulated by the new Broadcasting Act 1996, which carried out a comprehensive overhaul of the law on cross-media ownership (Kuhn 2007: 96), so that by March 2001 GWR would own or control a total of forty-seven stations around the UK. GWR were not alone in wanting to exploit synergies of management and control to bring economies of scale to ever-growing potential audiences, and this was the motive behind the relaxation of rules on cross-media ownership in the 1996 Act: to strengthen media companies in order to increase their robustness and their ability to weather economic storms.

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Consequently a number of other groups developed, each one acquiring control of stations around the country as they became either willing or vulnerable to takeover. Less surprising than the dominance of the market by a company which began life as a semi-rural station located in the premises of an old lime kiln in Wootton Bassett, broadcasting to the modest town of Swindon and the west of the rural county of Wiltshire, was the growth of London’s Capital Radio into an entirely separate group. Red Rose’s empire building faltered, not least when in 1994 its flamboyant founder Owen Oyston sold it to East Midlands Allied Press (EMAP). In summary, the litany of acquisitions and mergers, takeovers and boardroom manoeuvres which equally inevitably gathered pace over the 1990s and 2000s is more a study in the associated disciplines of economics and management than one of great concern to our analysis, but in leaving the detail to others to record, it is worth noting that the frenzy into which it developed was deeply detrimental to the sense of localness in ownership and in content generation which we have been considering. Put bluntly, in many instances what were once locally-owned and managed radio stations in which decisions about local content were taken locally, became mere cogs in much larger operations which saw homogenisation of processes and output as progress. In the next chapter Table 4.1 shows the number of licences controlled by the larger groups as the next millennium got underway.

Use it or lose it: splitting frequencies Compared to the relatively sclerotic progress represented by the equivocation of the 1970s, the frenzy of boardroom manoeuvres and transfers of ownership that grew from humble beginnings in 1985 and soon began to gather pace, represented a step change in the development of the network. Behind the raw quantitative data in Table 4.1 are hidden two initiatives which before then had dramatically swelled the number of local commercial stations on air in the 1990s. The first was relatively easily achieved, almost at a stroke of the regulatory pen. It was a direct result of a consultative green paper on radio, published in 1987, Radio: Choice and Opportunities, the general gist of which was to re-emerge with greater force a year later. Most crucially for ILR the green paper called for ‘a decisive step away from simulcasting’, meaning the simultaneous broadcasting by most stations of the same programming on what were by now becoming widely known as the AM and FM bands. Some of the original station branding, such as ‘Piccadilly 261’ and ‘Capital 538’ had already become anachronistic as trends had begun to reflect the

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engineers’ preferred reference to frequency, rather than wavelength. Thus Piccadilly’s sung jingles had begun to refer to 1152, in effect describing the same position on the dial by a different physical characteristic of the radio waves being broadcast. Whereas most stations had launched in a blaze of publicity around their AM wavelength, though, almost imperceptibly listeners had begun to migrate in large numbers to the FM band where the transmissions were clearer and offered stereo sound for their living-room hi-fis. In turn the branding had begun to reflect this migration to FM, and Piccadilly, for example, ran a jingle package positioning itself as ‘Piccadilly, stereo 97’. By the early 1980s, Capital’s branding identified it as 95.8 Capital FM. To return almost to where we began, the scarcity of frequencies argument which had often been used to ration access to broadcasting spectrum was in danger of collapse as listeners had begun to navigate more actively between the main broadcast bands. A new international conference on frequency allocation had freed up some space on the traditional broadcast bands and the UK had been embarrassed into promising to remove two-way communications by the emergency services from the upper end of the FM band, from 97.7 to 108 megahertz, in line with its European neighbours. In short: simulcasting the same output on both AM and FM was wasting a frequency that had already been cleared for use in that area and with that transmitter power, and the clear message to ILR contractors was that they should offer distinctive alternatives on one or the other band available to them. The likely sanction would be that any station not providing separate programming would lose one of the frequencies, which would be allocated to any new competitor that might emerge in its TSA with the consent of the IBA. Stoller explains how some splitting of frequencies had been allowed by the IBA since 1985, and how the difficulties of finding an AM frequency for a Basingstoke relay of Radio 210 had led to the first FM-only licence being awarded (2010: 169). This however, was the near doubling of the number of ILR stations nationally, without of course any parallel increase in geographical coverage, but with a minimum of engineering work to be done, because the transmitters were already operating. The response varied from station to station, in that some embraced this as a welcome commercial opportunity to find and grow a new audience to sell on to advertisers, and thereby increase revenues, while others saw it as a costly drain on its resources which might not be borne out by a corresponding increase in income. There were some notable exceptions, but most stations followed the example of the first to split, County Sound in Guildford in June 1988, which retained the original service on FM, branded as

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Premier FM, and launched an oldies station, Gold AM, from a new studio in the neighbouring town of Woking. In almost every case, the amount of locally-originated radio available to local audiences doubled, certainly in daytime. In Portsmouth and Southampton, Ocean Sound was the successor to the first station to lose its ILR franchise in a beauty-contest licence renewal, Radio Victory, and it used the three transmitters in its extended area to broadcast a choice of three separate services: Power FM, Ocean Sound and South Coast Radio. Piccadilly bravely retained its original service on AM and launched a younger station on FM, imaginatively branded as Key 103. However the biggest innovation was in Liverpool, where Managing Director Terry Smith wanted to capitalise on the city’s reputation for opinionated dialogue by creating the first all-talk station outside London, City Talk 1548, in parallel with City FM on 96.7 (Starkey & Crisell 2009: 61–2). BBC Radio Merseyside already did this, but played music within the limits of its needletime allocation. City and Merseyside had long vied for the top slot in the city’s audience ratings, both decisively beating the national stations that seemed to grate with many local listeners, still reeling from the economic consequences they perceived as having been visited upon them by Thatcherism and the tragedy that had occurred in 1989 in Hillsborough when a football stadium crush resulted in the loss of ninety-six lives. Unfortunately for Smith, the prohibitive cost of producing speech on the scale demanded even by his peak-time, weekday-only talk station meant it was short-lived. Initially running from 7am until 4pm Monday to Friday, and relaying the programmes of City FM outside those times, listeners to the frequency were met with the same radiophonic schizophrenia that beset early BBC Local Radio: an all-talk news and current affairs sequence presented by the former Fleet Street journalist Mike Kiddey at breakfast contrasted too starkly with an afternoon drive programme relayed from City FM. Johnny Kennedy on the mid-morning programme surprised even a number of staff at the station by playing records on his first show, and the afternoon double-header presented by Richard Jardine and Joyce Yates followed a similar format of music and extended chat. The addition of a lunchtime phone-in and a drivetime news and current affairs magazine, both presented by Roger Phillips, poached expressly for the purpose from Merseyside, came perhaps too late, and the first JICRAR figures were disappointing. The weekly reach was a mere 8 per cent, at a time when stations and advertisers had become used to figures in the thirties and forties. It is of course impossible to know when this occurred, because the research simply wasn’t asking the right questions of its respondents to tell us, but by that first

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set of JICRAR data, most of Radio City’s long-established audience had migrated to FM. It may well have occurred, imperceptibly, long before the launch of City Talk 1548, or it may well have been the loss of the more familiar service from the AM frequency that drove them there, or it may have been a combination of the two, but the returns from this unorthodox use of what had become City’s secondary frequency certainly wouldn’t justify the significant investment in production staff and additional journalists taken on to service it (Stoller 2010: 226). Barely approaching its second birthday, in 1991 City Talk morphed into Radio City Gold in a transition that was to be repeated, at least in part, two decades later when City secured a third licence to reincarnate City talk on FM but again found large amounts of speech too expensive to sustain. To dwell on the 1990s City Talk experience for but another moment, it is worth noting the considerable mass of local broadcasting that was broadcast by the station for the benefit of its listeners, and if we might borrow from some artistic traditions in the wider cultural sector, perhaps the value of an artefact lies more in its existence than in the number of people who might experience it. Certainly this is a notion which finds some currency in the mind of the author, who was for twelve months the Senior Producer on the station. This is an important concept to which we will return in a later chapter when we further consider the worth of localness as a principle of broadcasting, and it is not an unworthy one because even today there are many stakeholders in radio, both in production and consumption, who hold dear the notion that sheer volume of listenership is not the only criterion by which the worthiness of a radio station’s output should be judged. Even though the concept of meaningful speech was about to lose its currency, this station produced a veritable orgy of it. Charitable campaigners and sponsored cyclists, local musicians with stories to recount of the Merseybeat years that would today be validated as ‘oral history’, officials from such institutions as the art galleries and museums on Merseyside to the city’s fire service and colourful local politicians such as the then disqualified former deputy council leader, Derek Hatton, each had their moment of fame on the station – and some of them appeared repeatedly. The lunchtime phone-in, struggling with its smaller audience and hence, reduced pool of potential callers, valiantly raised issues of local and national topicality, giving Merseysiders a voice in their own, admittedly limited public sphere, and several presenters pushed repeatedly at the boundaries of impartiality as they spontaneously represented the anger of the Merseyside

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left at what they perceived to be the indignities of Thatcherism. The author’s own personal sense of triumph stems from a series of extended, mainly talk-based outside broadcasts from a wide range of locations that took the station to the local community and directly involved the local community in the station. The list of these elaborate, three-hour long OBs included: the site of the former Cavern Club, former venue for the Beatles subsequently transformed into a shopping centre; the seafront at Southport, scene of the annual Flower Show; the Aintree racecourse; Walton Jail; the Birkenhead Pier, embarkation point for that infamous ferry ‘cross the Mersey; the iconic Liver Building; the municipal market at Widnes; Chester Zoo on the eastern fringe of the TSA; the caravan park at many Merseysiders’ favourite Welsh seaside town of Towyn, in the aftermath of a catastrophic breach of the artificial sea defences and rather oddly a new golf driving range in Childwall in which former Councillor Hatton was a major investor. The most ambitious involved flying the Senior Producer and an engineer to the Irish sea port of Cork to join the QEII cruise liner on a commemorative round-Britain voyage, setting up a rudimentary studio, an aerial and a portable VHF transmitter. As the ship rounded the most northerly point of the island of Anglesey, the transmitter was switched on to send a signal to the studio in Liverpool and a small team of presenters and production staff arrived by helicopter to begin contributing programming to the breakfast show and then broadcasting both the mid-morning and afternoon sequences live from the flag room on the bridge.

The IBA’s bit on the side: incremental stations If the near doubling of stations through splitting frequencies achieved a dramatic increase in the number of ILR services towards the end of the 1980s, another initiative provided existing contractors with more of a headache. While if they ‘used’ their second frequency to provide a complementary service they could avoid losing it to a competitor with a more or less overlapping TSA, this development brought unwelcome competition to many and in effect, in each case ended the stations’ official monopoly of commercial radio provision in what they had quite reasonably thought would be their own exclusive territory. Just as the industry was awaiting a steer from government over the future expansion of the network and the introduction of national commercial radio, the Radio Division of the IBA suggested to the Home Office that they might be allowed to license a number of additional stations within

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existing ILR areas. With the exception of London, where LBC’s twin talk and rolling news stations and Capital FM and Capital Gold coexisted symbiotically, catering for identifiably different target audiences, none of the stations faced direct competition from other commercial stations with similar TSAs – and certainly not from rival commercial stations which would be able to play the same localness cards in appealing directly to their potential listeners and advertisers. Perhaps even in revenge for the indignities suffered at and as a consequence of Heathrow, this idea would enable the IBA to create additional stations to enhance the reputation and combined listenership of the network over which it had stewardship, without the need to wait for a new list of geographical areas within which it was to get the go ahead to operate commercial radio. In principle, the authority had already been authorised to licence stations in existing ILR areas, so by advertising the opportunity to provide an additional service alongside the current contractor, the regulator would simply be extending choice in a way that was not greatly dissimilar to that which was already resulting from the AM/FM split. Because these new stations would increase choice, they would be referred to as ‘incremental’ stations, and they would fall broadly into two categories. Some would roughly match the geographical coverage of the existing ILR contractor but be required in the terms of the licence to offer a distinctive service, perhaps focused on a specialised musical genre that would previously have appeared only briefly in an ILR station’s off-peak schedules as part of the full-service provision we explored earlier in this chapter. There had already been a public debate around the desirability of creating a new, ‘third tier’ of community radio stations to mirror the experience of a number of other countries which had opened up access to the airwaves to small groups of people, often activists in some or another social cause, and this had been roundly rejected by the Thatcher government, as we shall see in a later chapter. It made sense in the aftermath of this debate, though, to refer to incremental stations in this first category as serving a ‘community of interest’. Others would broadcast with lower transmitter power than the existing ILR station and cover only a more geographically tightlyfocused sub-area with a more general service that could reasonably be expected to serve a generous cross-section of an albeit smaller community with more mainstream programming. This category would be referred to as ‘small geographical/community stations’. In 1989 work began on identifying and advertising twenty-one incremental licences, of which seven were identified as ‘ethnic’. Another would be an information service for people travelling through the congested motorway

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network and slip roads around Heathrow and Gatwick as an airport information service for international travellers. Perhaps because of the more specialised nature of these stations or the nature of the smaller sub-areas some were intended to serve, the wave of incremental stations which launched over the next two years proved particularly prone to commercial failure. Ironically the changing regulatory environment was about to turn such commercial ineptitude on the part of some into considerable financial gain for others. The first station on air was Sunset Radio, which played ‘black’ music to central urban Manchester, and although it lasted only two years it was not the first to close. In London, Sunrise Radio broadcast on AM to the Asian community in the west of the city. Both Jazz FM and Kiss FM benefited from Londonwide FM licences, originally playing jazz and ‘dance’ music respectively, but although at the time of writing both Sunrise (‘The greatest Asian radio station in the world’) and Kiss (‘The UK’s best dance, hip hop and R&B’) remain on air, Jazz FM very quickly ran into trouble over the not unreasonable dominance of jazz music in its music policy. In the North-Eastern city of Sunderland, a short-lived ‘small geographical/ community station’, Wear FM, was a genuine attempt to run a community radio station, staffed mainly by volunteers, but in common with a number of other earlier failures its demise simply made way for blatantly commercial operators to step in and acquire the licence to broadcast while unceremoniously ditching the key requirements imposed on it in response to the IBA’s original beauty-contest selection process. Table 3.3 lists the twenty-one incremental stations which launched in the period 1989–1990 and in each case attempts a brief characterisation of the programming policy which earned it its licence, although several of them soon departed from these commitments.

It’s growth, Jim, but not as we knew it How, though, did this plethora of radio stations develop from the initial Conservative proposals for a network of sixty, as part of their ‘better tomorrow’ (Conservative Party 1970)? Put simply, the caution with which we have already noted the Thatcher government approached the ILR network it had inherited from the outgoing Labour administration of James Callaghan in 1979, would not outlive the 1980s. However, this was neither because of Heathrow nor a result of any lasting great interest in commercial radio in the Conservative Party (although the former may have been a contributing factor). However much it may have suited the ILR companies, it was mainly due to an ideological shift

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Table 3.3 The incremental radio stations launched under the IBA’s licensing process, with their original on-air dates Sunset Radio (FM)

Manchester

22 October 1989

Sunrise Radio (AM)

West London

5 November 1989 Asian

Black music

FTP (FM)

Bristol

21 April 1990

WNK (shared 103.3 FM with London Greek Radio)

London

10 November 1989 Afro-Caribbean

Wear FM

Sunderland

5 November 1990 Community

Jazz FM

London

4 March 1990

Hip hop

Jazz

Kiss FM

London

1 September 1990 Dance

Melody (FM)

London

9 July 1990

Melodic

London Greek Radio London (shared 103.3 FM with WNK)

13 November 1989 Greek, Greek Cypriot

KFM

17 February 1990

Stockport

Indie

Spectrum (AM)

London

25 June 1990

Multi-ethic

Choice FM

South London

31 March 1990

Black

East End Radio

Easterhouse (Glasgow)

1990

Community

Airport Information Radio (AM)

Heathrow and Gatwick Airports

25 June 1990

Flight and local traffic information and advice

Isle of Wight Radio (AM)

Isle of Wight

15 April 1990

Island

Bradford City Radio (FM)

Bradford

9 December 1989 Asian

Belfast Community Radio (FM)

Belfast

6 April 1990

Community

Radio Harmony (FM) Coventry

28 August 1990

Ethnic

KCBC (AM)

Kettering and Corby

6 April 1990

Local, full-service

RWL 1368 (Radio West Lothian)

Bathgate (West Lothian)

1990

Community

Mellow 1557

Tendring

7 October 1990

Easy listening

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in the position of the Conservatives towards commercial television and the public-service model for regulating it that had been devised by their predecessors. Fitzwalter details some of the preoccupations of the Tories over restrictive practices among a largely unionised workforce in ITV, which would seem ludicrous in that same industry today (2008: 10–12). To a Tory government bent on reducing union power wherever it hampered either private-sector investors in maximising the returns on their capital, or public services in operating efficiently, such intransigence in industrial relations as was in evidence at ITV was anathema. In labelling ITV the ‘last bastion of restrictive practices’ at a 1987 Downing Street seminar on broadcasting, Margaret Thatcher signalled an unbridled attack on the status quo. The primacy of the IBA as gatekeeper in the national interest of what was broadcast on ITV also brought upon it the wrath of the Tories when Thames Television broadcast on the network a documentary in the current affairs series This Week, entitled Death on the Rock (28 April 1988). It alleged an operation by the British elite force, the SAS, in Gibraltar amounted to cold-blooded murder of three members of the Provisional IRA, an organisation which was active in the ongoing ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. While the government, and the right-wing press which supported it, felt little affection for the BBC, Death on the Rock and other ITV programmes that seemed to them to be at worst unpatriotic or at least detrimental to their party political interests, began to draw fire from senior Tory politicians and newspapers alike (Fitzwalter 2008: 14, 60–8). The gentle duopoly of public-service television, conceived in the 1950s, began to fall victim to the rough and tumble of the more polarised politics of the Thatcher era. In Stoller’s view, towards the end of the 1980s the ‘withering eye of Thatcherism’ turned from the BBC to ITV and the IBA. He adds: ‘From then onwards, the Thatcher government acquired not just an intellectual but a visceral determination to do away with the pattern of independent broadcasting overseen by the IBA, and especially with the IBA itself’ (2010: 178–9). There were other drivers of change. Firstly, as we have already seen, since the new unified UHF network of television transmitters had been introduced in the UK in the 1960s, in which for the first time the BBC’s two services and ITV had come from the same transmitter in each geographical area, growth had been built in to the frequency planning. Each of the new transmitters had been allocated a fourth channel on which to broadcast a fourth national television service, but although the frequencies had long before been allocated, the debate had continued over what might be the nature of that fourth channel – until the recommendation of the Annan Committee in 1977 that an entirely new

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service be established, rather than the ITV2 favoured by the ITV companies. Although established by Labour, many of its main recommendations were followed by the incoming government. Launching in 1982, Channel Four Television originally had a strong public-service remit. However, so transformed were the Conservatives as they neared the end of their eighteen-year term of office that once it was realised that a massive re-engineering project involving the retuning of many thousands of domestic video recorders could enable the creation of a fifth channel to cover most of the UK, it was not the public-service model that would be chosen, but one based primarily on entertainment. Consequently, Channel Five launched in 1997. Towards the end of the 1980s, though, the principle of multiple providers in an expanding media market was already being established in television. A small number of cable television services were being developed under a separate Cable Authority, and it was clear that this new alternative means of distribution had some potential for future growth even though the expense of cabling large urban communities was initially only being born by developers constructing ‘new’ towns on former green field sites. Rupert Murdoch launched Sky Channel, initially distributed on cable, but soon climbing aboard the new high-tech platform of satellite television, which was also beginning to emerge. Then a group of ITV companies launched the ill-fated Super Channel in 1987, several years before Murdoch was to succeed in popularising direct-to-home satellite distribution. Secondly, the changing electronic media environment and the proliferation of content providers of all types meant any government would have to take a position on such issues as frequency allocation and regulation. The world in which Annan’s three-year deliberations had previously taken place was becoming unrecognisable. After a long period of consultation, the government published a white paper, Broadcasting in the 90s: competition, choice and quality: the Government’s plans for broadcasting legislation (Home Office 1998) which marked a clear departure from the paternalistic approach which had dominated the twentieth century since Sykes and Crawford. In regulatory terms, the IBA was disbanded, and replaced by two new bodies, the Independent Television Commission (which was to subsume the Cable Authority) and the Radio Authority. The legislation which followed, the Broadcasting Act 1990, not only created the Radio Authority to take on the radio functions of the IBA, but also empowered it to develop as many ILR stations as available frequencies would permit. Licence awards and renewals were to consider four essential criteria: financial viability, the demands of the local audience, enhancement of the range of programming and

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diversity of listener choice. However, this was no longer to be an essentially public-service network, and the stations were to benefit from a ‘light touch’ regulation that would no longer require them to broadcast education, information and entertainment, ‘although they may follow a public service pattern if they wish’ (Home Office 1988: 37). Of arguably equal significance, the Radio Authority was also to establish three national commercial stations, not on the basis of a beauty-contest selection process, but by auctioning them as commercial opportunities and awarding them in each case to the highest bidder. This was also to be the process for the awarding of ITV franchises by the new ITC, one in which Thames Television was to be beaten by a newcomer, Carlton. Commercial broadcasting in the UK, not just radio, was changing significantly from the original public-service model in which it was originally conceived. While commercial radio and television were subject to a regulatory upheaval that many of their proponents saw as undeniably positive, the BBC escaped ‘rather lightly’ (Jones 1989: 380). If market forces were to determine the control of ITV and the new Independent National Radio (INR), there were still high expectations of the corporation. Paragraph 3.2 noted that the BBC was ‘still, and will remain for the foreseeable future, the cornerstone of British broadcasting’. Its ‘special role’ was to provide ‘high quality programming across the full range of public tastes and interests, including… programmes of minority interest, and to offer education, information and cultural material as well as entertainment’. As we have already seen in Table 2.5, the steady growth of BBC Local Radio in its ‘third wave’, over the 1980s and the early 1990s, betrayed a quiet confidence at the BBC that its mix of local programming and national sustaining material rebroadcast from the national networks, served a useful purpose in reaching out to communities around England. It brought the otherwise potentially remote corporation closer to some, at least, of its audiences outside London. On 27th August 1990, following a reorganisation of frequencies, the BBC introduced its first new national network since 1967: BBC Radio 5. Grouping some of its sport and educational broadcasts under a single brand, Radio 5 was a confused offering to the market, and it was soon dubbed a ‘dumping ground’ by Crisell (1994: 39; 1997: 218) because these only loosely-related strands had previously existed on various opt-outs where they had interrupted simulcasting on alternative frequencies in order to offer greater choice. The BBC had another opportunity to demonstrate its ability to diversify when the Gulf War broke out in January 1991, and an impromptu rolling news service which earned itself the nickname

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‘Scud FM’ after the Iraqi medium-range missile of choice, was launched on Radio 4’s FM frequencies. There was indeed a subsequent debate around the desirability of the BBC launching a permanent rolling news service at the expense of an FM outlet for the wide range of non-news and current affairs programming on the network, much of it cherished by an articulate middle-class audience. The alternative proposal which won the day was to change Radio 5 into the Radio 5 Live of today – a mix of news talk, sport talk and live sport commentary – which in turn launched on 28 March 1994 (Starkey 2004b). However, this was most certainly not in any sense a cowed, submissive BBC, beaten into retreat by an ideologically-hostile government. It is true to say, though, that this could have been the most damaging period in the BBC’s history in terms of audience share, for its monopoly of national radio – still intact until the first Independent National Radio station, Classic FM began broadcasting on 7 September 1992 – finally came to an abrupt end. Far from allowing the commercial sector to take on the BBC in the areas of radio programming where it was quantitatively strongest, the popular music of Radios 1 and 2 and the high-production value, intelligent speech output of Radio 4, INR was deliberately constrained from the outset. Of the three INR stations, only one was to broadcast on FM, now becoming the waveband of choice among listeners, and the other two were to be confined to AM. To the relief of the ILR companies, they were to remain the principal commercial challenge to Radios 1 and 2, because the remit of the single national FM licence was deliberately advertised as a ‘non-pop’ music service. Of the possible musical formats that remained, classical music seemed the most likely to succeed, if any were to confound widespread expectations that the service would struggle to find an audience. In the event, the new Classic FM proved itself to have a keen ear for a limited number of popular classical music tracks that, rotated frequently to aid recognition, would prove most popular with new audiences beyond the rather niche intelligentsia of listeners to the BBC’s relatively stuffy Radio 3. A populist touch was underlined by presenter Henry Kelly’s reading out of daily horoscopes on his mid-morning programme, ILR-style, between brief classical music tracks that rarely amounted to much more than a single movement of a symphony, in an unwitting self-parody of commercial radio that sounded almost as if the programming policy behind it were really just intended to scandalise the small ‘c’ conservatives who had firmly opposed the ending of the BBC’s monopoly thirty years previously. Despite the opprobrium heaped upon the new service by the BBC and its core Radio 3 audience alike, Classic FM was an instant success.

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Of course it did little to severely dent the BBC’s audience share, but it had won four and a half million listeners by the time the 1993 first quarter listening data were released by RAJAR. A comparison of the fourth quarter data in 1992 and 1993 shows the BBC’s share of listening dropping from 58.4 per cent to 54.9 per cent, but these were early days for the survey and there may have been other factors at work, too. Even if the 3.5 per cent drop in the BBC’s share of listening could be attributed to the arrival of Classic FM, it was not large. As Radio 3 recorded a dip, it may well have lost some listening to Classic FM, but the popular belief (and the near certainty of the maths around the survey data appears to confirm it), was that the station was winning new listeners to classical music. The other two INR stations to launch, Virgin 1215 on 30 April 1993 and Talk Radio UK on 14 February 1995 were also handicapped in their own different ways. Virgin was able to play music, but on an AM frequency that suffered so badly from interference from other continental stations on the same frequency that when an FM frequency became available in London it was given to Virgin so it could at least simulcast in the most important commercial market in the country. Talk Radio UK, majoring in speech as its branding implied, was better suited to AM, but needed two separate frequencies, 1053 and 1089 kHz, to cover the UK. However, its greatest difficulties stemmed from the unfamiliarity to British listeners of the ‘shock jock’ format which the station attempted to import from the United States. The tighter regulatory regime, even under the new ‘lighter touch’ Radio Authority, made it far more difficult to win audiences by expressing provocative opinions on air (‘editorialising’) than in the US, and in 1995 the station was even fined for an item that was deemed to be not only offensive but blasphemous. Both Virgin and Talk Radio UK found audiences, but they were almost inevitably more modest than that of Classic FM, with audiences hovering around three and two million respectively. With BBC Radio 1 continuing to regularly reach audiences of over fourteen million, the success of INR was spectacularly modest. What, though, did INR do for local radio? Despite the rapid growth of the ILR network in the 1980s, with seventy-nine licences in force and the network already vastly outgrowing the original Conservative vision under Heath of sixty stations around the UK, the sector’s ability to attract advertising revenue was notoriously sluggish. Nicknamed the ‘two per cent medium’ after its total share of the advertising market, radio was struggling to be perceived as a credible advertising

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medium among national advertisers. The expectation, when the first franchises were awarded in the 1970s, was that as LBC and Capital in London were joined by dozens of new, sister stations around the country, media buyers handling large advertising accounts for major national advertisers would understand that the gaps in the ILR coverage map were being steadily filled and that this was a credible alternative to buying airtime on ITV or in the press. Commercial television had certainly won a large share of the advertising cake, and suggestions that winning an ITV franchise would be a ‘licence to print money’ were being borne out by handsome returns for investors. While commercial radio revenues were undeniably healthy in many other territories, including the United States and France, the British simply hadn’t yet bought in to the concept of radio as a selling medium. Behind this may well have been UK commercial radio’s relatively late arrival on the domestic media landscape. Historically, Radio Luxembourg had attracted national advertisers, most famously the powdered malt drink Ovaltine, whose diminutive singing Ovaltinies had charmed earlier generations between the wars, and cigarette brands, such as Rothmans. This had failed to translate, though, into commercial success for ILR, and the success of the offshore pirates had only temporarily resuscitated national radio advertising. The legislation which criminalised offshore radio piracy, the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967, had of course done this by criminalising the act of supplying such operations and, crucially, advertising on them. Perhaps in the buyers’ minds radio was tainted, or perhaps it had simply failed to make a case for itself. As stations outside London launched, initial expectations of large volumes of national adverts arriving down the music-quality lines that also supplied them with IRN’s feed of news cuts and hourly bulletins, with corresponding airtime bookings arriving by fax to prompt the scheduling of those adverts, were overtaken by a grim realisation that if they were to succeed, the stations had to make their own luck in life. Of those stations which prospered, much of their success was due to the efforts of the local sales team, chasing leads among local businesses and in many cases persuading them to try advertising on radio. Some of the most successful sales executives of the era simply identified the big spenders in the local newspaper and then persuaded them to divert some of their advertising spend to the radio station. They developed and used testimonials from satisfied clients to persuade others to advertise, and because the economics of radio mean advertising can be sold much more cheaply than television, yet it

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can sound far bigger during its moment on air than a display advertisement lost on a page of competing newspaper ads, the approach worked well enough to keep the industry afloat. INR, however, and especially Classic FM, are widely credited with having legitimised radio advertising in the minds of significant numbers of media buyers. Firstly, they became more likely to listen to commercial radio: Classic FM’s audience was markedly more upmarket than the ILR mean. Secondly, a truly national commercial radio audience in daytime, when radio was at its strongest in audience share terms, was a more tangible concept. Now, a national ad could be placed on daytime commercial radio with a single phone call, instead of buyers having to call multiple sales houses to patch together a national campaign through ILR. Ironically, 1992 marked another recession in the UK economy, one which hit radio advertising revenues hard, but nevertheless most ILR stations’ income grew substantially over the next decade. The Advertising Association’s Quarterly Survey identified a 287 per cent growth in what it called display advertising (as opposed to small ads or sponsorship) on radio between 1992 and 2002, which compared most favourably with 71 per cent for television and only 49 per cent for newspapers (see Table 3.4). While struggling to improve on its 2004 peak of 6.8 per cent of UK advertising spend, radio’s sudden progress from humble beginnings occurred during a period when the majority of the stations being added to the ILR network were decreasing in size, relative to the first stations that between them had most of the large metropolitan conurbations covered in the first two years from 1973. As with the incremental stations, and as we shall be seeing in the next chapter, many of the later stations to be launched Table 3.4 Total growth in display advertising (%) in the UK, 1992–2002 Radio

287

Television

71

Outdoor

141

Magazines

37

Newspapers

49

Total display

68

Source: Advertising Association’s Quarterly Survey

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were also located within areas already served by ILR, so although they mostly succeeded in extending choice in their TSAs, newer stations coming on stream were no longer pioneering something new to those areas, in bringing commercial radio to new local audiences or to new local advertisers.

What have the regulators done for us? Yet, as economically healthier times seemed to be dawning, and as we are about to consider an entirely different era in the development of local commercial radio in the UK, it is worth pausing for a moment to take stock of some significant achievements in place at the beginning of the 1990s. By and large, local radio audiences continued to benefit from those achievements until the very early 2000s. The first two regulators of commercial radio, the IBA and the Radio Authority which succeeded it, had, within the terms of the legislation which empowered them, established a substantial network of Independent Local Radio stations, far in excess of the number originally envisaged. The worst fears of the anti-commercial radio lobby had not been realised, and there was much about the individual stations making up the network which was distinctive in its appeal to local audiences. Localness was a trump card in the ratings game, that the BBC’s national stations could not play. From 1991 separate licences were awarded for individual AM and FM services, reflecting the increased listener choice afforded within many areas by the process of splitting frequencies, and the official count of licensed stations was therefore set to rise from 130 in 1991 to 255 in 2001. At the beginning of the decade, even though some stations had been taken over by others at the expense, in places, of one of the key criteria in the beauty-contest licence awarding process, most stations were still locally-owned. Crucially, they were all locally-operated, meaning that they were managed locally and the broadcast output was almost exclusively produced locally. The technology used in the live radio studio had changed little since the days of the 1960s pirate stations: in all but the most lavishly-resourced operations, most of the broadcasting day was the physical responsibility of a series of single producer-presenters who planned their own programmes within the music policy of the station (Starkey 2004: 92), and ‘drove’ the usual combination of a mixing desk, turntables or CD players and cartridge machines for playing back jingles and commercials. In most stations the decisions over which songs should be on the playlist, how often playlist songs should be played and the number of golden oldies that could be played each hour were

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decided by a Head of Music, working in the same building and probably also presenting a programme on air. A Programme Controller or Programme Director was responsible for the schedule, engaging new presenters and dispensing, sometimes ruthlessly, with others if their audience figures failed to shine. On many stations daytime presenters, perhaps in conjunction with a producer if they had one, still chose the music they played from amongst the playlist songs and the growing back catalogue of former hit records: music scheduling software was relatively new to the UK and different stations adopted the practice of letting a computer do this important job at different times during the course of the decade. In short, most stations enjoyed considerable local autonomy in programming their output. Generally the stations were still fairly distinctive, even though the original requirement to produce meaningful speech had long disappeared and with it some of the more inventive ways of generating speech content cheaply. Of the 255 stations licensed in 2001, just over half of them, 129 in number, were controlled by what were arguably the six largest groups, and only the largest of those groups, GWR, had systematically reformatted most of its FM stations according to a single template that it applied across the group. Table 3.5 also shows the progress that had been made by Capital Group, EMAP, Scottish Radio Holdings, The Wireless Group and United Kingdom Radio Developments (UKRD) in accumulating local and national licences. The issue of relative group size is one that is not easily resolved by the simple enumeration in the table, not least because neither the audience share nor the turnover of individual stations are shown. By then GWR’s portfolio had extended to its first national station, Classic FM, and similarly The Wireless Group controlled TalkSport, which in January 2000 had been rebranded and

Table 3.5 Group ownership of stations licensed by the Radio Authority, March 2001 Group

Number of stations

GWR

47

Capital

20

EMAP

18

Scottish Radio Holdings

16

The Wireless Group

16

UKRD

12

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reformatted from the original Talk Radio UK. The distinctiveness of both national stations from the two groups’ local offerings was of course non-negotiable, but GWR’s ‘makeover’ of its local FM stations was seen by many former staff of those stations as both cruel and insensitive to their local character and their track record in providing distinctive local programming for their audiences. Each one began to play only songs belonging to a centralised music policy described by spoken station imaging that was almost identical across the group as ‘your better music mix’. Each station was identified on air in the same manner, just as ‘The all-new 2-TEN FM’ was used to describe GWR Group’s reincarnation of Radio 210. As each station was made over, the imaging thanked supposed new listeners for ‘making the switch’ from a rival station, as if the changes had already begun to bear fruit. Many of the ideas behind the GWR makeover were inspired by a group of radio consultants who had applied the same principles to commercial stations in Australia, their guiding principle being to maximise audiences and therefore revenue. Australians were not new to ILR, as in 1986 Darling Downs Television had acquired the modest portfolio of the Canadian Group, Standard Broadcasting, giving it effective control of a handful of stations, but there had never before been such a bonfire of distinctiveness. During the 1990s the Radio Authority, despite its relatively ‘light touch’ regulation, had otherwise acted very effectively as a guarantor of localness and distinctiveness. The Broadcasting Act 1990 from which its powers derived required the regulator to ‘secure the character’ of the services as originally licensed, and it had done this by capturing the essence of each station’s winning application in a ‘promise of performance’ (Stoller 2010: 208). These detailed statements of what was expected of a station in terms of music policy and programme content were the main instrument at the Radio Authority’s disposal in holding those stations to the promises they had made, and which had contributed to their winning the licence at the expense of any rival bidders they had beaten to it. In the post-Heathrow climate, in which the relationship between contractors and regulator meant they engaged in regular trials of strength, stations were most often motivated to alter their output by the desire to increase profitability, and this was almost always at the expense of either distinctiveness or localness or both. It seemed though, that only GWR Group had lost sight of the advantage localness could give radio programming over the national competition, as for large parts of the broadcast day they seemed determined to throw away the localness trump card. So determined were they to subordinate any kind of local speech to a tightly formatted playlist of familiar

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current and older songs on very high rotation across the broadcast day that they reduced many of their presenters to reading short, prescripted ‘liners’ repeating the key messages in the branding. Only their breakfast shows allowed presenters to exhibit any personality, and that was in the context of a ‘zoo’ format involving multiple contributors: the newsreader, who would engage in witty banter around and outside the news bulletins; the ubiquitous traffic and travel presenter and perhaps a ‘sidekick’. Outside the breakfast sequences, the presenters really need not have been there.

All change at the next station It was here that, as best it could, the Radio Authority acted most effectively to guarantee localness, certainly against the most enthusiastic revisionism among commercial radio stations, for now the rate of change in the technology of broadcasting was beginning to quicken in pace. Analogue radio production equipment had generally improved since the days of the offshore pirates, with better, sleeker record turntables that could start almost instantly replacing the former ‘slip-mat’ gramophones which required the operator to physically hold on to a felt disc underneath the vinyl record until the moment came to release it and let the music play, less clumsy-looking mixing desks and improvements in sound processing and microphone circuitry. This, though, was the dawning of the digital age. At first CDs had revolutionised the sound quality and the durability of the primary storage medium for music, and then computer software had begun to invade the scheduling of that music, previously the joint preserve of the Head of Music who set the policy and the presenter who interpreted it, often surreptitiously deviating from it as much as keeping to it (Starkey 2004: 89–99). Now computers could store the digitised audio that had until then remained on a playable disc for insertion into a stand-alone player for track selection and playback at the touch of a button. Not only could a computer store music, but it could also store jingles, news reports, commercials, station promotions and crucially, presenter links. Because playout software could now interface with scheduling software, it was possible to automate long sequences of a station’s output without the presenter needing to be in the studio at the moment of broadcast to press buttons or to speak live into the microphone. Automation equipment had been in use in the United States and elsewhere for some time (Starkey 2004: 99–101), but it had been bulky, relatively unsophisticated in the ways in which it could be deployed, and needing high levels of maintenance,

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including the rewinding of spools of audio tape. When in 1992 Mike Powell first introduced an integrated suite of RCS scheduling and playout hard and software as Chief Executive at Pirate FM in Cornwall, he brought to the UK all the advantages for programmers and for the owners of the commercial stations of being able to remain on air without the need to pay a presenter to sit in the studio. Perceiving the dangers of automation, the Radio Authority insisted at first on tight restrictions on the use of automation during daytime hours, but conceded that an essential characteristic of overnight programming was that this was a time when audiences were small and the potential losses of localness would be minimal in effect (Stoller 2010: 272–4). Powell wrote of ‘intelligent automation’ (Starkey 2004: 100), but had the ‘voicetracked’ bank of bland, content-poor links inserted electronically between virtually back-to-back music been an option for GWR Group in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it seems reasonable to suspect they would have abandoned live presentation after the breakfast show on each of their local stations. No doubt other groups, and some other stations, would have been seriously tempted to follow suit. Similarly, the small amount of networked programming, mainly the Network Chart Show that was scheduled against BBC Radio One’s own Sunday evening chart countdown, was another arena in which this struggle was played out: because it was in an early evening slot, the Radio Authority insisted that a human being, however inexperienced, be present in each station’s studio to physically play in the local adverts rather than concede the task to an automated system. There was certainly protracted resistance to the Authority’s strictures on automation, and a number of leading figures in the sector bitterly condemned the regulator’s intransigence (Stoller 2010: 274). By the turn of the millennium, the giant that was local radio, which had previously seemed so bureaucratically constrained and unable to realise its full potential, was beginning to assert its individuality, to demand freedoms on its own terms, and test its strength, post-Heathrow, to the limit. As we shall see, the changes to come were largely to the detriment of localness in local radio, the golden age of which, if there ever was one, was arguably already over. Even though its newfound strength was derived from its popularity with local audiences, the giant that had slept for so long, and that had taken so long to begin to assert itself, was not going to remain local much longer.

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4 Homogenisation, or Two Digits to the BBC – and to Everyone Else?

Could things only get better? Politically the 1990s brought changes to the United Kingdom that had seemed unthinkable just a few years previously. Undoubtedly, Labour had changed, firstly in recovering from the electoral routs inflicted on the party in 1983 and 1987 by Margaret Thatcher and becoming, under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and then Tony Blair, an official opposition to be reckoned with. The Conservative election victory of 1992 was won, not by Thatcher, but by her successor John Major. He was an apparently dull politician, lacking Thatcher’s charisma yet benefiting from the wave of popular approval at her removal from office by her party and successfully guarding from the prying eye of the media a more exotic private life than most commentators at the time, or even since then, considered easily imaginable. Major’s popular image as a safe pair of hands (Starkey 2007: 93) was quickly superseded by one of a ditherer, lacking the authority to control either his government or his parliamentary party, neither tasks being easy with the slim majority he won in the closely-fought general election of 1992. By the time Blair rode spectacularly to power in 1997, in turn routing the Conservatives so decisively they would remain in opposition for three more parliamentary terms and giving Labour its biggest electoral win ever, Labour had been transformed beyond recognition by the experience. It was not just the 1997 Labour campaign theme, D:Ream’s 1994 hit song Things Can Only Get Better, which ‘won it’ for Labour. The ideological shift from the overtly socialist agenda of Wilson, Callaghan and the latter’s successor Michael Foot had been dramatic, and Kinnock and Smith had begun an apparently irreversible move to the centre ground of British politics that Blair merely consolidated and re-presented to dubious press barons, 129

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the majority of whose traditional allegiance to the Conservatives was being tested to the full by the weaknesses of Major’s government. That the influence of the unregulated media should be a putative factor in the Labour victory is well-documented elsewhere (Starkey 2007: 50–1), but as we have seen before, at no stage did radio, and certainly not local radio, command any particular significance in the wider political transformation taking place. Radio, and in particular commercial radio, was, however, to be a beneficiary. The central irony in Labour’s metamorphosis that is most pertinent to our analysis, is this: the party which closed down the offshore pirates, opposed the development of commercial radio in the late 1960s and threatened to destabilise the viability of the nascent ILR network as soon as it was returned briefly to power in 1974, had now embraced aspects of capitalist ideology that would previously have been anathema to it. Of course, this applied more visibly to many more socially and economically influential industries than radio, the party’s attitude to the role of the private sector in the provision of state health care through the National Health Service (NHS) being a single but certainly not isolated example. Labour were now friends, not enemies of private industry and, in place of Thatcher’s grand showpiece privatisations by the public sale of share capital in nationalised industries, Labour controversially conceded parts of the public sector to private sector provision, ‘contracting out’, for example, some essential services in hospitals, and raising finance for capital projects such as the building of hospitals through its Private Finance Initiative. Labour courted not only press ‘barons’ but also international financiers, and the importance and attractiveness of London as a world economic hub grew rather than diminished. The jibe ‘champagne socialist’ was often used in an attempt to damage Blair and the coterie of leading lights in ‘New’ Labour circles whose influence seemed unassailable as the new millennium dawned, but only the word ‘socialist’ would have actually upset them. Whereas previously the relaxation of rules on cross-media ownership that had been brought about by the Broadcasting Act 1996 might have been reversed by an incoming Labour government, ‘Blairite’ New Labour would of course go on to relax them even more. What was to come would so dramatically alter the institutional landscape of the commercial radio sector that it would render it unrecognisable today to its forefathers, and lead us to conclude that its future will be even less recognisable and even less local. For with an incremental loss of local ownership has come a concomitant deracination of content that

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has left the commercial radio sector arguably far less local than in what many might call the ‘golden age’ of ILR, as it was conceived and brought to life in the last millennium. As another ten-yearly renewal of its Royal Charter approached, would the BBC remain intact or lose significant parts of its provision to the private sector? Would its network of BBC Local Radio stations and the smaller stations in the national regions survive? In answering such questions and in drawing to a conclusion the limited chronology we have attempted, it is worth noting that the intention of this chapter is to bring the survey in the book of the development of local radio in the UK right up to date at the time of writing. As we observed in the preface, such an ambition is not one which can be achieved within tight space constraints and yet detail the minutiae of every licence award, every station launch, every merger or acquisition that might have taken place. It is apposite to wonder why such an analysis should depend on such an impossible approach, since from the moment it goes to press a blowby-blow account will fall silent on what happened next. What is possible here is to draw on the contextualisation of the previous three chapters, and the book’s underlying theme of a struggle between the public and private sectors and the ideologies underpinning them, to explain why the massive growth in commercial radio provision we have seen unleashed has left the BBC the clear market leader in terms of audience share. Key to this has been homogenisation: perhaps an unintended consequence of the 1996 Act, the election to power of New Labour and all that followed, but a consequence nonetheless. For with the IBA disbanded and the Radio Authority nearing the end of its natural regulatory life, just as the commercial radio sector was beginning to look increasingly diverse, it began to sound more and more the same. We shall examine here, too, the effect of other developments, both institutional and technological, which have impacted upon localness – and consider whether the trends which have been observable until now and those which are foreseeable for the future are overwhelmingly negative or positive. Crucially, with the onset of the first decade of the new millennium, did ‘things’ get better or worse, from the perspective of localness in local radio? Meanwhile, some unfinished business of the previous millennium remains, because now UK commercial radio was no longer only local, and despite the initial concerns over the availability of frequencies that we noted in the first chapter, it was diversifying and so evolving very rapidly.

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Regional radio beckons – and Aunt Sally to the rescue If commercial radio’s foray into the development of national brands served the local stations and the developing groups of local stations well by legitimising radio advertising, there were other ways in which decisions taken in the 1990s favoured the extension of localness in radio broadcasting. The FM band was now demonstrably the waveband of choice for the majority of UK listeners, as each RAJAR survey clearly demonstrated. Because electromagnetic radio waves, transmitted at the ‘very high’ frequencies which are by definition located in the VHF or FM band, have very different characteristics to those with lower frequencies on the medium or long wavebands, the exploitation of FM opened up the potential for many more local radio stations than could have been accommodated using AM. Normally VHF signals suffer from the disadvantage of travelling only in straight lines, and so, they do not follow the curvature of the earth until their relative transmitter power causes them to fade away, possibly many hundreds of miles distant. This is of course an advantage when attempting to create large numbers of local radio stations that interfere neither with each other nor with stations in neighbouring countries that are, after all, co-signatories of international frequency-planning treaties. It is because short wave transmissions do travel much farther, that the short wavebands have long been used for international broadcasting, where the intention is to send radio programmes to listeners in other parts of the world (Starkey 2007: 116–17). There had been suggestions that a fourth INR service should complete the radio landscape. The final section of the FM band to be released from two-way communication for public broadcasting, 105– 108 MHz, had been an option open to the Radio Authority. There was sufficient bandwidth at this upper extremity of the band for a network of FM transmitters to be commissioned (adjacent transmitters using close but different frequencies in order to avoid interfering with each other) for a coherent service to be created with credible national coverage in the same way that Radio 2 uses a collection of frequencies around 89 MHz, Radio 3 around 91 MHz, Radio 4 around 94 MHz and Classic FM around 100.5 MHz. Now finding its feet, and with many of its personnel having come from the Radio Division of the IBA which had so carefully constructed the ILR network, the Radio Authority instead took the decision to use the frequencies to further develop local radio at the expense of creating another national network. It is interesting to note that the only other opportunity to develop what

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was provisionally labelled an INR4, was to use a spare long wave frequency that had been vacated by the BBC, described at the time as 225 metres. Not only had the use of a wavelength to describe a position on the increasingly crowded radio dial now become somewhat old-fashioned, but the economics of long wave broadcasting made the commercial radio sector predictably wary of such a proposition, and the concept of an INR4 passed into history. Already a more creative use was being made of spare frequencies elsewhere on the FM band: the Radio Authority had begun issuing regional licences and the first five regional commercial radio stations had launched in September 1994. This third, and initially innocuous, tier of radio provision was based on two principles. Firstly, they would not undermine existing and forthcoming ILR stations in the way some had originally feared INR might, because they would be targeted at communities of interest in the same way as specialised niche formats had been introduced on a London-wide basis under the incremental principle of extending available choice. Secondly, they would wherever possible occupy spare frequencies already allocated to non-BBC radio in the range used to transmit Classic FM. Some, but not all of these regional stations would match ITV coverage areas, potentially making them an attractive proposition to advertisers wishing to synchronise campaigns on both television and radio. Despite the chequered history of ILR, these new opportunities proved very popular, with substantial numbers of applicants for each one, although in practice many of the ILR companies did object to new services moving onto what they considered to be their patch (Stoller 2010: 229–30). Those fears were born out in practice in four of the first five regional stations to launch, which were as follows: Galaxy Radio (dance, Severn Estuary), Jazz FM (NorthWest England), Century Radio (easy listening and country, NorthEast England), Scot FM (adult contemporary and speech, Central Scotland), Heart FM (soft adult-orientated music, West Midlands). Only Jazz FM had a music format that was actually commercially unviable, as evidenced by its eventual transition and rebranding to Smooth FM, just as happened with the London incremental. In the case of both stations, it was argued separately that the amount of jazz in the format was off-putting to listeners and threatened commercial viability, despite linguistic liberties being taken at times over the difference between music that could be defined as jazz and that which was ‘jazz inspired’. Galaxy’s ‘dance’ format may have been under

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pressure at times as mainstream musical tastes have changed, but the other five regionals – and most of the subsequent stations licensed later under the same basic principles – have represented a tangible erosion of incumbent ILR stations’ near monopoly of commercial radio exploitation of mainstream musical taste, as opposed to clearly specialist minority interests. The regional stations as they were originally licensed lacked the focus of the local stations, in that they had much larger editorial areas to serve and quite often irreconcilably competing local interests to reflect. In the North West of England, both City and Piccadilly were able to play to the differences in attitudes and allegiances, particularly over football, of their own audiences in Liverpool and Manchester respectively. Century, however, launched with that controversial Scouser Derek Hatton presenting its lunchtime phone-in and a match commentary and sponsorship deal with a Manchester football club to meld into a single service for a region that extended farther North to the very different city of Preston and beyond towards Cumbria. On television, regional broadcasting on both the BBC and ITV was mainly confined to short midevening slots for regional news coverage and half-hour documentary features, whereas, beyond football commentaries, the majority of the output was nationally orientated and most of it was produced outside the region. If regional commercial radio did little that was positive for localness on local radio, another major task for the Radio Authority in the 1990s had been the licensing of large numbers of ‘small-scale and additional local licences’ or ‘sallies’ as they became known. Designed to be financially robust, yet local enough to provide a widening of choice where there was an existing ILR service, sallies were to operate with small numbers of staff who would multitask as much as possible. It became the norm for programme controllers of these smaller stations to present a daily three- or, more likely, four-hour sequence as part of their work commitment – not necessarily out of choice but because the financial model demanded it. For example, 107.6 Kestrel FM launched in Basingstoke as an entirely independent station (independent, that is, of any other) in May 1998, to cover a relatively small town and its outskirts in the southern part of the now rebranded 2-TEN FM’s TSA, centred on Reading. With a population in Basingstoke itself approaching only 83,000, the 137,000 TSA was dwarfed even by the original coverage of Radio 210 which was estimated at its launch to be 270,000. When, by contrast, the first of the original, struggling ILR stations could count their TSAs in millions or

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substantial fractions of millions, this was a new financial model that would struggle to survive. Kestrel launched with a sister brand following soon afterwards in 2000: a local free newspaper, the Basingstoke Observer, to rival the longer-established paid-for title the Basingstoke Gazette. Others launched as extensions of existing or emerging local groups: Godfrey Williams’ Marcher Radio Group had already added a FM-only opt-out for the nearby Wirral peninsula to its twin, post-split MFM and Marcher Sound portfolio before winning the North Wales Coast sally licence in 1992 for a new service, branded Marcher Coast FM; then, in 1998 the North West Wales licence for Gwynedd and Anglesey for its Champion 103 brand. One of the smallest TSAs was Lakeland Radio’s 51,000 centred on Kendall, Cumbria, but size turned out not to be the only determinant of success or failure: River FM in West Lothian, Scotland, launched in 2003 with a TSA of 135,000 and closed in January 2007 when its owners the Kingdom Group returned the licence they had previously fought hard to win. Spectacular failures have been remarkably few, although the market has been largely responsible for that, as we shall see. Had regulation and the parallel restrictions on concentration of ownership remained as in force at the end of the 1970s it is unlikely that there would have been, by the end of 2008, anywhere near as many as the 299 licences in force, with services operating under them. Table 4.1 shows the number of

Table 4.1 Number of licensed commercial and RSL radio stations in the UK, 1973–2008 Independent radio Restricted Service licences Licences (short term) 1973

3

–

1976

19

–

1981

33

–

1986

51

–

1991

130

178

1996

177

324

2001

255

423

2008

299

438

Source: Stoller 2010: 358.

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separate FM and AM licences, the vast majority of them local, current at various points between 1973 and 2008.

Size matters, but small is beautiful… to a point History was to determine that the Radio Authority would be the most prolific creator of new radio licences of all three regulators of the commercial sector of analogue radio broadcasting in the UK since 1973. It ceased to exist in 2003, when its functions were taken over by a new ‘super-regulator’ covering a wider range of media than could be conceived in the 1970s, the Office of Communications (Ofcom). As the Radio Authority wound down its operations in 2003, it bequeathed to its successor a complete audit of the few remaining available FM and AM frequencies, together with suggestions as to what might be done with them. Consequently Ofcom continued to licence new stations, but fewer than thirty in its first five years, as the frantic activity of the 1990s and early 2000s was over. However, licensing and regulating commercial radio of whatever size and scale was no longer the Radio Authority’s sole interest. Digital radio, of which more later, was developed across all three tiers – local, regional and national – in parallel with the BBC, as radio transmission technology developed in response to advances made on a wider scale affecting the mass media more generally. On the analogue front, though, by far the greatest activity in terms of licences awarded was in an entirely new field of operation, and one that can only loosely be described as commercial radio: Restricted Service Licences (RSLs). The RSL, neatly described by Janey Gordon as ‘ultra local radio’ (2001), is just that: a radio service that is very localised by nature of its being restricted in transmitter power, aerial height and in most cases, ability to broadcast for any length of time. Conceived initially as ‘special event’ radio stations to coincide with short-term events to which the public had access and for which they could provide useful traffic and travel information in the immediately surrounding area, the ability to run RSLs was conceded to ‘fit and proper’ persons who met certain criteria for a licence to be granted for temporary broadcasting on AM or FM within a similarly restricted geographical area. A second officially sanctioned motive for applying to run a RSL was for prospective applicant groups to run short-term stations in a locality in order to demonstrate substantial public interest in a permanent station for that area. For subsequent permanent licence applications, a track record of having run what were almost invariably cited as having been ‘successful’ RSLs in the area became almost a sine qua non. Other short-term RSL

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operators have included educational establishments, from universities and colleges to very ambitious schools, keen to give their students the opportunity to work within the medium of radio and to broadcast their work, with all the requirements for professionalism and self- discipline that entails. Some faith groups have run simultaneous RSLs in large numbers of different locations to coincide with important dates on their calendar, such as Christians over the period of Advent and Muslims over Ramadan. Table 4.1 also shows the sheer volume of such licences awarded from 1991. An alternative way of licensing an RSL was for short broadcasting periods of just a few hours over a long-term period: for example, a football club might wish to broadcast immediately before, during and after a regular match slot on every Saturday in a season. However, the vast majority of licences have and continue to be awarded on a short-term basis, with a non-refundable application fee to pay in advance and two broadcasting licences to pay for on a pro-rata basis for up to twenty-eight days. Although commercial radio licensees were given the right to object to a proposed application, this would happen only very rarely, and strict rules applied to the running of RSLs in the immediate period before a current permanent licence was put up for renewal or a new permanent licence was about to be advertised. Commercial companies know well that RSLs tend to be run with limited budgets, varying levels of professionalism and little chance of making very deep inroads into the advertising spend in their usually much larger TSA. With little marketing and a range of popular incumbent broadcasters, both BBC and commercial, to compete with in trying to attract listeners, most RSLs are unable to muster significant audiences during their brief periods on air. The twenty-eight day limit on their periods on air, even if they do broadcast twice per year, and the possibility that they will be allocated different frequencies on different occasions means that any audiences they do build will be quickly lost to permanent stations once they switch off their transmitters. Wilier RSL operations began to maintain a continuous presence by streaming an internetonly service during their periods off air, but as internet listening still only accounts for a tiny fraction of overall radio listening, this strategy adds to the vulnerability of RSL radio stations to losing their audiences almost as quickly as they may attract them. Given that, under Ofcom, the RSL licensing process continues, we could usefully ask whether this additional tier contributes positively to the sum total of localness in radio broadcasting in the UK. Realistically the answer would have to be affirmative, if we consider the large numbers of such stations being

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licensed each year and then apply two of the most pertinent criteria around localness to have emerged in this analysis so far: local ownership and local content production. During the frenzy of sally licensing of the 1990s, the already established groups of permanent stations, which hoped to grow themselves in size and monetary value through the acquisition of brand new licences in as yet undeveloped TSAs, began to systematically run RSLs in what looked like promising prospective locations, both to demonstrate interest in the local community for their ‘own’ radio station and to demonstrate the commitment of the group towards that community: the beauty contest element not having disappeared from the licensing of new permanent stations. Effectively parachuting a peripatetic RSL-squad into an area was hardly symptomatic of local ownership, although some of the cannier approaches involved engaging the interest of local people, community groups or dignitaries, any of which had of course the potential to serve a useful purpose when the time came to write the application. However, initiatives of this kind were in a minority even before the pace of new licence awarding began to slacken under Ofcom, and so numerous became the RSL applications to run Radio Ramadans around the UK that the Radio Authority organised a process of block applications in order to simplify the demands on their own bureaucracy. For many of the enthusiasts who wish to run their own ultra-local RSL, the principal motivation for doing so is to provide their own outlet either for community news and views or for their own developing skills in radio production. So RSLs do contribute positively to the balance between localness in radio and its antithesis, in ways which are both substantial and worthwhile, not least for the educational value of some stations, but also sporadically and with little chance of making much impact on the communities in which they are located, simply because of their transitory nature.

Going digital – or are we? As radio has evolved from the early point-to-point transmissions of Marconi, Fessenden’s 1906 broadcast and the BBC’s first regional stations, the most significant technological developments have included the incorporation of the transistor into the much smaller portable radio set popularised in the 1960s, the development of stereo FM broadcasts on the VHF band and the now blindingly obvious discovery that two digits, one and zero, can be used to simplify and enhance a wide range of production and transmission practices. To return briefly and inevitably over-simplistically to the technical domain, just as a needle

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was once used to engrave a constantly changing, spiral waveform on a vinyl disc to encode audio for subsequent decoding by the needle on a gramophone or record player, an analogue approach to recording and transmitting audio was only ever as robust as the waveform was a faithful representation of the original sound. Digital technology, from the CD to a whole transmission multiplex, analyses the original audio waveform and records it instead as a series of ones and zeros which more or less accurately describe it, depending on the rate at which the waveform is sampled. Inevitably, the more frequently the sampling of the waveform takes place, the more faithful will be the eventual reproduction of the original sound, after it has been edited or otherwise processed through production software, or it has been transmitted to a distant receiver. This is the ‘bit rate’ of which the more technicallyminded might speak, and which some use disparagingly to dismiss digital technologies as unable to faithfully render the ‘warmth’ of some original recordings. In reality, the human ear simply does not need all the information that can be carried on an analogue waveform in order to hear as exact a replica of the original audio as it can discern, just as moving pictures on film and television are effectively a high bit-rate sample of movement: a series of still images which change more rapidly than the eye can perceive and which, one after the other, create an impression of movement. It is the principle of digital sampling which lies at the heart of the computerised production and playout software we have already discussed, and most readers will recognise the ability of .mp3 compression technology to make audio files much smaller than relatively uncompressed .wav files. In transmission terms, digital encoding and compression technology allows us to rather neatly address the problems over frequency spectrum scarcity that we discussed in Chapter 1. A single transmission frequency, used as efficiently as possible through digital encoding and compression, can provide up to eight simultaneous audio channels, providing the potential audience has the correct receiving and decoding equipment to turn the information back into audio. If the broadcast radio wavebands could be used only for digital transmission and reception, the number of services could therefore be multiplied many times, depending on the bit rate used, at a stroke dispelling some of the inherent difficulties in frequency planning for radio and television. An irony of the digital revolution is that radio is the medium which has been the least agile of all to deploy its immense potential in transmission, in addition to making gains in flexibility and productivity from its use in production. Digital satellite television and digital terrestrial television are

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commonplace in many countries in the developed world, mainly because broadcasters and television audiences alike have been quick to use digital technology to free television from the straightjacket of a very limited number of analogue channels – five in the case of the UK analogue television transmitter network. Even newspapers now use digital technology to enable the transmission of their pages to printers located closer to some of their audiences, in the way that British holiday-makers and expatriates in Spain are able to buy copies of the day’s newspaper that have been printed locally, rather than waiting for the previous day’s edition to arrive by air freight or overland. In most countries radio transmission, however, is still firmly analogue and at the time of writing the UK and Denmark are among the ‘very few’ countries in the world where a European system called Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) has been met with sufficient public acceptance to make it a viable broadcast platform (Ala-Fossi et al. 2008: 4–23). In some other territories, other systems than DAB, including DAB+, DMB or even IBOC, seem to promise digital futures, but with progress being made towards a target date of 2015 and consumer penetration of 17.1 million adults over 15 years reporting to RAJAR that they have at least one DAB set in their home (4th quarter 2009), the UK has probably the greatest success story to tell, limited though it is, of digital migration in radio. One rather inconvenient issue around the joint development of a network of national, regional and local multiplexes by the BBC and the former Radio Authority is that the cell-like construction of the network generally works better for national and regional radio than it does for all but the very largest of local radio stations. Drivers may find the local radio station’s digital signal more likely to drop out altogether near the fringes of the area than an analogue transmission which will fade as greater distance is put between the transmitting and receiving aerials, but which is likely to remain audible. However, the DAB phenomenon has played a twin role in the development or otherwise of localness, not least because a farsighted decision to encourage commercial radio investment in original, rather than just simulcast programming for DAB, was taken during the drafting of the 1996 Broadcasting Act. Stimulating interest in the technology among broadcasters and listeners also involved automatically renewing analogue commercial licences for stations which agreed to simulcast on DAB, thus allowing them to circumvent the beauty contest criteria for the renewal of their analogue licences. This was probably the single most important development in encouraging digital take-up by commercial radio broadcasters, but of course it removed the beauty contest scrutiny of their programming when their licences came up for renewal, at an important

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moment in the development of ILR into something other than that which its creators envisaged. It was no longer incumbent on existing stations to demonstrate how the quality and the quantity of localness of their output served the communities to which they were broadcasting, in order to secure the renewal of their licences, and at a time of great change in the sector – and of great potential for change – this has been an important factor in the diminution of localness in UK commercial radio.

Consolidation, in the name of competition It would be wrong to identify Ofcom as a sole culprit in the diminution of localness in radio broadcasting we are about to catalogue. This new regulator, like its predecessors, was and remains at the time of writing, the creation of the empowering and enabling legislation which preceded it. Shorn of its state interventionist instincts, the general direction of New Labour in office, rather than any particular ambitions for the commercial radio sector, continued but extended the policy of liberalisation begun under Major. The Competition Act 1998, the twelfth that year, received royal assent even before the flagship Human Rights Act. Its guiding principle was that in order to develop and sustain a dynamic market in the interests of economic growth, competition should be both encouraged and protected, with considerable powers given to a new Competition Commission to investigate allegations of anti-competitive practice and impose sanctions where appropriate. The specifics around cross-media ownership followed with less haste in the Communications Act 2003, which provided for significant deregulation and encouraged consolidation in ways that made the UK more accessible to non-EU ownership than any other major Western European country (Kuhn 2007: 97–8). While the keenest eyes were trained on the possible implications for terrestrial commercial television, with Rupert Murdoch both a likely and in some quarters feared contender (Starkey 2007: 52), there was relatively little discussion outside the radio industry of the implications for radio. The Act created Ofcom as a single media regulator and it began work late in 2003 with a remit that even extended to the responsibility for telephones that had previously been overseen by Oftel. It was to be an even ‘lighter touch’ regulator as well as representing the de facto convergence of media technology which meant that for the first time television content was accessible through broadband connections that were, after all, part of the telephone network. Ironically, radio stations had sporadically made their output available over the telephone since the 1970s. Ofcom was, therefore, created in

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the spirit of a new media age, one with little resemblance to that which had brought about the development of local radio in the 1960s and 1970s. Before the decade was over, consolidation in commercial radio would happen very quickly, with some very significant implications for localness, and the first indications of this came not from a globalising American predator but from within the once federal ITV network. With the casting aside of previous rules on the ownership of ITV companies, almost all of them had fallen into the hands of the two most ambitious among them: Carlton and Granada. Between them, they had pursued consolidation as far as the previous legislation had allowed, but the new Act and the way it was to be interpreted by Ofcom, gave the green light to a merger to form a new, giant single contractor for the whole of England, ITV plc, as soon as February 2004. Contrary to the founding principles of ITV though this was, it was in recognition of the dramatic change that had occurred in the provision of commercial television in the UK and abroad. The old state monopolies and cosy duopolies that had once been the inevitable consequence of a more challenging set of technical circumstances for television than for radio, had largely gone. No ship had successfully broadcast television programmes to the UK from international waters to break the BBC/ITV duopoly, although rumours had been circulated in the 1960s of the launch of Caroline Television. Until the advent of cable and direct-to-home satellite television, cross-frontier transmissions had been restricted to conjoined or adjacent territories such as mainland Europe, where Tele Monte Carlo had broadcast a service aimed at Italy from 1974. By 2003, though, this was a multi-channel world of seemingly infinite choice, as Sky (and to a lesser extent Freeview) were beaming an apparently ever-increasing number of television channels directly into UK homes. ITV’s side of the cosy duopoly was over, and the robust financial model that had guaranteed the stability of the individual companies was fast being eroded as a result. The same argument could be applied to commercial radio, not that new competition was beaming in from space; although the role of the ionosphere in reflecting short wave signals from distant countries had long made long-range listening a possibility, but it had been met with little enthusiasm from listeners other than a small hard core of so-called ‘DX-ers’. The new competition in radio was coming from within, as the issuing of incremental, national, regional, and sally licences in neighbouring or, worse still, the same locations as heritage stations was salami slicing the available audience ever more thinly. The Carlton and Granada merger had shown the way, and so few commentators were surprised when soon afterwards, in May 2005, Capital Group and GWR Group also merged to form a new radio conglomerate with the slightly cumbersome name of GCap Media.

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Just as Granada had been the dominant partner in the ITV ‘merger’, the GWR board of directors were among the main beneficiaries of their ‘merger’ with Capital. While Capital had developed a portfolio of stations that had enabled them to export the Capital Gold brand to heritage AM licences in such locations as Birmingham, Cardiff and Kent, as well as to some local DAB multiplexes, and nationally via both the Sky and Freeview platforms, the group had demonstrated few of Ralph Barnard’s homogenising inclinations. Consequently some of the branding – and distinctiveness – of the stations Capital had acquired had survived. With the departure of former Capital executives from the GCap board, such as the Chief Executive Officer, David Mansfield, such brand and heritage sensitivity as remained was quickly dispensed with. Thus, the substitution of formulaic announcements for the expression of personality in radio presentation that we have already observed taking place in GWR Group since the late 1990s and which coincided with a determined concentration of control at the centre of fast-growing groups, became an even more acute challenge to localness as the full implications of the Communications Act 2003 became more apparent. Soon after GWR Group ‘merged’ with Capital Group to form GCap, a parallel consolidation took place in 2005, in which EMAP took over Scottish Radio Holdings. Then in 2008 EMAP’s radio assets were bought by the German publishing group, Bauer, landing it a sizeable haul of large heritage ILR stations in several of the big cities of Northern England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, including Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Belfast, Edinburgh and Glasgow. At the time of writing, Bauer Radio seem to understand the importance of heritage in leaving at least the distinctiveness of some of the original branding intact at these populous locations. With the exception of the English AM stations, which had all been rebranded as Magic, the original names of the stations that had launched, one by one, in the 1970s and 1980s remained intact, with of course the subtle variations in place that had been introduced at the time of the AM/FM splits or in accordance with a need to reflect modern trends. In 1988 Radio Tees had become 96.60 Tfm Radio, while the post-split 96.7 City FM had actually bucked a trend towards dropping all reference to the word ‘radio’ by metamorphosing into Radio City 96.7. Only those with the longest memories would recognise the echo of Piccadilly’s first days on air in the use of the word ‘magic’ to describe an all-gold service on AM. Hence the appearance through rebranding of Magic 1152 in Manchester and in Newcastle, Magic 1548 in Liverpool, Magic 828 in Leeds, Magic 999 in Preston and so on. Early in 2011 Bauer reorganised its radio

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operation into two distinctive portfolios: stations focused on local geographical areas, large and small, were grouped together in Bauer Place, and the national or quasi-national stations focused on musical genre (for example Kiss and Kerrang!) or lifestyle (Heat) in Bauer Passion. The pace of consolidation, having so far left Bauer Radio as a separate entity, quickened markedly towards the end of the decade, with the considerable implications for localness that might have been expected from a group with historical roots in the former radio power house that had been Wootton Bassett. Chrysalis Radio, an offshoot of the record label that had popularised the 1980s bands Ultravox, Spandau Ballet and Huey Lewis and the News, had developed into the third largest group in terms of its share of the UK commercial radio audience, as opposed to the numbers of licences it held, because those licences were mainly regional. Operating the Heart and Galaxy brands in a number of regions, as well as having acquired the successor to the original LBC, London News Radio, and then rebranded it as LBC (or, ‘London’s Biggest Conversation’) made the Chrysalis portfolio of radio assets an attractive proposition to a voracious new entrant into the market: the investment company Global Radio, an organisation with rich backers and deep enough pockets to embark on a lavish spending spree that would befit the ambitions of its private owners. Global’s 2007 purchase of Chrysalis was a mere stepping stone, and in 2008 it acquired the by now troubled GCap Media, together with most of its portfolio of national, local and digital stations. The move was so decisive and so effective in creating a commercial radio super group, that few commentators could resist wondering when Global would take over Bauer. Of course, post-2003 the commercial radio sector is still regulated over ownership, albeit to a lesser extent than ever before. In gaining regulatory approval for the deal, Global was required to divest itself of the former GCap interests in the Midlands region that would have resulted in significant overlapping of services it owned: BRMB, Beacon, Mercia, Wyvern and the East Midlands operation under the regional brand, Heart 106. The key beneficiaries of this enforced sale, quite apart from any retention of distinctiveness that might benefit listeners, were Orion Media, a new group formed by former Chrysalis Radio Chief Executive Phil Riley. It is also worth noting that despite the big acquisitions there still remained a very small number of fiercely independent local commercial radio stations in the UK, as well as a number of other much less significant radio groups of various sizes and ambitions, such as UTV, UKRD, Tindle Radio, GMG, CN Group, Quidem and KMFM. Table 4.2 indicates the relative complexity of each group by listing the numbers

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Table 4.2 The relative complexity of principal UK commercial radio groups* in January 2011, according to analogue licences held and national broadcast brands operated (whether available through analogue or digital-only means) Number of commercial analogue radio licences held

National broadcast radio brands operated, analogue and digital

Global

47 FM (including Classic FM), 23 AM

The Arrow, Choice, Classic FM, Galaxy, Gold, Heart, LBC, XFM

Bauer

24 FM, 13 AM

Heat, The Hits, Kerrang, Kiss, Magic, Q Radio, Smash Hits

GMG

13 FM

Real, Smooth

UTV

11 FM, 4 AM (including TalkSport)

TalkSport

Absolute Radio

1 AM (Absolute Radio)

Absolute Radio, Absolute 80s, Absolute Radio 90s, Absolute Radio Classic Rock, Absolute Radio Extra

The Local Radio Company Group (UKRD controlled)

13 FM

Lincs FM

9 FM

UKRD

4 FM, 1 AM

Sunrise Group

4 FM, 3 AM

Tindle Radio

9 FM

Town & Country Broadcasting

7 FM

Quidem

6 FM

KMFM

7 FM

Orion

5 FM, 3AM

CN Group

3 FM

Note: *Excludes digital-only groups/stations, such as Planet Rock and UCB.

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of analogue licences held in early 2011 and, where appropriate, the numbers of national broadcast brands operated, whether available via analogue transmissions or only through the various digital platforms, including DAB or digital television reception but not the internet. From the perspective of the competitive free market, local commercial radio, whether under the Global umbrella or not, has to compete with not only the BBC in all its national, regional and local manifestations, but also some strong national FM and AM, digital-only and emerging quasi-national brands. It is important to note here the central irony of the political party which opposed the very principle of non-BBC radio from the outset, becoming the catalyst for the most blatant substitution imaginable of market forces for quality-based criteria to determine the ownership and governance of local radio stations. Yet, in fairness both to New Labour and to Ofcom, it would be incorrect to describe the UK commercial radio sector at the end of the decade as an unrestrained freefor-all. It would, however, be appropriate to examine now the implications of recent developments for localness and to draw some pertinent comparisons of what has happened in this extended case study of the UK, with some globalising trends discernable in local radio elsewhere in the world – which is one concern of the final chapter.

Let’s hang on, to what we’ve got The change of government in 1997 should have signalled a period of relative calm for the BBC. As natural allies in the ideological skirmish that we have portrayed as turning radio into a political football caught between opposing sides in a trial of strength between those who would champion either public or private provision of broadcasting, and despite the obvious requirement for the BBC to strive for impartiality in its coverage of politics or other matters of controversy, Labour in power should have caused few sleepless nights at the corporation. However the keenness of New Labour to demonstrate its affinity with the private sector complicated the situation. More importantly, Tony Blair was squaring up to a different adversary, the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. The 2003 Iraq War which so divided the people and politicians of the United Kingdom was only of oblique importance to BBC Local Radio, although it did, of course, just as other conflicts before and since then have done, provide programme material around the return, alive or dead, of local heroes. It was, however, the BBC’s national reporting of the circumstances around the declaration of war which proved to cause the greatest tensions between the corporation and a government

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of any political persuasion since the granting of the first Royal Charter in 1927. What became widely known as the ‘Gilligan Affair’, when a freelance working on the flagship Radio 4 sequence Today broke a story he struggled to substantiate, then resulted in the high-profile suicide of the government advisor Dr David Kelly (Born 2004: 452–65; Hendy 2007: 398–9), and led to the resignations within twenty-four hours of both the Chairman and the Director-General of the BBC. This, in itself, might not have been so troublesome, had the resignations not come during the period in the ten-year cycle in which the Royal Charter is reviewed by government and then, or at least this is what the BBC would wish, renewed for a further ten years. The tension between the Blair government and the BBC, which had clearly displayed rather more of the mettle in demonstrating its robustness at arm’s length toward the government of the day than was usual, was considerable. Some commentators expected, and some external stakeholders hoped for, Blair to exact revenge upon the corporation. Revenge, if it were to come, was most likely to take the form of dismemberment: the removal from the BBC of some of its constituent parts, just as it had become larger and involved in more different and diverse activities than ever before. Other portents bode ill for the BBC at the time. In the subsequent elections of 2001 and 2005 Labour’s 1997 landslide vote had been reduced to more normal proportions, but in retaining a very comfortable majority, particularly in the wake of the controversies over Iraq, Blair was still strong enough to shrug off concerns that might have worried less fortunate prime ministers. As the charter renewal process gathered pace, the next election was three or four years away, so potentially adverse publicity over any rough handling of the BBC did not need to be an issue. Among those external stakeholders who cared little for the integrity of the BBC, and who perceived it as a bloated and over-ambitious organisation which stood between themselves and increased profits, were the newspaper barons Blair had courted so successfully, including Murdoch with his own interests and ambitions towards broadcasting. Furthermore, Blair had vividly demonstrated his conversion to free-marketeer, even if there remained elements within his party who would be better described as unreconstructed socialists. In the event, and partly due to the careful handling of the detail of the charter renewal by the long-serving Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Tessa Jowell, the BBC emerged from the process with another ten years to plan for. There remained only the relatively minor inconvenience of a new BBC Trust being set up, in order to regulate the corporation from within better than had seemed to be happening under the BBC Governors and ostensibly on behalf of the

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licence fee payers. Characteristically but also tellingly, amid all the talk around possibly hiving off parts of the BBC that would stand the greatest chance of being more commercially viable without licence fee support than others, there were few serious suggestions that BBC Local Radio might fall into such a category. Until the final announcement was made of the terms of the charter renewal, BBC Radio 1, on the other hand, was a prime candidate, and among the most commonly posited suggestions had been reassigning it to that other publicly-owned but commercially-financed state broadcaster, Channel Four Television. BBC Local Radio, with its ageing audience, its obvious commitment to relatively expensive, locally-produced speech simply did not appeal to commercial interests, especially as there were now plenty of other ways of making money from radio broadcasting, almost all of them less demanding, less resource-hungry and so, potentially more lucrative. By and large, BBC Local Radio had been left relatively unmolested since the introduction of the third wave described in Chapter 2. Cherished by many of those who have worked in it, yet patronised by others whose careers in the BBC have required brief initiations or secondments in a local radio station, the network is bedevilled by what easily appears to insiders as systematic under-resourcing in a wider organisation quite capable of lavishing resources on those activities it prioritises. Veterans among BBC staff often recount tales of their time served in the regions, learning a trade in a local station that they then went on to ply to much greater acclaim in either network radio or on television. More famous examples include Michael Buerk, whose entry into broadcasting was via a job in Bristol: ‘It was for local radio, which I thought was a bit beneath me’ (2004: 91–3). He continues: ‘They wanted a programme assistant, which sounded like somebody to empty the ashtrays.’ (Interestingly, Buerk’s salary doubled, though, in moving from the Daily Mail to the BBC.) Describing his radio training in London, on a short course to which many BBC Local Radio staff were sent, Buerk discerned much about the attitudes in London to those working in the regions, describing them as follows: The little stations were Auntie’s bastard children. Their pioneers thought it would take the corporation back to its cat’s-whiskered roots and bring it closer to its audience. A fair slice of the BBC shuddered at the very idea… In private they called us Toytown Radio. Another future televisual luminary, Kate Adie writes more kindly about her initiation at BBC Radio Durham, but however amusingly put, her

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story is also one of career progression through the range of opportunities on offer at the BBC, and local radio is quite clearly one of the first rungs on the ladder (2002: 39–44). These, and other recollections of the network in its infancy are not unrepresentative of the bigger picture. The Director-General who departed so spectacularly in January 2004, Greg Dyke, chose not to index BBC Local Radio or any of the stations in the network directly in the essentially parthian memoirs he subsequently fired back at the government. Obliquely, though, some telling references to this distant outpost of his former empire do emerge in the text (Dyke 2004: 199). On visiting Radio Lancashire, Dyke expressed surprise that his tea was served ‘in a cup and saucer’, but was reassured that they had been bought specially and that he ‘needn’t worry about the expense’ as they were being taken back to the stall on Blackburn Market after he had gone. Dyke found that ‘some of our staff were working in buildings that should have been condemned years earlier’, and on visiting Radio Leicester said ‘how awful it was’. He reports being reassured that at least Leicester was not as bad as the studios at Stoke, and then later surprise that Stoke turned out not to be as bad as he had imagined: ‘it wasn’t that terrible’. Some staff were ‘buying their own recording equipment because the gear the BBC was supplying was so out of date.’ New staff ‘coming straight from media courses found they had to use equipment that was significantly inferior to what they’d been used to at college.’ Dyke found ‘many of the staff I met (in local radio) felt unloved, unwanted and unmotivated.’ It is to his great credit that as a result of his discoveries ‘every local radio station in the BBC’ was ‘digitalised’ over the next four years, while new buildings were commissioned for BBC Radios Stoke, Sheffield, Birmingham (which had been rebranded as BBC WM), Leeds, Humberside, Merseyside, and Leicester. Anyone examining closely the timing of the implementation of digital production technology in radio, though, is likely to be surprised that ‘digitalisation’ should have come so late. BBC Local Radio and the corporation’s parallel operations in the national regions continued until recently to provide selected, although not always the most populous, communities with a largely locally-managed and locally-produced service targeted if not exactly at the whole community, certainly a subsection of it. One of the most recent controversies to emerge out of the central management of the BBC’s ‘Nations and Regions’ approach to assuring some measure of consistency across its local radio network has been that over the fictional ‘Dave and Sue’. In 2005 a management initiative entitled Project Bullseye led to this normally rather sedate network of radio stations being parodied for its comedic treatment of the concept of targeting precise demographics – an

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activity which is essential to the effective running of media organisations, all of which essentially produce products honed to appeal to particular groups of people that are sizeable and biddable enough to enable both the product and the organisation to justify their continued existence in economic terms. Dave and Sue were, however, ‘composite characters’ intended to represent the network’s core audience, and actors were even engaged to play the roles at the Frank Gillard Awards for achievement in BBC Local Radio. The New Statesman’s lampooning article scoffed at the character profiles thus: ‘the only unconvincing things about Dave and Sue are that a plumber approaching retirement should still have a mortgage and that both of them hate bad grammar, which is somewhat surprising because there is no evidence that either ever reads a book or even a newspaper’ (Self 2005). The practice of characterising a target demographic was neither new, nor surprising to practitioners: in the 1980s ILR programmers would typically identify the daytime audience as a housewife called ‘Doreen’ and Self acknowledged that LBC was targeting a fictitious Amanda. The point where the public leaking of Dave and Sue turned from uncomfortable to embarrassing was when staff at BBC Radio Solent were told by Managing Editor Mia Costello by email to broadcast only to that target demographic and to deny access to the station phone-ins to anyone who sounded like they were outside it. In one of those awkward twists of managerial fate, the email was printed in the Southern Daily Echo, as follows: Whatever job you do on station, make sure this week, you broadcast to DAVE AND SUE – people in their fifties. ONLY put on callers sounding in the 45–64 range...I don’t want to hear really elderly voices … ONLY talk about things that are positive and appealing to people in this age range … ONLY do caller round ups about people in this age range. MAKE SURE YOU PLAY 6–8 DISCS AN HOUR – YES 6–8 DISCS AN HOUR!! REMEMBER – even the older listeners (65+) are leaving us for more upbeat sounding stations. … If we don’t, our business won’t survive!! Our listeners will have died out and we won’t have nurtured up any younger people...that’s fact – not fiction … the RAJAR figures show this. Whatever your view of this policy, this is what the business needs, so please make sure you’re doing the right thing. (Napier 2006) This is a network that had come to rely on listeners maturing and ‘growing into’ whatever mix of personal tastes and unwitting mindset that meant the lion’s share of its audience turned out when surveyed to be over 55 years of age. So the revelation that that traditional audience

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simply was not welcome anymore amounted to some seriously negative publicity. Certainly, the concept of an audience ‘growing into’ a radio station is widely accepted as feeding the national networks, Radios 2 and 4, as either the more boisterous pop music broadcast by Radio 1 to a late teen and early twenties demographic begins to grate, or more middleclass listeners find the attraction of the ‘intelligent speech’ of Radio 4 more compelling than when they were younger. Self, a former radio correspondent of The Listener and a long-term observer of BBC radio, had identified a more worrying departure from some of the public-service aspirations of the network inherent in the latest central programming initiative: Breakfast shows must be all-speech, but ‘that doesn’t mean all news’. So Radio Norfolk’s once-authoritative breakfast show (formerly required listening for all county and city councillors) is now dominated by fatuous phone-ins. Similarly, a typical half-hour segment of the Peterborough breakfast show from BBC Cambridgeshire includes five minutes of news, three short reports or interviews and 14 minutes of prattle from a presenter and his sidekick, inviting listeners to name a television theme tune and reading out e-mails and text messages. At the time of writing, the challenges currently faced by BBC Local Radio included those which were common to the rest of the BBC. When Labour’s third term of office ended in 2010 and an incoming coalition government of mainly Tories supported by Liberal Democrats imposed a 16 per cent cut in BBC funding, in addition to removing state funding of the radio World Service, the country’s political swing further to the right signalled an almost immediate tightening of budgets would be necessary. One of the most obvious ways to save money in BBC Local Radio is to reduce the amount of locally-produced programming. At various times this has been achieved, most commonly during the evenings, by geographical groups of stations pooling resources to fund a single programme which is shared – or syndicated – across them all. This has the considerable advantage of being able to reflect taste on a broadly regional, rather than narrowly local, basis, and careful consideration of the way such programmes and the stations carrying them are identified can avoid the obvious confusion of the early relaying of network programmes that were completely insensitive to local radio stations opting into or out of them. In early 2011 afternoon programme syndication was being trialled at three Yorkshire stations (Radio Leeds, Radio York and Radio Sheffield) and two in South-East England (Radio Kent and Radio

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Sussex & Surrey) (Plunkett 2010). If maintained or even extended, this approach to cost saving would certainly be to the detriment of localness in local radio, but in a wider political climate in which savage cuts were being made to a wide range of public services, from local councils to the arts, humanities and social sciences in higher education, it would have been surprising if publicly-funded, public-service broadcasting of this sort were unaffected. At the same time, a plan was floated to reduce all the stations to mere peak-time only opt-outs from Radio 5 Live, raising suspicions that daytime and evening localness might disappear altogether. This would be particularly significant for the expression of local culture, more commonly found in those timeslots than in the news and current affairs-driven dayparts of breakfast and drive.

Tough times, new opportunities The preceding account of relatively recent developments in commercial radio ownership and the commentary associated with it has been presented as a continuing phenomenon of the semi-regulated ‘free market’ – in essence a work in progress – and this has been quite deliberate, with the aspiration of preventing this chapter of the book becoming dated prematurely. Ownership is often problematic to report on contemporaneously, simply because boardroom control can change overnight. Assets are not only traded because of competition regulation but can be sold or simply exchanged between existing and emerging groups merely as a matter of expediency, for example in order to rationalise operations around a tighter-knit geographical area. The snapshot of ownership represented by Table 4.2 is therefore not incontrovertible, but it does serve as a useful indication of the relationship between the major players in the UK commercial radio sector and those with lesser interests at the time of writing. Even those groups with the smallest of holdings are significant players in the media landscape where they own or operate stations, and other factors can complicate matters. UKRD, for example, either owned or had a controlling interest in Eagle Radio and County Sound (Guildford), KL.FM (King’s Lynn), Star Cambridge, and Pirate FM (Redruth), but also owned one third of Heart (South Hampshire) and a third of Nova (Weston-super-Mare). Because UKRD also owned sufficient shares in The Local Radio Company Group (TLRC), it also had effective control of Mix 96 (Aylesbury), Spire FM (Salisbury), Wessex FM (Dorchester), Spirit FM (Chichester), 2BR (Burnley), Minster FM (York), Stray FM (Harrogate), the two Yorkshire Coast Radio licences in Scarborough and Bridlington, Sun FM (Sunderland), and a cluster of

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three stations in Darlington, Durham and Northallerton, all three now using one of UKRD’s favourite brands, Star. Through TLRC, UKRD also controlled one third of The Bee (Blackburn). Within this microcosm of the new complexity in radio station ownership and control lie some interesting examples of how the relaxation of regulation represented by the Communications Act and its interpretation by Ofcom have been exploited by the less locally-minded of radio groups to increase the profitability of individual stations. Put so bluntly, that might seem to be intentionally pejorative, but it is important to recognise that many of the stations we are about to discuss are located in such small or sparsely-populated TSAs that they would not even have been contemplated as potentially viable areas for the development of a local ILR station as the network was originally conceived in the Conservatives’ A Better Tomorrow. If a number of the first-wave ILR stations with much larger TSAs struggled either to raise launch capital or to remain viable through economic downturns in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, it should hardly be surprising that far smaller stations would struggle, even with the financial benefits brought by digital technology. Viewed more positively, UKRD and TLRC are both groups which strove to win licences and launch stations when some of the smallest areas were being advertised by the Radio Authority and Ofcom. Whether due to their own failings or the economic hand dealt them, these and other groups have experienced real difficulties sustaining those businesses under the terms of the original licence award. Spectacularly, in 2006 UKRD handed back to Ofcom the licence it had been attempting to operate as Star 107.9 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, rather than sell it to another operator, largely to force a response from the unsuspecting regulator. UKRD Chief Executive William Rogers demanded ‘a serious and meaningful debate in the industry to help smaller stations work and become commercially successful.’ He added: ‘There are scores of radio stations losing money that will never work and the regulator has got to have a serious look at how to manage this sector. It would have been almost unethical to sell the licence on, it’s not a sound business and never would have been. The industry has got to wake up. As long as people keep buying and selling these lossmaking assets we will never get the change we need to see’ (Day 2006). The station had launched as The Falcon in 1998, and been subsequently bought by UKRD and rebranded Star like the neighbouring station the group owned in the larger town of Cheltenham, both Star stations being located within the original much larger TSA of Severn Sound, which had enjoyed greater fortunes as the heritage ILR station for Gloucester & Cheltenham. In order to make savings on the running costs of the Stroud

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station, UKRD had already asked Ofcom for permission to co-locate the two stations, so the Stroud service would actually come from a second studio in Cheltenham. As ‘co-location’ was merely a relatively new term for a practice that had existed since the 1980s where permission to do so had been granted by the regulator of the day, Ofcom agreed there was a compelling business case to allow it. However, Ofcom refused a request from UKRD to alter the format of the Stroud station, in this context a legally-binding statement of a station’s programming obligations, which had replaced the earlier ‘promise of performance’. Ofcom further refused to allow the same output to be simulcast on the two stations, and required the Stroud service to retain its separate identity, even though it was being managed from Cheltenham. This was a moment in the history of UK commercial radio that was every bit as significant as the Heathrow Conference. The handing back of the licence, the first time the licensing process and the role of the regulator as the final arbiter of what should be broadcast in an area licensed for commercial radio had been subverted in so spectacular a way, was a pivotal moment. Since then Ofcom has attempted to accommodate wideranging, often swingeing changes to licence agreements in the interests of maintaining services on air. While the co-location of entire services or parts of services had been allowed sparingly by the IBA in the 1980s, a new concept of groups gathering together their local news operations into regional centres known as ‘news hubs’ had been considered in its dying days by the Radio Authority. The group which had pioneered them was GWR, opening experimentally with the Authority’s consent a hub in South-West England in 2002. The hub began servicing the separate GWR stations in Plymouth, Exeter/Torbay, Yeovil & Taunton, Kingsbridge and Barnstaple by pre-recording each of their own local news bulletins using copy and audio produced remotely at the hub itself or by reporters working in the different TSAs who would feed the material they collected to the centre. This ‘pooling of resources’, as it was rationalised, was allowed on the understanding that ‘a local journalistic presence’ would be maintained in each TSA (Crisell & Starkey 1998: 20–1). Ofcom soon took the concept even further, by focusing its regulation on ‘content’ rather than ‘operational’ issues, a principle set out at length in a document it published in 2004, Radio – Preparing for the Future. This was a recognition that successive technological developments and parallel relaxations in ownership regulation ought to be reflected in its approach to content regulation. In 2006, then, with the handing back of the Stroud licence threatening to make a mockery of the licensing function it had been bequeathed by its predecessor, the regulator’s initial instinct to insist upon the letter of

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each licence metamorphosed into an insistence only on the spirit of the licence. This does not mean that Ofcom became a pushover, conceding every request or demand for change it received. On the contrary, licensees were still required to state a case and Ofcom would test the reasonableness of what was being proposed before deciding each issue one way or another, the regulator often needing to bear in mind any possible implications for other, competing contractors in overlapping areas, as well as the effect of change on the diversity of choice available to the listener. The areas in which this new relationship has been tested most controversially include format changes, co-location, news hubs, syndication and of course automation. Syndication was another legacy from the 1980s as we have already seen, particularly where the IBA was reluctant to let newcomers to the network produce their own programming over the full twenty-four hours of the broadcast day. Overnight programming, less significant due to the smaller audiences listening, had often come from programming ‘hubs’ (although the term was not used in this way), and in 1986 Beacon was supplying a five-hour long programme to its neighbours, Mercia, Signal and Wyvern, with only separate advertisement breaks to distinguish between the four outputs. Other initiatives had followed, and TLRC stations had already begun simulcasting their evening programmes across all their own stations, while GWR had successfully syndicated Late Night Love with Graham Torrington between 1996 and 2008 on a number of stations they sub-branded as ‘The One Network’. As one of the pioneers in pushing Ofcom even further in the direction most radio groups would have wished to go, Rogers can claim some success, damaging though this has inevitably been for localness. Firstly, the three stations in North-East England which had each been separately advertised and won in Darlington, Durham and Northallerton were originally branded as A1FM, Durham FM and Minster Northallerton and launched in 1995, 2005 and 2007 respectively. In 2010, after discussions with Ofcom over possible co-location further north with Sun FM in Sunderland, the three stations were instead rebranded as Star and co-located in Darlington. They began simulcasting the same programming with the only difference between them being the ability to broadcast separate commercials in each TSA, thus retaining the flexibility to earn income from small local advertisers while making the maximum cost saving possible and remaining on air. The two Yorkshire Coast Radio licences in Scarborough and Bridlington were also simulcasting everything but local adverts, and while The Bee and 2BR remained separate services, neither actually broadcast from Blackburn or Burnley, both sharing co-located premises in the town of Accrington which lies between the two.

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Homogenisation – or milking an opportunity? As such requests to Ofcom gathered in pace and audacity, 2010 witnessed the most dramatic changes to the commercial radio landscape ever seen, mainly at the instigation of Global Radio. The trend was unmistakably towards homogenisation of services, or again put bluntly, removing distinctiveness in ways that contribute to an overall loss of localness. Typically, relaxation of content regulation in programming has been accompanied by sustained reductions in the frequency and length of regular news bulletins and the abandonment of the original notion that stations needed to promise – and then produce – extended bulletins at lunchtime and early evening. Co-location of stations has inevitably meant that some move out of their editorial areas, while syndication means local content is replaced by quasi-national presenters and in this brave new world automation creeps out of the night to stalk creativity by day. The trend for homogenisation of output across local licences (and even across regional licences) is taking the ‘local’ out of local radio, despite often vacuous claims that what little local content remains will be enhanced by a parallel concentration of resources. What is more likely to happen, and this had already been borne out by the experience of what we might call the earlier ‘gold rush’ to consolidate the majority of the local AM services into EMAP’s Magic or GCap’s Gold brands, is that those resources will disappear. This had been allowed to happen because audiences for the AM services had so dwindled that distinctive, locally-produced content seemed to matter less for them than for the more popular FM stations. With the creation of GCap, the merger of the Capital Gold and Classic Gold networks into a single operation simply made good commercial sense and was unopposed. Inevitably the group with the highest profile, Global Radio does not have a monopoly on consolidation. In a single week in August 2010 the following developments were reported in the news pages of the industry journal The Radio Magazine: ●

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Tindle Radio was consulting with journalists on setting up a news hub for its five stations in East Anglia, at Town 102 (Ipswich), also serving The Beach (Great Yarmouth), North Norfolk Radio (strapline ‘Made in North Norfolk’), Radio Norwich, and Dream 100 (strapline ‘adult contemporary music for Tendring’). Ofcom approval received for Ivel FM (Yeovil) and Vale FM (Shaftesbury) to merge under the new brand Midwest Radio, sharing all

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programming but retaining separate local news services. Until then the two former TLRC stations had separate breakfast shows. UKRD received Ofcom approval to merge three Star stations previously branded as Alpha (Darlington), Durham FM and Minster Northallerton, to form a combined TSA of approximately 430,000. GMG received Ofcom approval to merge and co-locate Real Radio (South Wales) with the as yet unused regional licence awarded to Real Radio (North Wales). Previous permission had been given to reduce a requirement for ten hours per day of regional programming on each station to seven hours. Requirements in both formats to include ‘regional information’ were changed to ‘information about Wales’. GMG’s Smooth Radio had begun testing its new national DAB service on Digital One, as it began phasing out regional content on its five analogue regional Smooth brands in England. Fifty jobs were going as Chief Executive Stuart Taylor commented that the move would ‘give listeners… a feel for the fantastic soulful sound that is Smooth Radio’. (Issue 956, 19 August)

Under Ofcom’s new policy of judging stations’ performance by ‘output’, rather than ‘process’ criteria, it was almost inevitable that many heritage brands would disappear altogether. While Bauer Radio seemed content to exploit the twin factors of heritage and localness across its FM stations in Northern England and its Scottish stations on both FM and AM, Global’s ambitions were clearly national. In the first of two seemingly audacious moves, the full implications of which were made public in 2010, Global first set about rebranding as many of its stations as possible as Heart and then, through a coordinated process of consolidation, reducing the operating costs of the new quasi-national FM brand to the bare minimum the regulator would allow. The first stage was the rebranding in September 2008 of twenty-nine local stations as Heart, maximising the use of syndication in daytime and extending the successful brand well beyond its original analogue geographical limits. A number of long-established heritage brands were lost in the long list of those which disappeared: 2CR (Bournemouth), 2-TEN FM, Champion, Chiltern (Luton & Bedford), GWR, Marcher Sound, Gemini, Q103 (Cambridge), Essex FM, Severn Sound, Ocean (Portsmouth & Southampton), Invicta, Lantern, Coast, Fox (Oxford), Plymouth Sound, Orchard FM, Southern FM (Brighton), The Buzz, SGR (which had absorbed the two Suffolk stations Orwell and Saxon in 1992), Horizon (Milton Keynes), Broadland (Norfolk), Northants 96, and Hereward (Peterborough). In stage two in June 2010, the thirty-three separate stations operating under the Heart brand were

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merged into fifteen Heart ‘super stations’, centralising what local output remained into regional news and programming hubs, a move which was expected to cause the loss of two hundred freelancers and staff. In addition, two Global stations on FM which had been left intact in stage one, Mercury (Reigate & Crawley) and TEN-17 (Harlow) were also rebranded and merged into the two Heart ‘super stations’ nearest them. Global’s second dramatic consolidation was the merging in January 2011 of the six regional Galaxy stations it now owned in Scotland, the South Coast, Birmingham, Manchester, Yorkshire and North-East England with the remaining heritage ILR stations Red Dragon (Cardiff), Trent, Ram (Derby) and Leicester Sound to extend the Capital brand into another quasi-national FM network. Only the breakfast and drive sequences would be produced separately in the regions from the London output that was relayed at all other times, and in order to preserve some distinctiveness the London-based presenters would pre-record and voicetrack regional variations of some of their links. Slight variations in the station’s straplines, associating the brand with each locality, together with regionally-compiled news bulletins, traffic and travel and of course commercials, completed the jigsaw of apparent localness (or regionalness) that amply met the new regulatory focus on output, rather than process. According to Global, this was ‘local radio, delivered nationally’. With Heart and Capital now almost national on FM and inheriting the audiences around the country that had been painstakingly established under a vast array of different local brands, formats, target demographics and TSAs, Global was pushing to the limit the concept of localness through which back door commercial radio had first been brought to the UK. This was a resounding triumph of the commercial over the local insofar as it enabled a private company which already owned the one national INR licence for Classic FM to effectively construct a further two national stations, albeit still dependent on a patchwork quilt of relatively low-powered transmitters and frequencies spread across the upper half of the FM band. Whereas the extent to which commercial radio was able to challenge the BBC in its first incarnations was deliberately limited, being at first only local, and then only nationally available within niches, by 2011 Global Radio at least was ready to square up to Radios 1 and 2. In principle this made good commercial sense but it was also, to a certain extent, a gamble on listeners not caring about the diminution of localness that resulted from it. Because some requirements remained for local content, like Heart the individual stations within the new Capital network would also have some bespoke regional material played in where appropriate, but would listeners be fooled? A

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report for the governmental Department of Culture, Media and Sport by the presenter turned radio executive John Myers had already warned that up to fifty stations could close if conditions were not made easier for them in the wake of a new economic recession (2009). Sacrificing some local content was preferable to losing stations altogether, and the Digital Economy Act 2010 had then paved the way for greater out-of-area production. Nevertheless Myers considered local news to be the most important element of localness and one that should not be compromised. Radio is indeed a clever medium, and many of the people who work in it are ingenious in adapting its inherent characteristics in order to exploit them to the full. However, the many imaginative approaches to reconstructing radio that digital production and distribution technology allows us in the twenty-first century are not without their critics. To some commentators this is little more than a cynical raising of two defiant digits to the listener. Consultant Terry Doyle described what he called ‘radio’s dirty little secret’ thus: Some of the presenters on your local commercial radio station are not broadcasting live. In fact, most of them are not even located in your area. At best there is just one presenter presenting on many stations at the same time and more are what is called in the industry ‘voice-tracked’. A presenter in a far-off place will record links and then program them in between songs and commercial breaks. The practice greatly reduced labour costs for radio stations in the past decade. However, it also killed creativity by shutting off an infusion of new blood and new thinking. (Doyle 2010) As the once sleeping giant, now reared up to its full height and making a big noise, has come to resemble something its creators might imagine to be not just unrecognisable but a monster worthy of (Mary) Shelley, there might yet be some solace before we come to a conclusion. In the final chapter, from the wider perspective of considering globalisation as a world phenomenon, we shall ask whether or not ‘things’ really can only get better for localness in local radio, and – heresy itself – whether or not localness actually matters.

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5 Global Village or Total Eclipse? – From ‘Hot’ and ‘Cool’ Media to ‘Active’ and ‘Passive’

Futures past and futures present When the pioneering communication theorist Marshall McLuhan characterised the increasingly mediatised world of the 1960s as a shrinking ‘global village’ (McLuhan 2001), that world was a very different place to the one in which we live today. By global village McLuhan was rightly suggesting that improving communication infrastructure would result in peoples being brought closer together, so an event in New York could be witnessed immediately around the developed world. In time the concerns of New Yorkers would become the concerns of others many thousands of miles away, and not just those concerning life and death in the way that the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 became a justification for a wider ‘war on terror’ as much in other western capitals as in Iraq or Afghanistan. What was being envisaged was, of course, less ‘village’ and more ‘global’, because inevitably the concerns of some communities will crowd out those of others in the creation of a ‘knowable, common world that all of us inhabit’ (Scannell 2007: 279). That communicated world would otherwise be a cacophony of mediated messages between which it would be impossible to discern. Of course, McLuhan could only foresee some of what was to come: even the now familiar interactivity of today’s Web 2.0 was beyond most people’s imagination then, just as in turn we can only hazard educated guesses at what our own futures may hold. We can only make predictions as best we can, as could McLuhan, but unfortunately the history of predicting the media future is not a happy one, especially in the case of radio where anticipated doom-laden outcomes have so far failed to materialise (Starkey 160

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2009: 45–51). Until the development of the transistor and its use within the newly-portable transistor radio, the growing popularity of television in the 1950s and 1960s and its new-found supremacy as the principal source of evening family entertainment in the living room, led many commentators of the day to speculate authoritatively that radio’s days were numbered (Crisell 1994: 27). They were of course proven wrong by history, as were those who thought that the birth of the iPod and the emergence of a so-called ‘iPod generation’ would also severely damage radio – which was one of the key predictions of a report produced for Ofcom in its infancy, entitled The iPod Generation: Devices and Desires of the Next Generation of Radio Listeners (Ofcom 2004a). In the six years since the report was published, RAJAR has released data showing some of the highest ever levels of radio listening (RAJAR 2010). Far from us getting better at prognostication, the odds against us accurately predicting future developments in the media may be increasing, because it may well be that unpredictability is growing, as the number of possible future outcomes from an increasingly complex present continues to multiply. In the early 1970s a new craze seemed to be sweeping the UK and a number of other countries including the United States, for something called ‘citizens band’ radio. In a reversion to radio’s early twentiethcentury past, this was radio for two-way communication, but with the strong possibility that there would be other CB radio enthusiasts eavesdropping or even joining in conversations with relative strangers whose signals they happened across by chance. Illegal at first, because portable transceivers for use in cars or inside the cabs of heavy goods vehicles were imported into the UK before public calls for legalisation on a dedicated part of the radio frequency spectrum bore fruit, this was certainly ultra-local in scale, and often decidedly parochial, as many conversations between truckers related to a sharing of knowledge about problems on the road ahead. With the practice came a whole subculture with its own vernacular: for example meeting a friend made via the airwaves, perhaps in a lay-by or a transport café, was called by the enthusiasts ‘eyeballing’. In today’s language, this was an early form of social networking, lacking the relative permanency of web pages or images stored on servers, but sharing many other characteristics with the less geographically-constrained Web 2.0. Despite the practicality of being able to communicate without contracts, subscriptions or call charges, legalisation removed some of the shine from CB radio and eventually more flexible technology – the mobile phone – turned what had become a minor craze into a passing fad: one that still has its small

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circle of enthusiasts but little remaining hope of ever becoming a mass market activity. One of the ironies of predicting media futures is that we do not know which of today’s runaway fashions will turn out to be the passing fads of tomorrow. It is worth noting that, popular though the latest social-networking sites are at the time of writing, in 2004, just as Ofcom were considering the possible effects of the iPod, almost nobody had any Facebook friends, because Facebook had not yet been opened up to the public, the launch of Twitter was more than a year away and Bebo was just launching – all according to Wikipedia, which was then only three years old. Undoubtedly, we inhabit an age in which the political economy of the media sector is undergoing seismic shifts and we cannot necessarily know where these often revolutionary changes will lead us. Similarly, we don’t know whether change will continue at the same pace as at present, increase in pace, or be followed by a period of relative calm. We do, however, know that some traditional media are being challenged now as never before. As the death of radio was being predicted in the 1950s, so are the print media finding the twenty-first century much less certain than the twentieth, as newspaper sales fall and attempts to monetise their web activity produce inconsistent results. Now, television is challenged internally as mainstream full-service channels are increasingly destabilised by an ever-expanding multi-channel environment, as well as externally because there are more types of ‘new’ media to occupy their audiences’ time. The share of the viewing ‘cake’ each television channel may expect to command is shrinking, as that cake, as in the radio industry, is being sliced ever more thinly by increasing competition. Because of the uncertainty around predicting the future, this will inevitably be a speculative chapter engaged in drawing conclusions from the preceding material and providing insights into future directions in the ‘globalisation’ – or otherwise – of local radio. Put bluntly, to extrapolate from the trend we have observed in our main example of the UK from the late 1980s, will commercial local radio manage to draw disparate communities together with homogenised programming designed to appeal to all but reflecting the cultural distinctiveness of nobody, or will it be eclipsed, along with the rest of the medium of radio, by new, more interactive, more democratic and hence more diverse media forms that render local broadcasting, as opposed to narrowcasting, obsolete? In this chapter we will consider the future of local radio from perspectives rooted in the past but secured in the present, and also reexamine the concept of localness by asking how locally should ‘local’ be delineated: that is, where should the geographical boundaries

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be drawn? Should our ‘villages’ be real in that we may walk from one side of the community to the other in a relatively short space of time, or should they be virtual, extending through shared interests over many hundreds of miles? Some controversy surrounds the ways in which new technology is blurring understandings and practicalities around localness. While we have concentrated so far on a type of radio identified as ‘local’, we have often spoken of its audiences as being ‘communities’. What, then, of another such designation of radio – one widely known as ‘community radio’? Finally, amidst all the epistemological instability of predicting the future, we will challenge fashionable claims that older media forms will be naturally overwhelmed by newer ones, and that radio’s days are at last numbered, whether or not current distribution technologies, such as DAB, are eclipsed by other, existing or emergent platforms. Almost inevitably, though, we will end with the cautionary note that for all the reasons explored in the last chapter, globalising and homogenising tendencies will do little to encourage radio’s survival as an instrument for the support of cultural difference and democratic participation. To return to the prognostication of the past, by categorising different communication systems as ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media, McLuhan immediately courted controversy, drawing a distinction that today is increasingly challenged by the blurring of boundaries that comes with media convergence. If radio seemed likely to ‘time out’ in McLuhan’s day, and despite the recent record listening identified in the UK, its demise seems to many commentators to be even more likely now. However, because we no longer live in McLuhan’s world, the key to understanding radio’s future may lie more clearly within a distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ media, rather than his notion of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media: between those which rely upon and those which simply accommodate user-generated content – and this is another theme we will develop later.

Going global or turning parochial? In the midst of the homogenisation we identified in formerly local radio in the last chapter, we might ask almost as an aside what happened to the notion of commercial radio – or ILR as it then was – broadcasting content which might be described as meaningful speech. You will remember our discussion of meaningful speech in chapter 3, exploring evidence collected by the IBA just as ILR was in its infancy, that 19 per cent of total output was deemed to be worthy of the label. This discussion prompted some original research, which could of course, be repeated any

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time in the future to discern future trends, because even though some have changed dramatically in nature and in ownership, the ten stations originally surveyed by the IBA are still in existence. They were Capital Radio, Radio Clyde, BRMB, Piccadilly Radio, Radio City, Metro Radio, Swansea Sound, Radio Hallam, Radio Forth and, you will remember, the particularly discursive Plymouth Sound which had exhorted daytime listeners to Talk with Louise. The programme controllers, or equivalent, in each of those stations, still broadcasting using some of the very first licences to be awarded if not the same brands, were asked to make as reasonable an estimation as possible of the time occupied in their output by programming which could be classified according to the same categories as those used by the IBA in 1976. As we contemplate results that combine stations’ own responses with our own observations to reveal an almost complete departure from the original programming that was officially considered to justify their existence, we might afford ourselves a wry smile at the likely private reactions of those programmers who could not find time to complete the questionnaire in the cause of scientific enquiry. The very idea of a serious academic enquiring after the amount of educational, religious or drama content that might appear in their schedules today will almost certainly have reinforced any prejudice they might have had over the supposed ‘other-worldliness’ of academia. The aggregated data are shown in Table 5.1. Does, though, the disappearance from the longer-established radio stations of the kind of speech content that best represents distinctiveness in itself represent a form of globalisation? Radio that was once local, which is now becoming national, can hardly be described as ‘global’ in the international sense of the word – unless it is part of a wider trend, one which is being repeated worldwide. In the UK, as elsewhere, the development of a new, ‘third tier’ of broadcasting has complicated this question, as has quite separately the development of the internet, because just as some trends are towards consolidation and so unification, others run counter to them because they amount to fragmentation. Today’s media are often considered convergent, as production practices broaden to enable content and the brands which produce them to be exploited in different media forms, in the way that audio or video content may appear on the same organisation’s web site. However, the media are also divergent in the way that audiences need no longer depend on small numbers of established, richly-financed brands which have passed some gate-keeping hurdle overseen by a regulator or which is the result of market forces. As content production and distribution costs have fallen, and the old rationales for restricting access to the

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Table 5.1 Aggregation of stations’ self-assessment of own content with our own observations in early 2011, using previous IBA definitions of ‘meaningful speech’ Weekday average minutes per hour

Music

6am–6pm

6pm–midnight

Overnight

36

44

47

News

2

1

1

Sport

1

0

0

Commercials

10

9

9

Current/social affairs

0.5

0.2

0

Community information

1

1

1

Features/arts/ interviews

1

0.5

0

Listener/consumer service

1

0

0

Traffic

1

0

0

0.5

0

0

1

0.5

0

Religion

0

0.1

0

Education

0

0

0

0.5

0.3

0.3

0

0

0

Weather/public service Competitions/quizzes

Programme information Serials/drama

Stations surveyed: 95.8 Capital FM, Clyde 1 FM, 96.4 BRMB, Key 103 (was Piccadilly), Radio City 96.7, Metro Radio, 1170 Swansea Sound, Hallam FM, Forth 1 and Heart Plymouth & the South West (was Plymouth Sound).

media (such as scarcity of electromagnetic spectrum) have become easier to circumnavigate, audiences are presented with ever greater diversity of choice over which – and whose – media content to consume. This is not confined to the internet. Known as ‘community radio’, and relatively new to the UK, in radio broadcasting a third sector now operates within a different set of regulatory constraints on ownership, sources of income and making profit, as well as a requirement to achieve a ‘social gain’ objective. In other territories different types of legal and

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regulatory constraint often apply, but true community radio tends to be licensed and regulated with the clear intention of keeping it both separate and distinctive from the more familiar public and private sectors. This ambition towards establishing and maintaining a new distinctiveness at a different level means that, in the particular case of the UK, community radio stations operating under very different conditions are required to be demonstrably different from those which preceded them, both commercial radio and the BBC. Typically, to deserve the status and be licensed under the banner of ‘community’ radio, these stations are expected to be small in geographical terms. In most cases the communities they are expected to serve share little with those imagined ‘communities of interest’ we have encountered through the IBA’s incremental licences which addressed, for example, everyone in Greater London with a liking for jazz music. However there are exceptions in the UK model, which developed at a much slower rate than in many other countries which accommodate community radio. The sector’s history is a chequered one. In 1985, some years behind most countries in western Europe as we shall see, the then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, announced a two-year experiment in the proposed licensing of twenty-one community radio stations, each one to be staffed by enthusiastic volunteers, and ‘very largely unregulated’ (Stoller 2010: 158–9). The licensing body was to be the Home Office, rather than the IBA, which caused concerns at the regulator and in ILR, both sides being understandably wary of a new tier of radio broadcasting that had the potential to destabilise the commercial radio sector and to undermine the IBA’s role in managing all non-BBC broadcasting in an orderly way. When 245 applications were received by the Home Office, expectations among campaigners for community radio, many of them organised in the Community Radio Association, were demonstrably high that finally they would be able to bring their own brand of radio to the UK. Unfortunately for them, this was a period of great social unrest, in which the polarisation of opinion resulting from a strong, right-wing prime minister leading her government down distinctly non-consensual political avenues, often brought violent protest onto the streets of some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country. Many of the applications reflected the clear ambitions of radical left-wing groups to use radio not only to support communities against adversity in hard times but also to galvanise anti-Conservative protest in ways that were impossible through traditionally-regulated broadcasting, with its rules on impartiality. Consequently, the proposal was quietly dropped, with

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the ‘community’ nature of some of the incremental stations that were subsequently licensed being offered to the community radio lobby as a consolation prize. It was not until Labour deposed the Tories that a renamed ‘Access Radio’ pilot was officially sanctioned and in 2001 sixteen stations were licensed on a trial basis, all of which launched in 2002. The stations ranged from neighbourhood to small-scale community of interest in nature, and Table 5.2 illustrates the diversity of the stations in the experiment. In order to assess whether the new tier of Access Radio as it had been conceived and put into practice was providing a viable and worthwhile alternative to the BBC and commercial stations, an independent evaluator, Professor Anthony Everitt was commissioned by the Radio Authority to report on the sixteen stations in the pilot (2003). Although the licences awarded were initially for a single year, they were extended as the scheme was considered to be a success. As a result, a number of other stations were licensed by Ofcom until the scheme was renamed Community Radio and a systematic, rolling process of licensing new services began. The stations were to be awarded five-year licences but the application process required them to identify not only the community which they were intending to serve, but also the ‘social gain’ objectives and milestones over the five-year period by which achievement of those objectives would be measured. The concept of not-for-profit radio was firmly established in the terms of the licences: any operating profit was to be reinvested either in the service or in the community. Sixty-two new stations were licensed by 2005, 107 by 2006, and by 2008 the number had risen to an impressive 191. By November 2010 a total of 211 stations had been licensed. The experience in the UK has mirrored that in the Republic of Ireland, though, where the previous regulator, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (the BCI, now superseded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland) found that each year a small number of groups awarded licences failed to actually get their station on air, so challenging were the financial or other circumstances in which they found themselves. On its web site, Ofcom characterised the scheme thus: Community radio licences are for small-scale, not-for-profit radio stations operated for the good of members of the public, or of particular communities, and in order to deliver social gain. (Ofcom 2011) Viewed objectively, the diversity in output and approach of community radio is matched only by its varying levels of professionalism

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Table 5.2 The original ‘Access Radio’ pilot stations in the UK, with their original on-air dates and the nature of each service Cross Rhythms Stoke-on-Trent 28 February 2002

‘the Christian community’

Bradford Community Broadcasting

Bradford

1 March 2002

‘to serve all those living in a complex multi-cultural city’

Angel Radio

Havant

1 March 2002

‘people over sixty’

Northern Visions

Belfast

9 March 2002

‘the arts and creative expression’

Takeover Radio Leicester

23 March 2002

‘enables children to run their own radio station’

Radio Faza

Nottingham

25 March 2002

‘the Asian Women’s Project and the Karimia Institute’

Awaz FM

Glasgow

29 April 2002

‘communication between Glasgow’s Asian community and the public and voluntary sectors’

Resonance FM

South London 1 May 2002

‘defines its community as artists’

Wythenshawe FM

Wythenshawe (Manchester)

6 May 2002

‘target disadvantaged communities’

Desi Radio

Southall (London)

10 May 2002

‘to reconcile the different religious and social strands of Punjabi culture’

GTFM

Pontypridd

20 May 2002

‘the residents’ association of a housing estate… and the University of Glamorgan’

ALL FM

Levenshulme & 5 June 2002 surroundings (Manchester)

‘target disadvantaged communities’

Forest of Dean Radio

Forest of Dean 19 July 2002

‘promotes community development in a rural area’

Sound Radio

Hackney

‘a local world service’

26 July 2002

New Style Radio Birmingham

14 August 2002 ‘the development of African-Caribbean people’

Shine FM

21 September 2002

Banbridge (County Down)

‘Christian… speaks to the community at large and promotes social reconciliation’

Source: As described in Everitt (2003: 5).

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and impact, but it is being hailed by some as the ‘new’ local radio, unable to drift in the same direction as ILR because the stations cannot simply be bought up by larger operators. Because of the social gain dimension they are required to connect with audiences in ways which seem to be precluded by the homogenisation we have observed in commercial radio. Some stations do lack sufficient, experienced professionals, as opposed to keen volunteers, to exploit their airtime to the full, although most stations have written volunteer training into their five-year plan. In this way, community radio in the UK, even where audiences are small, does embrace traditions from other countries that include genuine altruistic concern for unrepresented voices in the increasingly cacophonous ‘public sphere’ once described in gentler times by Habermas (1989). This is despite many of its earlier critics having perceived the demands from the community lobby as merely brazen attempts to circumvent the gate keeping of ‘professionalism’ in the BBC and commercial radio that their own circumstances demand, in order to get on the air by whatever means. Until the arrival of the RSL and then the Community Radio licence, the only recourse for those wanting to broadcast but unable to secure the finance and the infrastructure necessary to win a commercial licence was to go pirate. Landbased pirates, while lacking the swashbuckling glamour of the offshore ships and forts, have multiplied as FM transmitters have become progressively smaller since the 1980s. When in 1990 Kiss was awarded an incremental licence, for example, the station had already ceased its previous pirate transmissions for a period in order to legally qualify for an official licence, as it would have been automatically denied one if its backers had still been landbased pirate broadcasters at the time of their application. Even though an unofficial policy exists of encouraging pirates to ‘go legal’ through the Community Radio route, the application process and that of building a credible organisation which is more than a would-be music machine are onerous, and simply not very appealing to many pirate broadcasters who are prepared to run the risk of discovery and prosecution rather than ‘sell out’ to an establishment solution. Nonetheless, anecdotal evidence suggests that where landbased pirates have had their makeshift premises raided, or in many cases their tower-block rooftop transmitters seized, official literature has been left behind explaining the legal route to access the airwaves represented by the CR scheme. Not surprisingly, different CR stations have different approaches to finance. Some, where the smallest of commercial radio stations are also located, are prevented from taking advertising at all. Others, even

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when they are allowed to, choose not to take commercial advertising. Many more would like to be able to raise more money from advertising than the prevailing economic conditions in their own communities allow: there are considerable costs to running such an operation, even when the majority, if not all, of the human effort required to run a station is given free of charge. Stations may accept donations, monetary or in kind, and in calculating their annual turnover they may place a financial value on the volunteering from which they benefit. No single source of revenue, however, may amount to more than 50 per cent of the total, a provision intended to prevent single benefactors effectively taking control of a station, and instead to enforce a need to seek a plurality of financial sources. What, then, is the likelihood of community radio replacing the localness that has been disappearing from local radio in the UK? Firstly, we must acknowledge the differences in scale, because a station which is serious about serving ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods in parts of a city as large as Manchester, for example, cannot by definition be addressing those other areas of the city which are more fortunate economically. The Greater Manchester conurbation once served by Piccadilly 261 is far larger in size than the audiences sought by the community radio stations now located there. So, singly no one may replace Piccadilly’s vanished meaningful speech – but collectively numbers of stations might, and if each one were to do that well, with relevant, distinctive programming that reflects its own community, it might be possible to judge that each of those communities now has something better than it had before. Secondly, there is the question of resources: if required to depend disproportionately on volunteer talent, and unable to meet those expectations of ‘professionalism’ in their output, will community stations lack credibility with their potential audience and simply lose listeners to radio stations that programme the ‘pop and prattle’ so feared by ILR’s critics in the 1970s, but which do it very well? There is, of course, a counter argument to the notion that ‘professionalism’ is a prerequisite of success, and indeed that success is only measured by attracting large audiences. It is one in which we will shortly find some truth, because there is evidence to suggest that community radio can play an important role in developing and empowering individuals who get involved with a station and develop new generic skills and understandings of the community and the wider world in which they live. However, the justification for community radio lying other than in the impact it may have on large numbers of people in its editorial area contributes little to our survey of localness in local radio, because it can be argued that

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localness is only worthwhile if local people actually experience it. As the first age of community radio in the UK continues, with more stations being licensed and others reaching significant milestones in their first five-year plans, accessing reliable audience data will be very problematic. Most community stations cannot afford to become subscribers to RAJAR, so a systematic approach to producing audience reach and share data for the sector as a whole lies beyond its means. Observers and RAJAR subscribers alike are reduced to extrapolating from data labelled as ‘other listening’ in the organisation’s Quarterly Surveys in order to indulge in educated guesswork as to the size of community stations’ audiences. The variety and, it would be fair to say, eclecticism reflected in the stations in the original access radio experiment described in Table 5.2 has only been magnified as the number of stations has mushroomed. There may be more atypical stations, quite unlike anything else on the community radio map, than typical ones which might invite suggestions of lacking in distinctiveness from many others. Let us briefly consider two examples, which contrast with each other in a number of different ways, but which are on air to serve geographical communities as opposed to ones delineated by ethnicity or gender. Radio Teesdale is a not-for-profit company which serves the North Durham town of Barnard Castle and aims to provide that community with a medium through which it might express itself. It provides ‘opportunities for up-skilling and empowering people’ through training. The station covers an area which would often be difficult to reach with ordinary lower-powered transmissions, and so fills a need in one of the least competitive radio markets in the UK. Almost at the other end of the country, Radio Scilly also benefits from the absence of local competition, due to its being surrounded by sea. Advertisements are common, and many of them for businesses on the mainland to which listeners are drawn.

We are not alone: some international perspectives As, notionally at least, the particular focus in this chapter is on global issues, this is an appropriate point at which to widen our analysis to include some international contexts. It would be remarkable if it were not possible to draw some appropriate, meaningful comparisons between phenomena observed in the development and globalisation of local radio in the previous chapters of the book and those to be found in other countries. Aspects of content and ownership regulation

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that relate to policy and practice in the public and private sectors of the United Kingdom recur in other territories, but some are unique. We began by comparing the UK’s original preferred public-service monopoly with the loosely regulated commercial model of the United States, where by the 1970s some seven thousand FM and AM stations were licensed and broadcasting, each to a defined area within a nation of approximately 150 million. In the UK, with its command and control approach to broadcasting, just over one third as many people were being served by a handful of stations. Although the terms ‘local’ and ‘regional’ do not figure prominently in the discourse around the development of radio in the US, ‘networks’ and ‘syndication’ do, because the licensing of independent, privately-owned stations to operate in cities and towns was soon followed by a gold rush of mergers and acquisitions and in turn stations becoming ‘affiliated’ to the main broadcasting networks, among them NBC, ABC and CBS. The act of affiliation to a network commits a station to taking a prescribed amount of syndicated programming, enabling the parent network to include the station’s transmission area within the overall footprint it sells on to advertisers and sponsors. One of the most famous of US radio personalities, Casey Casem, recorded The American Top Forty each week, the programme – complete with breaks for the insertion of commercials, station idents and other local announcements – was pressed onto a number of vinyl discs, which were then posted out to stations taking the programme, including the American Forces Network overseas. An individual station affiliated to a network can benefit from the greater audience recognition of the national brand and cross-promotion through any associated television network, while retaining the ability to produce such levels of local programming (typically news, weather and traffic information) that it chooses, mindful that such content can attract listeners because of the local relevance to the logistics of going about their daily routines. The essence of what we might need to call the feather-touch regulation of the US model, is that the FCC does not prescribe content or specify quotas and mainly confines itself as a regulator to ensuring orderly use of the frequency spectrum and handling serious complaints over breeches of licence terms around taste and decency. Stations are free to determine their own formats, and depending on the owners’ perceptions of the available market, it is not uncommon for a format to be ditched overnight and replaced by one that is radically different: for example, changing from adult-oriented rock to Latin (meaning Latin-American) or from newstalk to ‘soft’ AC (adult contemporary). Because the US is a

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nation formed from a federation of independent and proudly distinctive states, but probably more decisively because it is vast and spread over a number of different time zones, any supposed benefits of a single national radio service have always been widely recognised as being outweighed by its impracticalities. The vagaries of the initial distribution of licences as the demand-led pattern of stations began to emerge, does leave some licensees in the privileged position of being authorised to transmit with much higher levels of transmitter power than the rest, and among the fifty kilowatt ‘superstations’ that can still be heard over hundreds of miles on AM are the legendary WABC and WCBS in New York. From over the Mexican border, similarly high-powered AM stations beamed programmes into the US, for the US, including XERB on which Wolfman Jack gained national notoriety for ‘barking’ between songs (Richter 2006: 57–8). On a more local scale, the commercial radio model is not the only one adopted by the US, though. A thriving college radio sector does face restrictions on ownership in order to preserve its essential characteristics, many of which are shared with a small, parallel university radio sector in the UK. However the latter was originally only licensed to use very lowpowered induction-loop transmission systems that confined signals to campuses – while in the US college radio has long benefited from low-powered FM transmission that allows it to reach out into the surrounding neighbourhoods. Because in many ways the radio broadcasting systems of the US and the UK developed in diametrically opposed ways, it was, of course, the public broadcasting sector that remained underdeveloped in the US. Certainly this is so when compared with those in the UK and many other European countries. Today, National Public Radio (NPR) is often hailed as an oasis of quality broadcasting that also provides a left-wing counter balance to the right-wing shock jocks in the commercial sector (Starkey 2007: 93–4). In reality that balance is illusory: NPR lacks the generous public funding of the BBC and also levels of audience penetration significant enough to even begin to rival the commercial sector in the US. So the US model of local radio broadcasting is overwhelmingly commercial. In identifying trends in homogenisation and concentration of ownership in different local radio markets around the world, the dominance of privately-owned commercial radio in the United States provides the context for the notable example of Clear Channel, which operates more than 1200 radio stations there. Together with its joint venture partners, Clear Channel also operates more than 240 radio stations in Australia, Mexico and New Zealand. While some

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differences in approach are inevitably apparent across the company’s interests in such diverse markets situated in significantly different time zones, the potential for the kinds of consolidation we have identified as damaging to localness in content production is clearly present here in abundance. At best the absence of local ownership and control in local radio stations does little to encourage diversity in content, and at worst transnational flows of capital in return for influence tend to result in some of the worst manifestations of cultural imperialism which many would consider to be inherent to a capitalist system. Given the progressive decline of ownership regulation, it is remarkable that Clear Channel has, at the time of writing, so far largely restricted its activities in the UK cultural sector to the outdoor advertising and theatrical industries. In France, the radio industry developed in ways that were broadly similar to the UK, except that an original laissez-faire attitude to privately-owned radio was quickly abandoned and a state monopoly imposed, which only became strengthened rather than weakened, as the twentieth century progressed (Starkey 2007: 25–6). By the arrival of the mid1970s the state broadcaster ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) benefited from public funding for its mainly national services but faced stiff competition from large, apparently privately-owned long wave services of mass entertainment located in third countries on its borders, beaming in strong signals from Luxembourg (RTL), Germany (Europe 1), Monte-Carlo (Radio Monte-Carlo) and even the tiny Pyrenean principality of Andorra (Sud Radio). This competition was, however, illusory. The radios périphériques (or peripheral radio stations) were controlled by Sofirad, a company which in turn was also owned by the French state and which also reported to the French government (Duval 1979: 383, 387–8, 400; Kuhn 1995 : 94–5). The spell of national or quasi-national radio (quasi-national because the périphériques reached far into the country but tended to suffer from poorer reception in its most distant corners) was broken by the arrival of landbased pirates in the late 1970s. Perhaps the most famous – or even infamous to some – was Lorraine Cœur d’Acier, a landbased pirate set up in support of striking steelworkers in regular conflict with the right-wing government and its armed police force, the CRS. Other, mainly left-wing landbased pirates emerged, run either by political activists in order to promote a political perspective (such as the first, Radio Verte which launched in 1977) or simply by enthusiasts bent on pushing against the strictly-enforced state monopoly of radio in the hope of bringing about a liberalisation of the airwaves (Starkey 2007: 28–9). The French were aided in this by the

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situation in Italy, a country where chaos often manages to surface from under attempts to impose order. There the state monopoly which had benefited RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) was ruled illegal, so getting a licence to broadcast a local radio station became the relatively minor formality of queuing at a post office and completing an official form. Many stations launched without even doing that. The rush to occupy available or sometimes not-so-available frequencies led to the FM band quickly filling up in many urban and semi-urban areas. Disputes over frequencies were sometimes settled violently or with the threat of violence, as the mafia inevitably became involved in some stations. A small number, notably Azur 102 and Radio Nova International (on which the author broadcast between 1979 and 1981), used the relative freedom of the Italian system to broadcast across the border to the French and expatriate foreign communities living on the French Riviera, casting themselves in the style of mini-périphériques (Cazenave 1980: 107). Landbased pirates, often being run on very tight budgets and risking fines and the confiscation of equipment, tend to gravitate towards music formats. Unusually, in France the political nature of many pirates led them to broadcast a disproportionate amount of speech, which was inevitably locally produced. Radio Verte was an ecologically-motivated station, and prominently featured studio discussions around green issues. In Marseilles a socialist station, Radio K, launched in 1981 with the stated aim of broadcasting mainly speech and letting journalists, instead of disc jockeys or presenters, play any music that was broadcast between their reports and commentaries. Less surprisingly, given the absence of content regulation and any obligation imposed upon them to produce particular kinds of speech, the emerging private sector of Italy in the late 1970s was dominated by music stations, and inevitably groups emerged there too, with private commercial networks growing out of the original chaos of the spontaneously-developing radio libere sector. In 1981 the election of the socialist François Mitterrand to the French Presidency led to the legalisation of privately-owned local commercial stations and what are today deemed radios ‘associatives’ rather than ‘community’ radio, although that is broadly what the term means in France. The regulator, the Conseil Supérieur de L’audiovisuel (CSA) does consider content issues when awarding licences, and because the FM band is saturated in many of the most-populated areas of the country, at the time of writing the CSA was inviting applications and licensing digital stations on AM using the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) system, which offers almost studio-quality transmissions.

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In a number of other European countries, thriving local commercial radio sectors have developed, often becoming dominated by national or quasi-national groups that have been created by the consolidation of local stations into what the Spanish term cadenas. In Spain, for example, the local radio sector is otherwise particularly vibrant because responsibility for radio broadcasting is not confined to a single regulatory or even legislatory body: central government often vies for power with the separate autonomous regional governments and because both wish to retain the right to licence stations an element of chaos has crept in to this market, too. Many local stations are unlicensed, slipping through the complicated regulatory net, and they continue to derive income from advertising, while many others are licensed by the region, either as commercial stations or as community stations. To add a further layer of complication, ‘municipal’ stations are licensed by town halls. The pressures on small licensees to succumb to temptation and accept offers to trade broadcasting licences in return for money or a share in the consolidated business is considerable, which of course runs entirely counter to the interests of localism in Spanish radio. Among others, the Kiss FM network has largely been formed in this way, with a patchwork quilt of seventy transmitters carrying a quasi-national service that differs only where local advertisements and idents naming the local area are played out automatically. Speech is kept to a bare minimum.

The third way – democratisation and resistance in the community sector In Spain, an entirely different approach to syndication can be observed in the way the Asociación de Emisoras Municipales de Andalucía de Radio y Televisión (EMA-RTV), a municipal station association and support network operates. It has clear ambitions towards encouraging positive social change through radio, and provides its member stations in Andalucía with a sustaining service into and out of which individual stations can opt at will, depending on how much very local broadcasting their own resources will allow them to do. The association, as do others like it elsewhere in Spain, offers its members a range of services intended to sustain them in their local broadcasting, including volunteer training and multimedia services (Chaparro Escudero 2002: 177–82). The aspiration to encourage positive social change through community radio is common to many countries, and is itself encouraged by AMARC, the World Association of Community Broadcasters. There are many examples of this happening in ways that produce greater social impact

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than would be possible in the UK context, simply because often community radio operates in parts of the world where communities suffer from greater extremes of poverty and social deprivation. Other authors have documented this phenomenon in great detail, including Lewis and Booth (1989), and shown how community radio – and therefore this particular type of broadcasting on a local scale – can be much-needed catalysts for literacy or public-health campaigns or expressions of difference by ethnic minorities at risk of being submerged by dominant cultures. Some of the most frequently-cited examples include striking 1940s tin miners in Bolivia who used part of their strike fund to support the launch of a radio station that would support workers and their families in their struggle to survive economically, health workers who use stations in underdeveloped parts of Africa to communicate messages around proper hygiene for avoiding disease and speakers of minority languages whose only public forum for the expression of their cultural heritage is their own community radio station. Clearly, the medium of radio can do so much more on a local level than foreground international chart music and celebrity pap. Paradoxically, some countries lack any form of community radio, such as Greece where the idea of ‘radio stations that address the needs of local communities/communities of interest via the training of volunteers and the use of a small core of paid staff has never taken off’ (Barboutis & Gazi 2007: 57).

Radio’s place in a world of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ media This analysis of international contexts within which localness in local radio can be observed and contrasted is far from exhaustive but, with the exception of Clear Channel, in none of the examples we have considered here can we really say that local ownership and production are being exchanged for a global command and control system that excludes local distinctiveness in programming content. Most localness is being ceded to regional or national interests. Yet, the trend we have identified in detail in the UK and which is mirrored in many other countries is one which shares characteristics with globalising trends observed in other media and other economic and political spheres of influence. Terry Flew neatly summarises theories of ‘global media monopoly’ as they have been argued within neo-Marxist, imperialist and other paradigms, adding that: ‘The proposition that media ownership worldwide is subject to growing concentration, leading to reduced competition and increasingly homogenous media content worldwide, is a commonly cited one’ (2007: 72–4 my emphasis). What, if not cultural

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imperialism at least on a national scale, could the concept of ‘local radio, delivered nationally’ otherwise be? Just as foreign ownership of UK satellite television is growing, so could international conglomerates become more interested in the UK radio market, with its ever-lighter regulatory governance? However, globalisation does not need to be ‘top down’, driven by individual corporations seeking to take control of previously locally-owned and managed media producers. The mere removal of the distinctiveness in radio programming that we have identified as a key feature of localness, has the effect of producing ‘bottom up’ globalisation, in the same way that cultural imperialism does not depend solely on individuals to acquire foreign interest but merely on the export of styles, tastes, fashions and attitudes. A pertinent question on which to conclude, though, is whether such globalising trends actually matter in an age in which the number of media providers and the diversity of provision across a growing range of media and distribution platforms are growing exponentially. Because the justification for consolidation in local radio is so often the inherent precarity of the small or independent privately-owned commercial station in an increasingly competitive marketplace, in answering such a question it would be useful to consider the robustness or otherwise of the medium of radio to survive in any form as the media world of today metamorphoses into that of tomorrow. In this digital age we are very used to media convergence, in which content from a single producer might be accessible through a range of different platforms. We are equally used to interactivity in all its many forms – but with so much media output to choose from, we might ask how different media will develop, and how audiences will use them. Such answers may be hard to divine with any accuracy, as we have already noted, but today, as in the past, radio may well be a more robust medium than many commentators concede. Today, there are ever more ‘active’ media, and they are becoming increasingly interactive, but what of ‘passive’ media? One medium which can be as active as any others is indeed radio, with listeners being exhorted to text in to the studio, programming and extended content being placed on many stations’ web sites for nonlinear access, and the use of microblogging (for example, Twitter) and social-networking web sites to maximise audiences’ contact with the brand and in order to build brand loyalty. Radio can also be consumed passively, in that in order to enjoy many radio programmes or to access essential information from them, listeners who simply want to tune in and listen may do so to their complete satisfaction. They may also listen while they do something else, perhaps routine or mundane in nature,

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which requires little cognitive engagement, such as ironing or longdistance driving. That is one of radio’s great strengths, and perhaps a reason why radio may be one of the most durable of today’s media as we head towards an uncertain future. This is, in itself, a distinctiveness of radio which can be attributed to the differences between radio and the other media which rely on the transmission of given images. To better understand such a distinction, let us ask what ‘active media’ might be, and what distinguishes them from radio? We often hear of many ways in which radio has moved on from its simple beginnings as a real-time live or pre-recorded audio stream that can reach audiences large or small in nearby communities or great distances away. Once, the only way of interacting with a radio station was to write in using the traditional overland mail service. This created a considerable time lag between the broadcasting of the content and the receipt of the listener’s response to it, so even though we didn’t call it ‘interactivity’ at first, it was exactly that: a very slow form of interactivity. Perhaps, in a few days, listeners could hear their letters being read out. Then, the use of the telephone for integrating listener responses into the radio programming dramatically reduced that time lag, as did the presence of a studio audience and the mounting of an outside broadcast, in ways we have explored through the schedules and programming of early ILR. Live audiences, such as at roadshows or outside broadcasts from workplaces, could be heard on the radio straight away, either laughing at a joke or applauding something they agreed with. Individuals within audiences could even be heard speaking on the radio from their own homes in a phone-in. However this was not the interactivity of today and it is clear that inviting listeners to text in provides mass instant responses, that parallel web content posted by radio stations can be supplemented by listeners’ own material (today termed ‘user-generated content’) and that radio stations can use all the features of Web 2.0 to position themselves at the heart of the social-networking craze, if craze it is. Now digital radio can provide pictures that are already made by producers for their audiences, so they don’t have to create or recreate them in their own imaginations. DAB, a newer technical specification called DAB+ which is being rolled out in Australia, and the mobile television standard Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) all allow still pictures to be transmitted alongside sound output. There are now also many radio stations which are very wisely colonising parts of the mobile phone experience, so all listeners need is the latest application (or ‘app’) and they are connected, wherever they are, providing of course the phone is within range of a strong

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enough signal and they have paid their subscription to the mobile phone service. Well-resourced local radio stations are able to make more detailed content available through these essentially interactive services and even to provide more specialised content that targets subgroups within the audiences, right down to neighbourhood level. These are undeniably exciting times for radio, and the medium is being consumed– that is, enjoyed – in many ways that are quite different from before and which few might have believed just ten to fifteen years ago. Some old distinctions drawn between different media are much less relevant now, than when they were first proposed. In particular, the ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ categories of media, as described by McLuhan (2001), which were related to the demands they placed on human cognitive activity, used terms and drew distinctions that were always considered problematic, and with them McLuhan courted much controversy. Today a much more relevant – and also less controvertible – distinction between different media might lie in this difference between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ engagement with them. McLuhan described radio and the press as ‘hot’ and television and the telephone as ‘cool’, whereas in today’s rather better-connected global village, the television and the telephone are ‘active’ media, while radio is a medium that – for all the excitement around parallel web content, metadata and the like – may indeed be more durable simply because it can be successfully consumed passively. This essential characteristic derives from the secondary nature of much radio listening, as Crisell observed (1986: 12–13), which means that radio in its original form can still be enjoyed to the full while doing something else: getting dressed, bathing, ironing, cooking, and in particular driving, which are all activities to which radio can be an effective accompaniment. In Understanding Radio, Crisell described radio as a secondary medium, and the semantic difference between primary and secondary seemed to some people to suggest ‘subordinate’ or of lesser importance, although Crisell has also frequently argued that radio has many more finer characteristics than television (2003: 11–18). Far from lacking as a medium because analogue radio can offer its listeners no given, as opposed to imagined, pictures, to Crisell radio was more intellectually challenging because it depended until very recently on a listener’s ability to construct in the ‘mind’s eye’, either consciously or unconsciously, a set of derivative but still essentially original pictures from the audio clues provided by the audio-only transmission. Many would argue that one of the great strengths of radio drama, for example, is the vast universe of possibilities this opens up,

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for producers and for listeners alike, in the way that the first listeners to Capital Radio would have drawn on previously given images of the actress Peggy Mount (from television, film or the press) and used them to create their own, possibly re-styled images of her playing her new role in Bedsitter. Through listening to the radio, even to short, dramatic adverts that make imaginative use of the range of possibilities open to commercial copywriters on even the smallest of local radio stations, listeners can relatively easily be stimulated to create elaborate, but almost inevitably differing, scenes in each of their own minds that would otherwise require big budgets or many hours of expert time in producing computer-generated imagery (CGI) for the screen-based media. It seems appropriate to suggest that the secondary nature of what we might now start to call ‘pure’ radio, and the passive way in which it can be consumed, bring to the medium an advantage that other media lack: in this ever more connected and interactive world in which we live, everyone remains constrained by the reality that there are still only twenty-four hours in a day. Among the many social-networking and content-sharing web sites that exist at the time of writing, including MSN, Photobucket, Xing, Orkut, Twitter, Myspace, Bebo, Blogger, You Tube, Hi5, Flikr, Friends Reunited, Friendster, AudioBoo, LinkedIn, Ning, Zaadz, Ryze and RenRen, the most popular in the Western world is Facebook. When we are using Facebook, for example, it can take us considerable time and effort to update our account, upload images and so on, so with all the other things we might have to do today, how much time will there be left to read our own Facebook friends’ posts? As the number of friends we each have multiplies, how much time do we each have left to interact with each individual? Some of us will be as out of touch now, with some of our Facebook friends, as we were before we ‘found’ each other again on Facebook. The development of Facebook, Twitter, Flikr, LinkedIn, Ning and all the other networking opportunities we are faced with today presents an enormous challenge to our ability to consume other, active media. YouTube offers what would once have been inconceivable opportunities to – actively – access archive and original, professional and amateur, audio and video content, and this runaway interactive success exhorts a visitor to ‘broadcast yourself’. Inevitably, because there is so much content there, and because it will almost certainly grow exponentially, most contributors aren’t broadcasting themselves, but instead they are ‘narrowcasting’ to very limited, and often quite specialised, audiences – to use a term which is at least forty years old and dates back to the early debates around the nature and viability of community radio and

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analogue cable TV. There are of course blogs – such as Paula Cordeiro’s Net FM in Portugal – which have rightly developed a reputation for compelling content, that are deservedly popular and often influential. Net FM, for instance, is regularly visited by that relatively small number of people who want to be updated in Portuguese on developments in, and academic perspectives on, radio as a medium and as an industry. There are, however, many more blogs that are truly undistinguished by their intrinsic value to anyone other than the blogger. Let us imagine for a moment a world where everyone has a blog. Would every blog be read by the same number of people, or would some – becoming, in their own way, recognisable brands – be more widely read than others? The relatively new phenomenon of news microsites, often with an editorial area that corresponds with a single postcode, provides in many instances fine examples of citizen journalism. It is quite evident that many others do not, and while these active media exhibit some really excellent material, in the relative absence of any selective gate keeping role as described by Galtung and Ruge (1965), there is a lot of mediocrity in so-called hyperspace, too. That is, notions of professionalism combine with a reasonable application of quality thresholds to ration access to media outlets that exist only through their survival in commercial markets or through public subsidy that must ultimately be justified, yet many web sites apply no such criteria. There may indeed come a time when the public’s appetite for bedroom ‘air-guitar’ videos wears off, or perhaps the production values in amateur postings will rise, as the shortcuts available through software wizards and the like become more able to support user-generated content, but much content accessed through interactive means on the internet would pass few strictly-applied commercial, public-service or content-regulatory tests. As a consequence of the divergence of brands and platforms, early Harvard Business School research into the use of Twitter appeared to suggest that it was only core enthusiasts who engaged with the microblogging site most regularly, and that its growing success may be illusory: ‘tweeting’ has novelty appeal for many, but it is a daily core activity for a few (Piskorski 2009). Harvard research into Wikipedia suggests a similar phenomenon: they found that 90 per cent of posts on the usergenerated encyclopedia were originated by 15 per cent of its contributors (Piskorski & Andreea 2009). The consequences of the mushrooming of divergent brands and platforms mean that some traditional media are under pressure and that previously reliable income streams have been eroded. In the UK, where we have followed the development of the main commercial network (now branded

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ITV1 alongside a number of parallel but associated digital-only brands, among them ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4), prior to the 2010 general election the channel’s owner, ITV plc, had persuaded the then government it could no longer afford to continue its public-service commitment to regional television news. A pilot scheme to investigate how public funding might make a contribution led to the beauty-contest style identification of three consortia, known as Independently Funded News Consortia. Before they could begin work, though, a change of government led to the pilot being abandoned and claims that something dramatic must now happen for ITV to continue its regional news service. What seemed a likely consequence of ITV abandoning its commitment to regional television news would be to hand the BBC a monopoly in this provision, a privileged position it had not enjoyed for fiftyfive years. With regionalism in commercial television also under threat, it is pertinent to ask whether it is progress in the multi-channel, multimedia age for a community to lose a healthy pluralism they have enjoyed for decades?

Radio: the benefits of passivity Where do its essential characteristics and the nature of the competitive market within which it operates leave radio, and particularly local radio? Despite having been written off many times as an outdated medium which is doomed to be eclipsed by another, radio is doing comparatively well in many parts of the world. Experiences will vary across different markets, but in the UK RAJAR have been reporting some record audiences: in the last quarter of 2009, half a million more adults were listening to the radio than a year before; digital listening hours for radio showed an 11 per cent annual growth; DAB ownership was up 11 per cent annually and mobile phone listening was up 7 per cent annually (RAJAR 2010). This was not an isolated set of results: the second and third quarters of 2010 revealed record listening figures in terms of reach, as 46.8 million adults, or 90.6% of the UK population aged 15 and older were listening to radio each week (RAJAR 2010a), and this represented an increase of one million. There are, of course, methodological and epistemological issues around the collection of audience data through sampling techniques (Starkey 2004a), but if we don’t look too hard at the data – and audience data collection for other media is subject to little institutional or public scrutiny – at the time of writing these appeared to be good times for radio. When we consider how radio is being consumed, and this must reinforce the advantage that radio has due to the potential for using it as a secondary medium, the published data on platform usage consistently demonstrates that

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traditional, essentially passive consumption by simply switching on a radio set, be it portable or otherwise, in the kitchen, elsewhere around the house or in the car, is still the source of the vast majority of that listening. That is, in that third quarter of 2010, DAB continued to lead digital migration in the UK, being well ahead of its nearest rival, listening through television platforms, in terms of share. DAB accounted for 15.3 per cent, compared to only 4.4 per cent for listening through the Sky, Freeview and Freesat DTV platforms combined. Internet listening, arguably the method which requires the highest levels of listener interaction even though small numbers of wi-fi radio sets were by then in use, remained stuck in third place with a 2.8 per cent share of all listening, maintaining the trend indicated in Table 5.3. The balance of listening, namely 75.2 per cent, was, by our definition, potentially the least interactive – or active – of all, because the transmission of metadata is limited in potential on analogue FM radio and conventionally non-existent on analogue AM, while timeshifting and other ‘red-button-style’ interactivity are not available. Of course the passivity of the receiving method is not a clear indicator of levels of total interactivity because any listener could choose at any time to interact with the radio station being listened to and do so through a different medium, from the letter or phone call to the text, email or subsequent web site visit. However, the fact that most listening should be done using technology that most favours passivity, does support our hypothesis: that passive engagement with radio and the use of radio as an accompanying medium that is often secondary to a primary activity may make it an unusually robust

Table 5.3 Digital radio listening in the UK by platform as a percentage of total listening, quarter three, 2010 September 2009 %

June 2010 %

September 2010 %

All digital

21.1

24.6

24.8

DAB

13.3

15.8

15.3

DTV

3.6

4.1

4.4

Internet

2.2

2.9

2.8

Digital unspecified*

2.0

1.8

2.2

Note: *Where respondents have been unable to identify the digital platform, this listening is indicated as ‘digital unspecified’. Source: RAJAR (2010a).

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medium compared to others which demand higher levels of cognitive and psychomotor engagement. In turn this may account for the record levels of listening being detected by RAJAR.

Two digits to localness, or a giant nonetheless? So, insofar as we might be tempted to prognosticate, what will the future look – and sound – like for localness in local radio? It seems likely that there will be ever more media products from which potential audiences may choose, as they prioritise their activities during their waking hours. Despite the great interactivity and possibilities for user-generated content that many of them will offer, current trends suggest that radio – with its potential to be consumed in its purest form while doing some other, perhaps primary, activity – is better positioned to withstand increased competition than many other media. As we head towards the future, it is entirely possible that radio will be a big part of that future – with all the enhancements the latest technology will bring. Where, then, does that leave localness? We have assumed throughout this analysis that localness is to a certain extent a virtue. Certainly in licensing commercially-financed but essentially public-service-inspired radio stations in private ownership in the UK and in many other territories, one of the most common quality criteria has been the amount of content that is local only to those people whom the station is primarily intended to serve. Where state broadcasters such as the BBC have been required or empowered to establish local radio as a complimentary activity to their other operations, and where the case has been made for the licensing of a community radio station, local content has been central to the rationale behind most station launches. It is, however, entirely possible that localness may be decreasing in importance, at least localness as it may be transmitted over the airwaves by a radio broadcasting service. While listening to radio services over the internet remains a distinctly minority activity in the UK, and one even less likely to catch on in the near future in underdeveloped regions of the world where even mains electricity may be hard to come by, there are many other uses to which the World Wide Web may be put. The phenomenon of hyper-local news sites we cited earlier is but a single example of how individuals within local communities can access for themselves media content that is of specific interest to them and others in their communities, and there are many more. For example, Streets of Bournemouth is an on-line ‘living museum’ of Bournemouth, which was developed in partnership by Bournemouth Libraries and the University of Bournemouth, and

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launched in 2010. The site features not only images and an interactive map, but also extensive audio recordings of local residents giving eyewitness accounts of people, places and past events in the style of oral history, and visitors to the site may interactively select which contributions to access. Inevitably, the site is not alone, as other initiatives from local residents and institutions have contributed to a growing and relatively easily accessible resource. To accurately quantify the plethora of such sources available worldwide or even in a domestic market the size of the UK would be either impossible or quickly overwhelmed by the creation of new web sites. In short, the media world has evolved considerably from that in which localness in local radio provided a rare opportunity for listeners in distinctive communities to access local content that was otherwise missing from the limited media landscape of the time. If in some markets localness once provided a useful Trojan horse through which business interests gained access to the potential of radio broadcasting that would otherwise have been denied them, as we have seen in the UK, the horse is now no longer necessary. To return to our original metaphor, the once sleeping giant of local radio has evolved considerably since its infancy. However, a strong business case for localness can still be made. Table 5.4 shows how in the UK market RAJAR detects some of the biggest audiences being won by radio stations whose localness, and hence distinctiveness, have been compromised the least. As always, we must be careful in presenting and analysing data. Where RAJAR was asked to combine data for pairs of stations (from an original AM/FM split, for example) or for whole groups or subsections of groups, they have been omitted from the list. Interestingly, the data precede the roll-out of the Capital brand but none of the stations, most of them regional, feature in the list. However, five of the Heart stations do appear in this top thirty chart, the highest being Heart Somerset (formerly Orchard FM) in 21st place. In drawing comparisons, we must not be deceived by the ‘island effect’ of four of the top seven stations being located within the quite geographically and culturally specific contexts of individual islands, namely Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Mann and Guernsey respectively. Paradoxically, Isle of Wight Radio is 28th, although its separation from the mainland is less significant than the others, being only three miles away. The other three stations in the top seven are all located in some of the most distant parts of Scotland. The impressiveness of the share figures in the top ten begins to wane almost immediately, although what is not apparent from the chart is that the worst performing stations have share figures which are considerably lower, the majority of the AM Gold stations, for example,

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Global Village or Total Eclipse?

Table 5.4

187

Top 30 UK radio stations by listening share in their own TSAs

Rank Station

Share in own TSA %

1

Island FM 104.7

35.0

2

Radio Borders

34.9

3

Channel 103 FM

31.0

4

Manx Radio

30.7

5

Moray Firth Radio

29.5

6

West Sound

23.9

7

BBC Radio Guernsey

23.4

8

102.5 Radio Pembrokeshire

22.4

9

Northsound One

21.2

10

BBC Radio Ulster

20.3

11

C.F.M. Radio

19.9

12

BBC Radio Jersey

19.7

13

BBC Radio Cornwall

19.7

14

Lincs FM 102.2

19.2

15

Dream 100

19.0

16

3FM

17.8

17

Spire FM

17.4

18

97.4 Cool FM

17.4

19

BBC Radio Cumbria

17.3

20

Yorkshire Coast Radio

16.6

21

Heart Somerset (was Orchard FM)

16.3

22

Heart 103.3 FM Milton Keynes

16.3

23

KL.FM 96.7

16.2

24

Trax FM

16.0

25

Heart North Devon (was Lantern FM)

16.0

26

Heart Plymouth (was Plymouth Sound)

15.9

27

Clyde 1 FM

15.9

28

IOW Radio

15.8

29

Radio Wave 96.5 FM

15.7

30

Heart Essex (was Essex FM)

15.7

Source: RAJAR, third quarter 2010.

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Local Radio, Going Global

hovering around only 1 or 2 per cent (with an arithmetical mean across the stations of 2.1 per cent). Inevitably, one important influence on stations’ rankings in this chart will be the competitiveness of the market, and not just the attractiveness of the station to potential listeners. Some of the stations in and around London face tougher competition than they would if they relocated to either New York or Los Angeles (Starkey 2003a: 305–6). Just as the more remote Scottish stations attract larger audience shares, 102.5 Radio Pembrokeshire has consistently scored well since it launched with a commitment to locally-produced speech, and BBC Radio Ulster is also able to exploit the distinctiveness of its editorial area to perform well, as is 97.4 Cool FM (which launched in place of the FM simulcast of Downtown Radio in 1990). Being realistic, though, it is clear that localness can still drive audiences to their ‘own’ stations, to the detriment of national, regional and neighbouring stations. In one area of mainland England which remains proudly distinctive from neighbouring areas, as evidenced not least by that traditional hostility between Liverpool and Manchester over rival football teams (Crisell & Starkey 1998: 23–5), BBC Radio Merseyside’s share was 11.4 per cent and Radio City’s 10.7 per cent, too low to appear in our chart, but still well above many other stations in similarly-sized markets. The case for localness in local radio that can reasonably be extrapolated from station audience share data is generally reinforced by the mean data for certain groups or types of stations. However, of course, as in the discussion above, other factors may influence the RAJAR data. For example, in the same quarter BBC Local Radio achieved only 8.4 per cent overall in its combined editorial areas, but as we have already discovered they target an older demographic which by definition excludes large sections of the population who might otherwise listen in for local content. The Heart network of former local and regional stations (as opposed to the wider national coverage of the brand through digital platforms) fared only marginally better with 9.9 per cent, even though they were targeted more aggressively at a younger demographic. Bauer’s better 12.4 per cent was built on the group’s heritage-tolerant approach of maintaining big existing brands, more extensive use of local management and far greater distinctiveness between stations. Furthermore, because groups of stations, however they are constituted for the purposes of presentation in the RAJAR survey, can include wide variations in performance, within some arithmetic means lie some extremes of performance. Of the BBC local stations, for example, thirteen stations performed better by share of listening than Bauer’s mean of 12.4 per cent. BBC Radios Cornwall (19.7%), Cumbria (17.3%), Lincolnshire (15.6%), Norfolk (14.3%) and Derby (14%) were performing

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189

particularly well. At the other end of the scale lay BBC Radios Manchester (3.8%) and Tees (3.1%) and while we can easily identify localness as proving popular with some audiences, results like these suggest that a range of other factors must play a part. If anything, there may simply be an element of luck in the impact a diet of localness can have on a radio station’s fortunes, or perhaps it is the skill with which it is produced and then integrated with non-indigenous material, inevitably including most of the music played. The cost of entering the RAJAR survey in the UK makes it unlikely that many, if any, community radio stations will be put to this rigorous acid test of popularity, as we have already noted, but even though they are very local in ownership and content, levels of professionalism and lack of marketing budgets may work against them. Perhaps, in another sense, however we may feel this is just or otherwise, the greatest test of localness in local radio may be the market – commercial and public service. In the case of the commercial sector, sometimes niche markets abandoned by big players can be exploited by newcomers, and as Global Radio and others have abandoned some key elements of local radio for greater consolidation and homogenisation, community, internet or even newer forms of radio we have not yet imagined may step in to fill the void. Community stations depend heavily on volunteer support and may sustain few salaried staff, but if levels of professionalism can be set high and sustained they may yet keep localness alive. This amounts to shifting the responsibility to provide localness in radio to the voluntary sector, a de facto policy which resonates with that of the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats which came to power in 2010: shifting some essential public-service provision around health and social care to the voluntary sector, in order to produce savings for the taxpayer. Public-service radio also has to face tough, if in some ways different, tests in order to continue to attract public funding. While radio’s future may well be bright, preserving and stimulating localness may ultimately depend entirely on the will of legislators and regulators to keep it alive, wherever in the world it may be found. Distinctiveness may cost disproportionate amounts of money, and the preservation of heritage – both cultural and radiophonic – may require effort and expenditure as well as political will. The big prize remains the expression and stimulation of cultural difference, yet it may just slip from our hands. Regulation of both ownership and content, as well as the provision of support funding, may be essential to stem the tide of local radio going global.

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Fitzwalter, R. (2008) The Dream That Died: The Rise and Fall of ITV, Leicester: Matador. Fleming, C. (2002) The Radio Handbook (2nd edition), London: Routledge. Flew, T. (2007) Understanding Global Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Galtung, J. & Ruge, M. (1965) ‘The structure of foreign news: the presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four foreign newspapers’, Journal of International Peace Research, 1, 64–91. Gordon, J. (2001) The RSL: Ultra Local Radio, Luton: University of Luton Press. Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hansard (1977) ‘Written answers (Commons)’, volume 928 column 607-9W, 24 March, London: Hansard . Hansard (2003) ‘Broadcasting (Wales)’, volume 928 column 274, 21 January, London: Hansard . Hendy, D. (2007) Life on Air: A History of Radio Four, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Home Office (1997) Radio: Choice and Opportunities, consultative green paper, London: HMSO. Home Office (1998) Broadcasting in the 90s: Competition, Choice and Quality: the Government’s Plans for Broadcasting Legislation, policy white paper, London: HMSO. Jones, T (1989) ‘The deregulation of broadcasting’ in The Modern Law Review, volume 52, number 3 (May), London: Blackwell pp. 380–388. Lewis, P. M. & Booth, J. (1989) The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Local Radio Working Party (1980) Third Report of the Local Radio Working Party, London: Home Office. Kuhn, R (1995) The Media in France, London: Routledge. Kuhn, R. (2007) Politics and the Media in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McCarthy, C. (2007) ‘Development of the AM transmitter network’, BBC Engineering Information document, London: BBC http://www.mds975.co.uk/ Content/bbc_transmitter_development_clive_mccarthy.pdf (accessed 26/8/10). McLuhan, M. (2001) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge (first published 1964). McQuail, D. (2010) McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (6th edn), London: Sage. Médiamétrie (2010) L’audience de la radio en lundi-vendredi (5h–24h), 27 July, Paris: Médiamétrie. Milland, J. (2004) ‘Courting Malvolio: the background to the Pilkington Committee on broadcasting, 1960–62’ in Contemporary British History, volume 18, number 2, pages 76–102. Myers, J (2009) An Independent Review of the Rules Governing Local Content on Commercial Radio, London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport http:// webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/ publications/An_Independent_Review_of_the_Rules_Governing_Local_ Content_on_Commercial_Radio.pdf (accessed 25/11/10). Napier, A. (2006) ‘You are too old at 65, BBC tells listeners’, Southern Daily Echo, Southampton: Newsquest Media Group http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/ news/1019701.you_are_too_old_at_65_bbc_tells_listeners/ (accessed 28/12/10).

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Index 2BR 152, 155 2CR 59, 157 2LO 4 2MT 4 2-TEN FM 126, 157 5XX 5 A1FM 155 ABC 171 accents 91–5 Access Radio 167, 171 Action Desk 101 Adie, Kate 148–9 advertising 7–8, 10, 11, 13, 20, 21, 22, 29, 30–1, 44, 45–6, 51, 52–3, 60, 61, 66, 76, 77, 82, 83, 92, 95–7, 102, 110, 111, 114, 121–4, 128, 132, 133, 137, 155, 156, 169–70, 171, 172, 176, 181 Advertising Association 123 AM transmissions, characteristics of 14 AMARC 176 American Forces Network 172 analogue transmissions, characteristics of 3, 4, 5 Anglia TV 47 Annan Committee 57, 117, 118 Arnold, David 85 Associated-Rediffusion 28, 44–5, 49 Association of Independent Radio Contractors (AIRC) 82–4, 102–3, 104 Attenborough, Richard 48 audience measurement 54, 76–8, 102–4, 121, 131, 170–1, 183–5, 186–9 automation 127–8, 155, 156 Azur 102 175 Baker, Pete 87 Barnes, Susan 38 Basingstoke Gazette 135

Basingstoke Observer 135 Bassett, David 99 Bauer 143–4, 145, 157, 188 BBC-1 32, 57 BBC-2 16 BBC LDN 48 BBC Local Radio xv, 23–5, 26, 34–42, 43, 46, 48–9, 56, 61–2, 73, 78, 103, 131, 148–52, 185, 188–9 (see also individual stations) BBC London 94.8 48 BBC London Live 48 BBC Radio 1 22, 23, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76, 77, 86, 88, 91 BBC Radio 2 22, 23, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 68–9, 77, 103, 132 BBC Radio 3 22, 33, 77, 103, 120–1, 132 BBC Radio 4 22, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 55, 56, 62, 77, 92, 103, 120, 132, 147, 151 BBC Radio 5 119–20 BBC Radio 5 Live 120, 152 BBC Radio Birmingham 31, 36, 37, 149 BBC Radio Brighton 24, 62 BBC Radio Bristol 31, 36, 37, 49, 148 BBC Radio Cleveland 31, 49 BBC Radio Clwyd 57 BBC Radio Cornwall 187, 188 BBC Radio Cumbria 187, 188 BBC Radio Deeside 210 56–7 BBC Radio Derby 35, 188–9 BBC Radio Durham 24, 37, 148 BBC Radio Gwent 57 BBC Radio Highland 56 BBC Radio Humberside 31, 49, 149 BBC Radio Kent 42, 151–2 BBC Radio Lancashire 149 BBC Radio Leeds 149, 151–2 BBC Radio Leicester 23, 24, 35, 101, 107, 149 BBC Radio Lincolnshire 62, 101, 188

195

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196

Index

BBC Radio London 31, 34–5, 37–40, 46, 48, 105 BBC Radio Manchester 31, 34, 36, 37, 46, 189 BBC Radio Medway 34, 40, 41, 42, 49 BBC Radio Merseyside 24, 32, 35, 49, 57, 61, 94, 111, 149, 188 BBC Radio Newcastle 31, 46, 49, 101 BBC Radio Norfolk 62, 151, 188 BBC Radio Orkney 56 BBC Radio Oxford 31, 34, 41, 42 BBC Radio Scotland 55–6 BBC Radio Sheffield 24, 46, 77, 149, 151–2 BBC Radio Shetland 56 BBC Radio Shropshire 57, 61, 62 BBC Radio Solway 56 BBC Radio Stoke 24, 35, 36, 37, 57, 149 BBC Radio Surrey 62 BBC Radio Sussex 24, 62 BBC Radio Sussex & Surrey 62, 151–2 BBC Radio Tees 189 BBC Radio Tweed 56 BBC Radio Ulster 55–6, 78, 187, 188 BBC Radio Wales 46, 55–7, 187, 188 BBC Radio York 151–2 BBC Southern Counties Radio 24, 62 BBC WM 149 BBC World Service 53, 151 The Beach 156 Beacon Radio 49, 50, 51, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 86, 96, 144, 155 beauty-contest licensing 45, 46, 49, 60, 69–70, 75–6, 83, 105, 111, 115, 119, 124, 138, 140–1, 183 The Bee 153, 155 Bell, Madeline 86 Bernard, Ralph 108, 143 Birch, Philip 20 Blair, Tony 19, 129, 146 Bleasdale, Alan 72 Bowen, Dave 99 British Broadcasting Company 6, 7 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 7, 25 BBC Trust 105, 147–8 Charter 7, 9, 30, 131, 147–8 Governors 147 Brittan, Leon 166

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BRMB 50, 69, 70, 72, 88, 91, 93, 99, 100, 106, 144, 164, 165 broadband 141 Broadcasting Act 1990 118 Broadcasting Act 1996 108 Broadcasting Authority of Ireland 167 Broadcasting Commission of Ireland 167 Broadland Radio 157 Brown, Gordon, government of 19 Buerk, Michael 148 ‘built’ programming 33, 99 Butler, Billy 93, 94 The Buzz 157 Cable Authority 118 Callaghan, James 54, 115, 129 Calvert, Reg 21 Capital FM 158–9, 165, 186 Capital Gold 143, 156 Capital Group 125, 142–3 Capital Radio 43, 48–9, 50, 51, 54, 63, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 86, 91, 99, 109, 110, 114, 122, 164, 180–1 capitalism 8, 9, 20, 42–3, 130, 174 car stickers 87 Carlton 119, 142–3 Caroline Television 142 Carter, David 35 Casem, Casey 172 CBC 59, 107 CBS 171 celebrity status 87–8 Centre Radio 107 Century Radio 133 Champion 103 135, 157 Channel Four 118, 148 charts 86–7 Chegwin, Keith 76 childrens’ programmes 75–8 Chiltern 59, 157 Chrysalis Radio 144 citizen journalism 182 citizens band radio 161–2 Classic FM 120–1, 123, 158 Clear Channel 173–4, 177 CN Group 144, 145 Coast FM 157

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Index 197 co-location 154–5, 156 Communications Act 2003 141–2, 143, 153 Communist Party 8–9 community radio 83, 114, 115, 116, 163, 165–71, 175, 176–7, 181, 185, 189 Community Service Volunteers 101 Competition Act 1998 141 Conseil Supérieur de L’Audiovisuel (CSA) 175 Conservative Party 9, 10, 15–16, 19–20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 55, 57, 58, 80–1, 115–17, 118, 121, 129–30, 151, 153, 166–7, 189 consolidation 6, 141–6, 156–9, 164, 173–4, 176, 178, 189 continental radio stations 10–11, 21, 121 Cool FM 187, 188 copyright 16, 21, 34, 52, 83, 101–2 (see also needletime restrictions) Costello, Mia 150 County Sound 110–11, 152 Crawford, Alan 17 Crawford Committee 7, 9, 43, 118 cross-media ownership 47, 108, 130, 141 Daily Mail 7, 48, 148 Darling Downs Television 126 Day, Roger 88 de Manio, Jack 92 Dearne FM 58 Decca 16 Decision Makers 53, 94 deregulation 81, 141, 153, 154–5, 189 Dickinson, Helen 38 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) 140–1, 143, 146, 157, 163, 179, 183–4 DAB+ 179 Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) 175 digital technology, characteristics of 3, 139–40 direct-to-home (DTH) satellite broadcasting 13, 118, 139–40, 142, 178

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DMB 140, 179 documentaries 12, 41, 53, 117, 134 Dodd, Ken 61 Downtown Radio 49, 50, 70, 73, 78, 100, 188 Dream 100 156, 187 duopoly 14–15, 28, 29–30, 34, 82–3, 117, 142 Dyke, Greg 149 Eagle Radio 152 Eastwood, Dave 76 EMAP 16, 109, 143 EMA-RTV 176 EMI 16 Equity 95 Essex FM 157, 187 Europe 1 174 Evans, Chris 87, 88 Evans of Claughton, Lord 61 Everett, Kenny 75 Everitt, Professor Anthony 167 Express and Star 51 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 8, 44, 84, 172 Fessenden, Reginald 2, 138 Financial Times 47 FM transmissions, characteristics of 14 Forces Programme 12 Fox FM 157 Free Radio Association 24 Freed, Alan 11–12 Freeman, Alan 38 Freeview 142, 143, 184 Galaxy Radio 133, 134, 144, 145, 158 Gale, George 99 Gale, Roger 19–20 gatekeeping 182 GCap 143, 144, 156 Gemini 157 General Strike 55 Gillard, Frank 31 Global Radio xi, xii, xiii, 144, 145, 146, 156, 157–9, 189 globalisation xii–xiii, xiv, xv, 15–16, 142, 146, 160–3, 164, 177–8, 189

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198

Index

GLR 48 GMG 144, 145, 157 Gold 139 Gold AM 111 Gorman, John 74 Granada 44, 75, 142–3 Greater Manchester Independent Radio 47, 53 Gwent Broadcasting 107 GWR 108–9, 125, 126–7, 128, 142–3, 154, 155, 157 Halfhead, Tim 61 Hamilton, David 32 Hansard 57 Hart, Paul 85 Hatton, Derek 112, 113, 134 Hayes, Brian 99 Hayes, Isaac 86 Haynes, Ken 71 Heart 133, 144, 152, 157–8, 165, 186, 187, 188 Heath, Edward 25–6, 27, 28, 33, 43, 51, 54, 81, 104, 121 Heathrow Conference 82–4, 105–6, 108, 114, 115, 126, 128, 154 Hereward Radio 59, 157 Home Service 6, 12 homogenization xiii, 109, 131, 143, 156–9, 162, 163, 173–4, 177–8, 189 Horizon FM 157 Horne, Nicky 71 horoscopes 120 IBOC 140 ideology xv, 15–16, 20, 24–6, 27–9, 33, 42–3, 51, 54–5, 57, 66, 80–2, 84–5, 129–30, 146–7, 174, 177–8 incremental stations 106, 113–15, 116 Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) 29–30, 44–6, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 78, 82, 83, 84, 90, 94, 97–8, 100, 102, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113–14, 115, 116, 117, 118, 124, 131, 132, 154, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166

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Independent Local Radio (ILR) 25–6, 29–30, 32, 42–4, 45–55, 57, 58–61, 63–79, 81, 82–92, 93–101, 102, 103, 104–14, 115, 118–19, 120, 121–8, 130–1, 132, 133, 134–6, 140–1, 143, 150, 153, 154, 158, 163–5, 169, 170, 179 (see also individual stations) Independent National Radio (INR) 82, 106, 113, 120–2, 132, 158 (see also individual stations) Independent Radio News (IRN) 53–4, 63, 64, 122 Independent Television (ITV) 9–10, 13, 14, 16, 26, 28–30, 34, 44–5, 47, 52, 57, 67, 68, 97, 102, 107, 117–18, 119, 122, 133, 134, 142–3, 182–3 Independent Television Authority (ITA) 28–9, 44–5, 97 Independent Television Commission (ITC) 118 Independent Television News 29 interactivity 179–80 internet 4, 13, 137, 146, 164–5, 182, 184, 185–6, 189 Invicta Radio 59, 88, 157 Isle of Wight Radio 116, 186 Ivel FM 156–7 Jack, Wolfman 173 Jardine, Richard 111 Jazz FM 115, 133 Jensen, David ‘Kid’ 91–2 jingles 85–6 Joint Industry Committee for Radio Audience Research (JICRAR) 102–3, 111, 112 journalism 29, 53–4, 63, 64, 122, 182 Jowell, Tessa 147 Kelly, Henry 120 Kennedy, Johnny 93, 111 Kestrel FM 60, 134–5 Key 103 111 Kingdom Group 135 Kinnock, Neil 19, 129–30 Kiss FM 115, 169 Kiss FM (in Spain) 176

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Index 199 KL.FM 152, 187 KMFM 144, 145 Labour Party 8–9, 19, 24, 27, 30, 51, 54–5, 56, 115, 118, 129–30, 131, 141, 146, 147, 151, 167 landbased pirates 23, 103, 169, 174, 176 Lantern FM 157, 187 Laser 558 22–3 LBC 48, 50, 51, 53–4, 63–4, 65, 76, 77, 94, 99, 104, 107, 114, 122, 144, 145, 150 Liberal Democrats 151, 189 Liddell, Alvar 92 Light Programme 6, 12, 17, 34, 75 The Listener 151 The Local Radio Company (TLRC) 152–3, 155, 157 Local Radio Working Party 55 localness xiii–xv, 2, 42, 47, 48, 84, 85–102, 104–6, 107, 109, 112–13, 114, 124, 126–7, 128, 131, 132, 134, 137–8, 140–1, 142, 143–4, 146, 152, 155, 156–9, 162–3, 170–1, 174, 177–8, 185–9 London News Radio 144 Lorraine Cœur d’Acier 174 Lucas, Ian MP 57 MacDonald, Ramsay 8–9 Macmillan, Harold 81 Magic 143–4, 145, 156 Major, John 55, 129, 130, 141 Manchester Guardian 47 Mann, Terry 65, 86 Mansfield, David 143 Manx Radio 14–15, 18, 187 Marcher Radio Group 135 Marcher Sound 59, 60–1, 65, 85, 86, 93, 94, 96, 157 Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967 21–2, 122 Mason, Barry 35 McDonaldization xiii McLuhan, Marshall and ‘global village’ xiii, 160–2, 163, 180 and ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media 180

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meaningful speech 97–101, 112, 125, 163–4, 165, 170 Mercia 59, 155 mergers 108–9, 143, 172 Metro Radio 49, 50, 70, 72, 86, 91, 93–4, 99, 164, 165 Midwest Radio 156–7 mini-périfériques 175 Minster FM 152–3, 155, 157 Mitterrand, François 175 Mix 96 152 monopoly 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 25–6, 28, 29–30, 43–4, 66, 78–9, 82, 108, 113, 120, 134, 172, 174–5, 177–8, 183 Mount, Peggy 75 Muggeridge, Douglas 77 municipal stations 176 Murdoch, Rupert 43, 81, 118, 141, 147 music scheduling 124–5, 126–7, 133–4 Musicians’ Union 21 MusicMann 15 Nathan, Abraham J 23 National Programme 5 National Public Radio (NPR) 8, 173 NBC 172 needletime restrictions 21, 101–2 (see also copyright) Net FM 181–2 Network Chart Show 128 New Statesman 150 news bulletins 63–4, 68–9, 70 news hubs 154, 155, 156, 158 Nin, Reverend Alan 99 Norry, Roy 93 North Norfolk Radio 156 Northants 96 157 Oakley, Nik 67 Observer, The 48 Ocean Sound 111, 157 Ofcom (Office of Communications) 106, 136, 137, 138, 141–2, 146, 153, 154–5, 156, 157, 161, 162, 167

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200 Index offshore pirates 17–23, 47, 55, 82–3, 103, 124, 127, 169 O’Rahilly, Ronan 17 Orchard FM 157, 186, 187 ORTF 174 Osborn, Hilary 34, 37–8 ownership 138, 152–3, 174 PAMS 85, 86 participation, in democracy xiv, 163 Peebles, Andy 71 phone-ins 64, 98–9, 150 Piccadilly Radio 49, 50, 53, 70, 71, 72, 76, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 99, 109, 110, 111, 134, 143, 164, 165, 170 Pilkington Committee 15–16, 20, 21, 43 Pirate FM 128, 152 pluralism 183 Plymouth Sound 50, 70, 73, 74, 76, 99, 100, 157, 165, 187 Poste Parisien 10 Powell, Mike 128 Premier FM 111 presenters 87–95, 127, 128 Price, Pete 93 professionalism 170–1 Proudfoot, George 19 public-service broadcasting (PSB) 7, 8, 10–11, 19, 20, 25, 26, 29, 32, 33, 44, 46, 49, 53, 58, 60, 63, 65, 66, 69–70, 79, 84, 97–8, 100, 104, 117, 118, 119, 151, 152, 165, 182, 183, 189 Q103 157 Quidem 144, 145 Radio 210 49, 50, 108, 110, 126, 134 Radio 270 18, 19 Radio 390 17 Radio Aire 107 Radio Atlanta 17 Radio Atlantis 22–3 Radio Authority 106, 108, 118–19, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132–3, 134, 136, 138, 140, 153, 154, 167

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Radio Avonside 108 Radio Caroline 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 67, 88 Radio City City Talk 111–13 in Liverpool 49, 50, 61, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 86, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101, 111–13, 134, 143, 164, 165, 188 Radio City Gold 113 Radio City (offshore pirate) 17, 21 Radio Clyde 50, 71, 72, 76, 87, 91, 99, 164, 165, 187 Radio Côte d’Azur 10 Radio Essex 18 Radio Forth 46, 50, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 100, 164, 165 Radio Free Europe 14 Radio Guide 67–8 Radio Hallam 50, 70, 72, 77, 91, 99, 164, 165 Radio Invicta 17 Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR) xi, 104, 121, 132, 140, 150, 161, 171, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189 Radio K 175 Radio Liberty 14 Radio London (‘Big L’) 17, 20, 22, 43 Radio Luxembourg 10, 11, 12–14, 16, 17, 22, 23, 28, 53, 77, 86, 91, 92, 95, 103, 122 Radio Lyon 10 Radio Mercur 16 Radio Mercury 85, 86, 158 Radio Monte-Carlo 174 Radio Moscow 14 Radio Normandy 10 Radio Northsea International 22–3, 26, 67, 88 Radio Norwich 156 Radio Nova International 175 Radio Orwell 50, 70, 73, 77, 158 Radio Pembrokeshire 187, 188 Radio Prague 14 Radio Ramadan 138 Radio Scilly 171 Radio Scotland 242 18, 19

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Index 201 Radio Sutch 17 Radio Syd 16 Radio Tees 50, 51, 65, 70, 73, 143 Radio Teesdale 171 Radio Times 32, 33–4, 37, 38, 39, 40 Radio Trent 50, 70, 73, 91, 92–3, 107, 158 Radio Veronica 16 Radio Verte 174, 175 Radio Victory 49, 50, 70, 73, 76, 111 Radio West 59, 86, 88, 107–8 radios associatives 175 radios périfériques 174 RAI 175 Ram FM 158 Real Radio 157 receiving licence, for broadcasts 7, 20, 24, 30, 33, 48, 55, 62, 105, 147–8 Red Dragon Radio 158 Red Rose Radio 107 regional commercial stations 106–7, 132–4 Regional Programme 5, 6, 11 regulation 9, 16, 17, 25, 28–9, 43–5, 49, 83, 84, 97, 118, 119, 126, 135, 136, 152, 153, 154–5, 156, 171–2, 174, 175, 189 light touch 126 Reith, John (later Lord) 10–11, 20 rental payments 52, 53, 82–3 Restricted Service Licences (RSLs) 136–8 Reynolds, Gillian 74 Riley, Phil 144 River FM 135 Robson, Alan 93, 94 Rogers, William 153 Rosko, Emperor 91 Ross, Les 93 Royal Charter 7, 9, 30, 131, 147, 148 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 85 RTL 12–13, 174 ‘sallies’ 106, 134–5, 138 Saville, Jimmy 92 Saxon Radio 59, 157 Scholes, Mel 93, 94 Scot FM 133 Scottish Radio Holdings 125, 143

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Script 67 Scud FM 119–20 Selkirk Communications 48–9, 107 Severn Sound 59, 153, 157 SGR 157 shock jocks 121, 173 short-wave radio, technical characteristics of 3, 132 Simmons, David 38 simulcasting 31–3, 38, 41, 75, 109–10, 119, 121, 140, 154, 155–6, 188 Sky TV 13, 43, 118, 142, 143, 184 Smedley, Major Oliver 21 Smooth Radio 157 Snow, Jon 64 Snyder, Bob 65 social gain 165, 167, 169 social networking 162, 181 Sofirad 174 Sound Broadcasting Act 1972 27, 28 South Coast Radio 111 South of the Border 44 Southern Daily Echo 150 Southern FM 157 specialist programming 36, 37, 38–9, 40–2, 69–74, 94–5 spectrum scarcity 1, 3–4, 21, 29, 110, 139, 164–5 Spire FM 152–3, 187 Spirit FM 152–3 splitting frequencies 109–13, 124 sponsorship 7, 10, 11, 16, 17, 29, 84, 123, 134, 172, 186 Standard Broadcasting 126 Stannage, James 93 Star 152, 153–4, 155, 157 station themes 85–6 Stewart, Bob 93 Stewart, Ed ‘Stewpot’ 75 Stoller, Tony 43, 45, 78 Stray FM 152–3 Sud Radio 174 Sun FM 152–3, 155 Sunrise Radio 115 Sunset Radio 115 Swinging Radio England 17, 78, 88 ‘swinging sixties’ 17

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202 Index Sykes Committee 7, 43, 118 syndication 31–2, 64–5, 75, 94–5, 151–2, 155–6, 157–8, 172, 176–7 Swansea Sound 46, 50, 56, 65–6, 69, 70, 71–4, 77, 86, 99, 164, 165 Talk Radio UK 121 teenage listeners 11–13, 161 Tele Monte Carlo 142 television, invention of 9–10 Television Act 1954 28–9 TEN-17 158 Tfm 143 Thames Television 44, 45, 117, 119 Thames Valley Broadcasting 91 Thatcher, Margaret 27, 33, 55, 57, 61, 80–2, 114, 115, 117, 129, 130 Thatcherism 84, 111, 112–13, 117 Third Programme 6, 12 This Week 44, 45, 117 Thomas, Norman 74 Tindle 144, 145, 156 Total Survey Area (TSA) 60, 61, 90, 91, 94, 102–3, 108, 110, 113–14, 124, 134–5, 137, 138, 153–4, 155, 157, 158, 187 Tower Radio 17 Town 102 156–7

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UKRD 125, 153–4 UTV 144, 145 Vale FM 156–7 Vance, Tommy 71 Virgin 1215 121 Voice of Peace 23 voiceovers 95–7 voicetracking 128, 158 WABC 173 Walker, Johnny 35, 37 wavebands, characteristics of 14 WCBS 173 Wear FM 115 Wessex FM 152–3 Williams, Godfrey 61, 135 Wilson, Harold 19, 20, 21–2, 23, 27, 54–5, 129 Wiltshire Radio 59, 60, 108 Wireless Group 125 Wogan, Terry 35 World in Action 44–5 Wyvern 59, 144, 155 XERB 173 Yates, Chris 108 Yates, Joyce 111 Yorkshire Coast Radio 152–3, 155, 187 Young, Jimmy 35

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