A public lecture at the University of West London on October 9th 2013, marking the 40th anniversary of commercial radio in the UK.
Thank you, Paul, for those kind words, and for inviting me to give this public lecture – and to all of you for coming.
Last night, at the Altitude bar on the 29th floor of Millbank Tower, overlooking Westminster and the Thames, there was a splendid party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of LBC and legally regulated commercial radio in the UK. The event was hosted by Global Radio, the owner of LBC – and of Capital Radio, which celebrates its 40th anniversary next week. Boris Johnston was the start turn!
On the other side of town, just off Fleet Street, hundreds of former LBC and Independent Radio News journalists were holding their own party to mark the same event. And as a former LBC presenter, as well as a media commentator, I went to both.
At 9 o’clock this morning – somewhat unkindly, given the extent of last night’s celebrations – the Radio Advertising Bureau held a breakfast briefing to unveil the latest econometrics figures which, it says, show how effective radio is an advertising medium. And now here we are at tonight’s event. No one can say the anniversary has been left unmarked.
So let me take you back exactly 40 years ago, yesterday.
Monday October 8th 1973, just before 6am.
In Gough Square, just off Fleet Street, where most national newspapers were still based in those days, LBC was about to go on the air.
In a hotel in Oxford, I was scanning the airwaves on my transistor radio, desperately hoping the Medium Wave transmissions would stretch all the way up the M40 so that I could hear this historic broadcast.
I had just become a junior reporter at Campaign – which then described itself as the newspaper of the communications business – and I was desperately keen. But I’d also got married two days before, in the Midlands, and it’s fair to say that my wife Carol was less wedded to the idea of waking up early to listen to the radio than I was.
With my transistor under the pillow, I could just make out the faint sound of LBC’s opening words, the first to be uttered on legally authorised commercial radio in Britain. They were delivered by a young David Jessel, who had recently left Radio 4’s The World at One to present LBC’s all-important Morning Show. This is what I heard…..
CLIP – LBC opening words “This is London Broadcasting, the news and information voice of independent radio. Welcome to LBC. It’s six o’clock…”
It was a historic moment, and there was a historic news event for LBC’s journalists to get their teeth into – the Yom Kippur war.
In this lecture I shall tell you how they got on, and examine how commercial radio developed over the next 40 years; the impact it has had on BBC and public service radio; and how radio has since fared – and largely prospered – in the much more competitive media landscape.
But before that I want to take you back a bit further.
Back in fact, another 40 years to nineteen thirty three, when radio WAS the wireless and another commercial radio station was born. This was Radio Luxembourg which, despite its name and location, was to beam its broadcasts into Britain, in the English language, for years to come – up to, and beyond, the start of LBC. And it wasn’t the only radio station on the Continent in the 1930s targetting its broadcasts at British listeners.
In those days, the BBC – under the legendarily dour Scot John Reith, a son of the Manse – did not believe in entertaining its listeners too much, if at all, and certainly never on a Sunday. Reith would not allow its Sunday broadcasts to compete with religious observance. Professor Sean Street, of Bournemouth University’s Centre for Broadcasting History Research, has written: “As the 1930s began, the BBC Sunday was a sombre occasion indeed”.
Yet the BBC had already begun to whet the audience’s appetite for radio on the other six days of the week. There was a gap in British listeners’ lives, and several advertiser-funded stations were set up on the Continent specifically to fill it. They included Radio Paris, Radio Toulouse, and Radio Normandy – which with Radio Luxembourg – became the UK’s first truly effective commercial radio stations.
Radio Normandy was founded by the appropriately named Captain Leonard Plugge, later to become the Conservative MP for Chatham. He has been called the true founding father of commercial radio. Capt Plugge bought transmission time from several Continental stations, when they weren’t using it to broadcast in their own languages, and formed the International Broadcasting Company to market them to British advertisers.
By the mid-1930s, commercial radio for the UK was booming, so much so that an American advertising agency set up a state-of-the-art recording studio in one of the iconic buildings of British broadcasting.
These days we think of Bush House in the Aldwych as the historic home of the BBC World Service. It finally vacated the building last year to move in with the rest of BBC News in New Broadcasting House, the huge steel and glass edifice that now sits in Langham Place, at the top end of Regent Street.
But in the 1930s, before the World Service settled in, Bush House was home to the J. Walter Thompson organisation, the world’s biggest advertising agency. As Sean Street revealed in his seminal work Crossing the Ether, which first documented the influence of commercial radio in 1930s Britain, JWT was pioneering the use of commercials and sponsored programming, a full twenty years before ITV brought commercial television to these shores.
Professor Street was granted access to JWT’s ledgers for the years 1936 to ’39, and they provide a remarkable picture of radio’s growing appeal for advertisers. He wrote: “Rowntree steadily increased their radio spending from under 10 per cent of their total spend in 1936 to almost 15 per cent by 1939… Horlicks spent more than one third of their money on radio advertising, with a daily one-hour variety programme.”
Yes the advertisers made the programmes. And JWT held their hand as they learned how to use this new medium – the agency recorded this tape to introduce advertisers to the wonder of wireless:
CLIP – JWT recording (from disc)
So the production costs were high. £2 in every £5 that Horlicks spent on advertising went on making the programmes, rather than buying the airtime from the radio stations. As well as its daily Horlicks Tea Time Hour, it broadcast Horlicks Picture House at 4pm on Sundays on both Radio Luxembourg and Radio Normandy, featuring well-known stars Vic Oliver, Webster Booth and Helen Raymond, plus the Horlicks All-Star Orchestra.
It was not alone. And so effective was radio advertising – reaching a large audience because of the BBC’s Sunday policy – that even advertisers associated with the Sunday Observance League, such as the Quaker chocolate companies, overcame their scruples.
One Sunday, a few years later, Sir Thomas Beecham conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra, sponsored by his family’s firm, Beecham’s Pills Ltd.
And then, of course, there was this.
CLIP “We are the Ovaltineys, happy girls and boys…..
The League of Ovaltineys programme was made in JWT’s Bush House studio and broadcast at 5.30 every Sunday on Radio Luxembourg. Professor Street writes: “The programme achieved immortality through what might be legitimately claimed to be the most significant advertising jingle of all time. Decades later it can still be recalled and sung by several generations.”
One key to its success was not just that it was aimed at children but that the programme had their parents’ approval. This was a lesson learned from research in America, which talked of creating a radio children’s “domain” that would be the focus of family listening at an appropriate time. The irony was that the BBC had already created such a domain, The Children’s Hour, on weekdays. As Professor Street observes “the BBC had literally handed its rivals the gift of an audience; having established an expectation in their listeners (in this case children), they then denied those listeners the same content on Sundays”.
BBC executives were aware of the negative impact of John Reith’s Sunday policy and watched these commercial developments closely. The Corporation was even spurred, for the first time, into conducting market research into the radio audience.
In 1936 it hired Robert Silvey from – believe it or not – the London Press Exchange ad agency. In a memo, to be found in the BBC’s Written Archives at Caversham, he reported on the rapid growth of radio advertising revenue – from £30,000 in 1934 to £630,000 in 1936. He went on: “It is believed in well-informed quarters that the 1937 figure may be very nearly double that.”
That forecast was correct. The following year Silvey wrote: “The number and importance of advertisers using commercial radio is considerable. In this coming week on Sunday morning, 14 advertisers will be broadcasting from Luxembourg and 12 from Normandie. They include Lever Bros, Rowntrees, Stork Margarine, MacLeans toothpaste, Carters Liver Pills and J Lyons and Co.
“31 advertisers will be broadcasting from Luxembourg before 10.45am next week.”
The BBC responded to the competitive threat. It gradually relaxed its gloomy Sunday policy, though – to be fair – the change was also influenced by the coming of world war in 1939. This forced the BBC to develop a new style of broadcasts for its forces overseas and for audiences at home, partly designed to raise morale. And it now had British listeners to itself again – for the war brought a halt to commercial English-language broadcasts from the Continent.
Radio Times listings, unearthed by Sean Street, show the gradual arrival of more entertaining programmes. By March 1943, on Sundays, its Forces broadcasting service was transmitting Workers Playtime and The Bob Hope Programme; and by March 1946 its Sunday schedule included Family Favourites, Variety Bandbox, Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, and Tommy Handley in ITMA.
When the war ended in 1945, a very different BBC emerged, with the Home Service, the Light Programme and the new cultural Third Programme as the national networks. But there was to be no major revival of commercial radio. New media rules in France meant that the BBC would no longer face competition from Radio Normandie and its sister stations. This left Radio Luxembourg as its only broadcasting challenger until the coming of commercial television – or Independent Television as it was to be known – in 1955.
Britain was almost alone among significant countries in legalising commercial TV before commercial radio, and that political decision had a huge impact on the development of radio in this country. And that deliberate naming of ITV – ‘independent’ rather than ‘commercial’ television – was to have a significant echo when BBC radio finally faced legally authorised competition almost 20 years later.
For the moment, in the immediate post-war period, Radio Luxembourg remained unashamedly commercial. Indeed, in many ways it foreshadowed the arrival of commercial television in Britain, broadcasting sponsored quiz and talent shows such as Take Your Pick with Michael Miles, and Double Your Money and Opportunity Knocks with Hughie Green, all of which were to find a place in the early ITV schedules.
There was another significant programme, which in due course would come to define Radio Luxembourg – and commercial radio – for years to come. Sean Street notes that “On Sundays, from 1948, Britain’s first Top Twenty chart show became a radio sensation among the young, popular music-starved UK audience. ”
When ITV arrived in 1955 and poached Radio Luxembourg’s popular quiz shows, Luxembourg became, he says, “increasingly a record-based station, with sponsorship moving to record companies such as Capitol, Decca and EMI. Thus a disenfranchised youth audience was once again being nurtured, and the station was “DJ”-led.”
You might have thought that the Government would have been aggrieved by this continuing challenge to its broadcasting policy from a station based overseas, and might have tried to make life difficult for the commercial interlopers. Far from it, it seemed. Radio Luxembourg had offices and studios in Hertford Street in Mayfair, where it recorded many of its programmes and commercials.
Meanwhile, other companies based in London were earning a good living making programmes for Radio Luxembourg. One of these early independent producers, Ross Radio Productions, was led by one John Whitney, later to become the first managing director of Capital Radio and later still, director-general of the regulator, the Independent Broadcasting Authority. And of course British advertisers and ad agencies were making, and paying for, commercials to be broadcast on Luxembourg, with no penalty whatsoever.
It wasn’t until nine years later in 1964 that the Government – and the BBC – were jolted into action against illicit commercial radio by the launch of Radio Caroline and other offshore pirate stations, trading on the huge popularity of new groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Caroline, headed by a young Irish entrepreneur called Rohan O’Reilly, broadcast its first programmes in March 1964 from a former Baltic ferryboat moored five miles off the British coast at Harwich.
“There followed an explosion in such stations” writes Sean Street “which radically changed the course of youth music-radio culture in Britain and ultimately prompted the BBC to create Radio One in 1967.”
Six weeks after Radio Caroline, another pirate ship, Radio Atlanta, started broadcasting. Just before Christmas 1964 came Radio London – Big L, as it was known – populated by what’s been described as a who’s who of DJs of the time. Its managing director, Philip Birch, would become the first MD of Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio (now Key 103/Magic) while a later Radio Caroline MD, Terry Bate, became one of the pioneer sales directors in Independent Local Radio.
By 1965, UK advertisers were reported to be spending £2m a year on the pirate stations. Seizing the moment, John Whitney set up the Local Radio Association to lobby for commercial radio to be legalised. They argued that the pirates showed there was room for further choice in sound broadcasting, whatever the merits of the BBC.
In 1966, National Opinion Polls reported that 45 per cent of the population were listening to commercial radio each week. The NOP surveys suggested that Luxembourg and Radio Caroline each had 8.8m listeners a week and Radio London 8.1m.
It was a merry life, but a short one, for the pirates. The following year, 1967, they were outlawed by the Marine etc Broadcasting (Offences) Act. Though popular with many of the public and advertisers, the stations were opposed by a powerful coalition of the Labour Government, the BBC, newspaper publishers (fearful of the competition for their advertising) and the record companies (resentful that the pirates paid them no royalties).
The Bill to abolish the pirates passed its final stage in Parliament on August 14th 1967. Almost all the stations went off the air straight away. Cannily, their executives saw the possibility that commercial radio might now be legalised and they wanted to stay on the right side of the law just in case (the exception was Radio Caroline, which flew the pirate flag on and off for years to come).
The following month, the BBC launched Radio One, staffed almost entirely by DJs from the pirate ships. In his book Independent Radio, the story of commercial radio in the United Kingdom, Mike Baron writes: “DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Cash, John Peel, Keith Skues, Ed Stewart, Emperor Rosko, Stuart Henry and Duncan Johnson all came ashore to work for the Corporation’s new pop radio station.”
And so the BBC’s legal monopoly of radio broadcasting was re-established for a few years more, challenged only by Radio Luxembourg.
Of course, Radio One was not alone as a new BBC network. September 1967 also saw the launch of Radio Two, replacing the Light Programme, Radio Three instead of the Third Programme and Radio Four, superseding not just the Home Service but its national regions too, such as the North of England Home Service. And in their place, emerged a new tier of BBC local radio stations, starting with Radio Leicester in November 1967 – again anticipating the success of the Local Radio Association’s campaign and the arrival of Independent Local Radio.
As in the 1930s, and after the war, competition from commercial radio – albeit still unauthorised – had helped bring about a major change to the public service broadcaster’s output and station line-up.
Yet one of the most ground-breaking changes the BBC introduced around this time had little to do, at least directly, with the commercial competition – for in this field, news and current affairs, it didn’t yet have any.
1965 had seen the launch on the Home Service of The World At One, two years before the arrival of Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and eight years before the launch of LBC and Independent Radio News. WATO – as it quickly became known – was the vision of its first editor Andrew Boyle, strongly influenced by its first presenter, the remarkable William Hardcastle, former editor of the Daily Mail.
In the view of one of its early producers, Jenny Abramsky, later director of BBC radio, “The World at One was actually the start of modern-day broadcast current affairs. You’d never have had Newsnight if you’d not had The World at One and I think it was that critical in terms of broadcast journalism.”
That quote appears in Simon Elmes’ book And Now on Radio 4. Elmes – an award-winning BBC producer – explains: “Andrew Boyle’s idea was to create a completely new sort of news magazine that would interrogate issues and the people dealing with them. It would be, as the jargon goes, hard-hitting and agenda-setting. And The World at One truly was those things!”
The radio critic Gillian Reynolds told Elmes: “Andrew Boyle and William Hardcastle were the great revolution and they made radio think – they made all of broadcasting think – about different ways of doing the news. It was so daring and it flew in the face of every piece of BBC editorial received opinion.”
Boyle hired a new young team of reporters, including Sue McGregor, Nick Ross, Margaret Howard and David Jessel. Boyle also liked using newspaper correspondents such as Anthony Howard and William Davis, believing they could speak more freely and were more lively than the traditionally restrained BBC correspondents.
WATO spawned two new programmes, much in its own image – The World This Weekend at Sunday lunchtime, and then in 1970, PM Reports, as it was then called. PM was one of a raft of Radio 4 innovations introduced under a controversial BBC policy document called Broadcasting in the Seventies. Radio 4 had inherited a raft of schools and music programmes from the old Home Service, which made it a bit of a jumble.
From now on, Radio 4 would be unashamedly speech-based, with four news and current affairs programmes forming its spine – Today, The World at One, PM Reports, and the World Tonight – as well as half-hour news bulletins at 6pm and midnight. And in between those – comedy, drama, quizzes, documentaries, discussion programmes such as Any Questions, and of course Desert Island Discs. That formula remains – as strong as ever – 43 years on. Radio 4 has just recorded its highest-ever RAJAR audience figures – almost 11 million a week. (So incidentally has LBC 97.3 – with 1 million a week for the first time – proving my point that radio really is thriving…..)
Broadcasting in the Seventies was hugely controversial at the time and prompted a storm of criticism in the press – for months. But Jenny Abramsky says it was “far-sighted”. From it, she says, you got “Radios, 1, 2, 3 and 4 as very clear propositions when they were going to face the coming of commercial radio – and actually creating a portfolio of services for the BBC.”
Once again, the BBC was responding to the prospect of commercial radio competition – and sharpening up its act. Not least, against the forces of television within the Corporation – which were threatening to run away with the money and the influence.
By then, political battle had also been drawn over the legalisation of commercial radio – between the Conservatives under Edward Heath and Labour under Harold Wilson. Labour was against it, the Conservatives were broadly for it – though what form they thought it should take was still to be decided. After Heath unexpectedly won the 1970 General Election, the Government published a White Paper entitled An Alternative Service of Radio Broadcasting…..
Which led to the event we’re celebrating this week – the launch of LBC on that morning of Monday October 8th 1973. You may remember that I had got married two days before. Hostilities broke out almost immediately – though fortunately nowhere near our wedding. The Yom Kippur War began on that Saturday in the Middle East, which should have given the fledgling news station just the sort of major story it needed to get its teeth into. But it was not to be.
LBC’s honeymoon was to prove shorter than mine. The station had a dreadful start. By the time we got back to Britain after a week away, LBC seemed to be in chaos, its failings gleefully reported by the newspapers, who of course had never wanted this new rival for their audiences and advertising in the first place.
Tony Stoller, whose official history of Independent Radio in the UK, Sounds of your Life, provides the best and fullest account of the past 40 years, wrote: “The station could have weathered the links that failed to work, and more than its fair share of technical glitches. But the inadequacy of its management quickly became manifest in minor and major matters… LBC was finding it difficult to invent a way of operating an all-news and talk station. It had plenty of newspaper experience among its editors, but too many of its radio skills came from Antipodean freelances.”
Tim Crook, whose analysis, International Radio Journalism, is also required reading, wrote: “There is an apocryphal story that LBC were at one point so desperate for experienced freelances that an editor was despatched to the Aldwych, a traditional gathering point for international travellers from ‘down under’. The story goes that he had to move from camper van to camper van asking “Anyone here a radio journalist from Australia or New Zealand?”
Within days, The Economist had accused LBC of “amateurism” saying it “lacked the authority essential to a news and current affairs station (competing with the BBC)”. The Independent Broadcasting Authority’s own annual report thought the early mistakes “embarrassing”. Its director of radio, John Thompson, told Tony Stoller his heart sank at LBC’s first 48 hours.
Within weeks, in the House of Commons, the acerbic Labour MP Gerald Kaufman – who’d opposed the whole idea of commercial radio – was putting the boot in. “The London Broadcasting Company” he said, ” is grossly overworking and underpaying its staff, has hardly any listeners, gets hardly any commercials and seems to be on the verge of financial disintegration. Would it not be kinder to put it out of its misery?”
Capital Radio, which went on the air a week after LBC, with the licence to run London’s general entertainment station, had made a more encouraging start – with experienced presenters such as Roger Scott, Tommy Vance and Dave Cash. But it soon got into difficulties too, with a misguided music policy that it had to change by Christmas.
Advertisers, who had been only too keen to embrace the pirates a few years before, were now confronted with two unconvincing London stations. And while the BBC had snapped up the best of the pirate DJs for Radio One, which had by now been broadcasting for six years, its new rivals weren’t really sure whether they were meant to be commercial stations or not.
Just as commercial television had been launched under the banner ‘Independent Television’, to distance itself from the worst excesses of American television and make clear it had higher aspirations than selling soap powder and making money, so the new medium was also called Independent – and Independent Local Radio, at that.
This was partly so as not to frighten the horses during the inevitable horse-trading of the political process. But there was also a belief that these new stations could bring something genuinely new to the media mix, local public service radio funded by advertising.
Tony Stoller, later to be managing director of Radio 210 in Reading and the first chief executive of the Radio Authority, told Sean Street: “It was hugely in the image of the early 70s. It was part of the liberal consensus, part of the view that it was for public authorities and public services to provide things which the public ought to want. So in the end, Reithian.”
The Government White Paper foresaw the new stations competing directly with Radios 1 and 2 and “offering a true public service… (It could see) no place for a system of broadcasting which did little more than offer a vehicle for advertisements”. A major ingredient of the output was to be local news and information and the stations “must be firmly rooted in their locality”.
Sean Street writes: “Stations would be limited in the changes they could make to schedules, which would be strictly monitored in respect of a requirement to provide a range of programming including education, religion, ‘meaningful speech’ and a range of different kinds of music
This was not a message designed to please advertisers, or their advisers – the advertising agencies who would strongly influence their decision where to spend their money. The agencies were at first sceptical, and then scathing, about the new medium.
At Campaign, it was my job to talk to the ad agencies’ media directors and unearth news stories from them – and it’s a truism of journalism that bad news makes a better story than good. For several weeks, I faithfully reported the agencies’ criticisms of commercial radio.
In November, the Financial Times reported the agencies’ frustration that Capital Radio was withholding publication of its own audience research and their belief that “Capital must have something to hide”.
Since Capital and LBC couldn’t criticise the ad agencies themselves, for obvious reasons, we messengers – the reporters – got the blame. Years later I found that some of the founding fathers of ILR had never forgiven me for those early reports. But things were coming to a head.
In December, I arranged to meet a National Union of Journalists official and he told me just how bad things were, with journalists queuing up to use the few editing machines because an inexperienced management simply hadn’t bought enough. In Campaign’s last splash story of 1973, I reported the journalists’ demand that the station’s management had to go.
It wasn’t just me! Other papers were piling in. “London’s ailing broadcasters” was a scornful Guardian headline. “Why the jewel in the crown of commercial radio looks tarnished” scoffed the Sunday Times.
Just before Christmas, following a crisis meeting with the Independent Broadcasting Authority, LBC’s chairman, chief executive and chief editor resigned.
And then things started to look up.
New Year’s Eve – Hogmanay – saw the launch of Glasgow’s Radio Clyde, brilliantly led by the former political editor of Scottish Television, Jimmy (now Lord) Gordon. It was an immediate success, showing just how vibrant Independent Local Radio could be, connecting with listeners in a way that the BBC had found difficult to do, particularly north of the border.
“Clyde set the gold standard for ILR, at a time when the currency elsewhere seemed at risk of being debased” wrote Tony Stoller. “It offered distinctly high-grade popular radio, mixing a skilfully chosen selection of music with ambitious news and features programming – and it played the local card to perfection, becoming a statement of ambition for Glasgow in its drive to self-esteem and regeneration.”
Other independent local stations followed in a steady stream. In February 1974, it was BRMB in Birmingham; in April, Piccadilly Radio in Manchester, where a young Chris Evans would later learn his trade; in July, Metro Radio in Newcastle; in September, Swansea Sound, and in October, Radio Hallam in Sheffield and Radio City in Liverpool, where Gillian Reynolds was the first programme controller.
All these stations helped demonstrate that the gloomy London experience need not be typical of Independent Local Radio. But as Gillian Reynolds recalled recently in the Sunday Telegraph, it still wasn’t easy for the new medium, because of the political and economic situation in the early 70s: “It was born into national industrial strife and nightly power cuts. The chances of it surviving, let alone thriving, seemed slim.”
The recession hit advertising across all media, let alone the unproven newcomer. ITV’s revenue fell by 20 per cent over Christmas. But Stoller writes: “One saving grace from the ‘three day week’ was that ITV and BBC Television were required to shut down at 10.30pm to help the nation save power. Radio was allowed to broadcast into the night, and thus gained exposure to new listeners in large numbers.”
At Capital, a new breakfast team was introduced – the maverick DJs Kenny Everett and Dave Cash – and the Kenny and Cash show gave the station a real boost.
Meanwhile, at LBC, a new chief editor was appointed to take on what was advertised as “the toughest job in broadcasting”. Marshall Stewart was poached from Radio 4’s Today programme, which as editor, he had already sharpened up in anticipation of the launch of commercial radio.
Within a month, he had lured Douglas Cameron from Today to replace David Jessel, teaming him with Bob Holness in a breakfast partnership that helped define LBC, supplemented by George Gale and then Brian Hayes and their morning phone-in shows. Douglas read the 8am news on LBC yesterday – and it was great to see him, at over 80, enjoying both parties last night!
There was also a sister company, Independent Radio News, which provided the national news service for all the local stations. Gradually the two companies began to build their reputation. Though resources were very limited, they were faster on their feet than the BBC. “Actuality” – the sound and atmosphere of what was going on – was a top priority.
LBC and IRN broke the mould of news broadcasting, establishing themselves as Britain’s first 24-hour news service, and launching the careers of dozens of well-known broadcasters, including Channel 4’s Jon Snow, ITN’s Julian Manyon, Radio 4’s Martha Kearney, 5 Live’s Peter Allen, and two of the BBC’s specialist editors, Mark Mardell and Mark Easton. Many other reporters, producers, editors and executives started there too.
Martha Kearney, now presenter of The World At One said that as a young reporter at LBC “there was definitely a sense amongst the people working there that we were the underdogs. We had fewer resources than Auntie BBC, but sometimes we could be quicker on our feet and we were very sharp elbowed.”
When the Falklands War began in 1982, LBC really came into its own because – unlike Radio 4 – it broadcast news and current affairs 24 hours a day and could interrupt its programming with the latest developments, often breaking the news.
By the time of the Gulf War in 1990, the BBC was ready to respond, turning its Radio 4 FM frequency into a rolling news service – nicknamed by many journalists Scud FM – the precursor of what would become Radio 5 Live, which was finally launched in 1994.
Later, when LBC fell on hard times, losing its licence for a while, 5 Live was seen by many as the true inheritor of its spirit and drive and rapport with its audience, staffed as it was by many former LBC and IRN journalists.
I was one of those who was trained to broadcast by LBC, and I’m proud of the fact. In 1984, the station decided to launch a media programme called Advertising World, and asked me to present it.
I’d been writing for The Times and the Economist about advertising and marketing for two years, reporting on the beginnings of the media explosion that was to transform the communication business. That included the launch of Channel 4 in 1982, of TV-am and BBC Breakfast News in 1983, and of course cable and satellite TV. In 1981, the ground-breaking international cable channel, MTV, famously played the Buggles song Video Killed the Radio Star as its first pop video – an act seen by many as a declaration of intent.
As an unashamed fan of sound over vision – convinced of the wonder of wireless – I thought it most unlikely that video would kill radio.
For me, the offer from LBC was a dream come true. As you’ve heard, I had been listening to the radio since the days of Luck Lucky Luxembourg, the Station of the Stars. And – peculiar child that I was – I’d also been listening to the Today programme since it was presented by Jack De Manio. I’d been waking up early to tune into Test matches down under long before it was called Test Match Special. I’d broken into my honeymoon to listen to the opening moments of LBC. And now, a decade later, I was on it.
Every week for five years, I went into LBC’s Gough Square studios to prepare and present Advertising World, interviewing the major players in the media business and covering all the issues in this turbulent period. As well as the growing competition in television, I reported on the turmoil in newspapers during the Wapping dispute, when Rupert Murdoch moved his papers out of Fleet Street; the early days of Sky; the debate over the future of the BBC and whether it should carry advertising; and, not least, all the challenges still facing the radio industry.
I stayed at LBC till 1989 when the BBC advertised the job of media correspondent for its radio news outlets – including, of course, the Today programme. Without my experience at LBC, I doubt I’d have got the job.
I was starry-eyed about radio – but I wasn’t blind to the threat posed to it by the video revolution. One reason that radio had prospered in the UK despite the coming of television – both BBC and commercial – was that there was very little television in the UK. Government and regulators had kept it firmly in its box. At the start of 1982, there were just three TV channels in the UK and only one of them carried advertising. They broadcast mainly in the evenings, with schools programmes occupying much of the day during term time.
Most importantly, radio had breakfast to itself.
All that was about to change. In November 1982, Channel 4 came on the air – as only the second advertising-funded TV channel in the UK – to be followed three months later by breakfast television, in the shape of TV-am and its Famous Five presenters – David Frost, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford, Michael Parkinson and Robert Kee. This was a huge threat to radio, both BBC and ILR.
TV-am’s hope was that the breakfast audience, liberated from the protectionist shackles which stopped them watching TV over their cornflakes, would flock from their radios and wake up to their TV sets. That was the hope too, for cereal and coffee advertisers, and the manufacturers of small, kitchen-size televisions. And that was the fear, if you were in radio.
It didn’t work out that like. Not for the first time, as you’ve heard, the BBC responded to the threat of new competition by getting in first – launching its own Breakfast TV programme, with Frank Bough and Selina Scott, two weeks before TV-am. It went down well, whereas the commercial station started disastrously, never recovered, and was only rescued many months later by a new team of managers and presenters – headed, so the legend now goes, by Roland Rat.
This was a reprieve for the commercial stations, which had feared the worst. But commercial radio – or Independent Local Radio as it still was – had other problems to cope with.
In 1984, there were only 40 ILR station licences and the medium still had no national presence, which made it hard for it to appeal to national advertisers, who have the big budgets. To help get over this, stations stepped up their lobbying to be allowed to broadcast a Network Chart Show, a concept which had been strongly resisted by the IBA, in these terms:-
“It has been drawn to our attention that a programme is being offered to all companies in a ‘Top 30’ format for simultaneous broadcast on Sunday afternoons. The IBA would wish to discourage companies from broadcasting this type of programme in the ‘networked’ form which has been suggested…. (It seems to us) it might tend towards the sort of ‘networked pop’ programme which goes against the spirit of ILR.”
Eventually, under pressure it relented. Sean Street writes: “The Network Chart Show, initially presented by David ‘Kid’ Jensen, was eventually syndicated through the ILR network from 1984, sponsored initially by Nescafe, and gained a weekly audience of four million listeners.”
At the same time, the IBA gave permission for another network advertising opportunity, around the morning news bulletins syndicated by Independent Radio News. Called Newslink, it proved so popular with advertisers that stations no longer had to pay for their IRN service – they actually got an IRN dividend.
As the competition from Channel 4 and breakfast TV started to kick in. The stations started to lobby harder against what they saw as the “over-regulation” of independent radio which they claimed was jeopardising the very existence of the network.
In 1984, they held a “council of war” at Heathrow Airport and within three months, according to one of the participants, quoted by Street, “many of the IBA’s petty rules were dispensed with. Within a year an independent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit had shown there was scope for rapid expansion of the number of stations and that light-touch regulation was feasible and safe.”
This culminated in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which – Street says – enabled Independent Radio to be truly commercial for the first time, permitting among other things the creation of large groups of stations and national commercial radio.
The Independent Broadcasting Authority was abolished and its radio responsibilities given to a new light-touch Radio Authority. Its first chief executive Tony Stoller made clear his regret at the passing of independent radio: “One of my jobs when I worked at the Independent Broadcasting Authority was occasionally to write rude letters, for example to somebody at the BBC who had described it as commercial radio, and demonstrate that it was not – it was independent radio.”
Not any more. Stoller told Street “the Act contained no positive programme requirements, ceasing to regard commercial radio as public service broadcasting”.
Some might challenge that view. The first national commercial station was Classic FM, which was awarded the only national FM licence. Surely a truly commercial system would have allowed a pop music station to take that slot, to challenge Radio 1, but this was specifically forbidden under the Act. Virgin Radio, when it launched nationally as the Radio 1 challenger, had to make do with an AM frequency (though it managed to acquire an FM one in London).
Classic FM was launched in 1992, a year which saw several other breakthroughs, including the Pepsi Chart Show – the first truly national, branded chart show. For the first time, radio also had a single audience research system – RAJAR – backed and ensdorsed by the BBC and commercial radio.
And the Radio Advertising Bureau was set up, under Douglas MacArthur, a former Procter & Gamble marketing man, transforming the way radio was perceived by advertisers. By focussing on research, and case histories demonstrating the power of radio advertising, the “2 per cent medium” – as radio had become known, grew at its peak to 7 per cent of the display advertising market.
Indeed, so successful was it that every other medium, including ITV and national newspapers, was galvanised into setting up its own version of the Radio Advertising Bureau.
The RAB even did its best to improve the quality of radio commercials – some of which were so bad, albeit memorable, that they were reputed to drive listeners away. The best-known of the awful advertisers was Barratts Liquormart, in the very early days of ILR, featuring the owner of the shops, Freddie Barrett, singing his own jingle in a raucous Cockney accent. I’d hoped to play it to you but we couldn’t find it anywhere on the web – possibly to protect the public – but this gives you something of a flavour of it:
(sings) Barretts, Barretts, Come to Barretts, Barretts Liquorrmaaaart….
But occasionally there was gold amongst the dross.
When the comedian, writer and director Mel Smith died recently, all the obituaries reminded us of the hilarious ‘Gerald the Gorilla’ sketch from Not the Nine O’Clock News.
For many of us, the radio commercial he created with Griff Rhys-Jones for Philips video recorders was equally brilliant, and I was delighted when it emerged on Twitter a few days later. The ad – entitled ‘Firips’, for reasons that will become clear – was voted the UK’s best radio commercial of all time by creative directors in the Radio Advertising Hall of Fame.
The 60-second ad pits Smith as a gormless customer, convinced that only the Japanese can make high-quality electronics goods, against Rhys-Jones as the salesman, listing the benefits of the VR2023 video recorder.
One of those who chose it as the best ad ever has questioned whether stations could run the ad today, given the sensitivities of racial stereotyping, but I think it still stands the test of time. See what you think.
CLIP – FIRIPS ad
This summer, commercial radio published its roll of honour of 40 individuals who’ve helped shape its success over the past 40 years, I think Mel and Griff would have been worthy of inclusion.
So 1992 was a watershed year for commercial radio – with the launch of the Radio Advertising Bureau, the first joint audience research, the Pepsi Chart Show and the first national station, to be followed by Virgin the following year. But commercial radio was helped by something else at that time – the BBC.
Under its then director-general John Birt, it shed millions of its listeners – rather more successfully than it intended. The then director of BBC Radio, Liz Forgan, explained why this was thought necessary in Simon Garfield’s book about Radio One, The Nation’s Favourite – which has the sub-title “The screamingly funny story of how Radio 1 got from Dave Lee Travis to Zoe Ball”.
Liz Forgan said: “All the BBC radio networks needed a strategic rethink for one simple reason. Commercial radio was getting itself together and there was competition of a sort there hadn’t been before. It was clear the world was changing. Radio 1 at that time was so genuinely hard to distinguish from any of the commercial pop stations that there was a real and quite legitimate argument for privatising it.”
Radio 1’s new controller Matthew Bannister reinvented the network, getting rid of Dave Lee Travis and many other old-style DJs – and it certainly had an impact. Simon Garfield writes: “The listening figures were catastrophic… in June 1993, two months before Dave Lee Travis left, Radio 1 had 19.23 million listeners. In November 1993, one month after Bannister introduced his first schedule changes, the figure was 16.86 million. Two months later ir was 14.84 million, a loss of almost 4.5 million listeners in seven months….
It didn’t stop there. At the start of 1995, shortly after Steve Wright’s departure, the figures had fallen yet again – to 11 million in the last quarter of 1994. It’s true that Radio 1 had lost its medium wave frequency and there were now 147 commercial stations, up from 120 in 1992, most of them playing pop music – but even so it was more than the BBC intended to lose.
The beneficiary obviously was commercial radio – handed eight million listeners on a plate, something which it perhaps should have expressed more gratitude for. It had echoes of that period back in the 1930s when commercial radio won a large audience, thanks to John Reith’s Sunday policy and his belief that BBC radio shouldn’t really be too popular.
Of course that view didn’t last – and the BBC now looks remarkably strong – too strong in the commercial stations’ view, and that is another debate which will be continued next week at the annual Radio Adademy Festival in Salford.
So why didn’t video kill the radio star?
In 1981, when MTV opened for business with that song by The Buggles, few could have predicted JUST how competitive the media market was going to become.
It started with Sky’s satellite explosion of hundreds of TV channels, offering viewers a choice of segmented channels – film, sport, news, music, children’s programmes, food, and so on. And that was BEFORE the digital revolution, which has turned everything – not least the traditional media business models – upside down.
But radio has a knack of reinventing itself in changing times. Its very simplicity and comparative cheapness is a huge advantage, as of course is its huge rapport with its audience. Radio has been interactive since the days of the first phone-ins – listeners have not only been able to talk to their favourite station – they have been able to talk ON it, and engage with the presenters – and answer back!
In July this year, in the Sunday Telegraph, the doyenne of radio writers Gillian Reynolds looked ahead to this week’s 40th anniversary, in an artile headed Wonderful Wireless. She pointed out that nine in ten people in the UK still listen to the radio and more people than ever before are listening via their phones, tablets, laptops and every other digital way, including TV.
“The world has gone wireless” she wrote. “So when anyone nowadays can broadcast via the internet, why are the British still so fond of their radio? I see three reasons. The medium is genuinely internally competitive. It knows its audiences and tries hard to please, surprise and engage them. Above all, it has kept pace with evolving digital technology.”
Some might argue with the latter point – pointing out that the future of digital radio itself – the DAB format and whether and when there will be a digital switchover – remains in doubt. We’ll hear more from the Government later in the year.
But that’s not the point Gillian was making. Radio is already leapfrogging the DAB technology through wireless and mobile – and the whole radio industry is involved, with the BBC and commercial radio combining (against the forces of television?) to present all their stations via the Radioplayer.
I once wrote a piece for the Times under the headline ‘The joy of radio’ explaining why I much preferred radio to television, even though most reporters felt that in career terms TV was the place to be. Having worked for broadsheet newspapers, I joined the BBC to report for the Today programme and PM on Radio 4, not BBC Breakfast News or even the TV Ten. I pointed out that 12 million people a week woke up to Radio 4, 5 Live or Radio 2 – a crucial time of the day, when they were starting out and needed to be well-informed.
I also argued that radio had a far stronger relationship with its audiences than television, as any Radio 4 controller who tries to change things too quickly finds out. My favourite is a story that I actually covered on Radio 4, when the BBC was considering turning Radio 4’s Long Wave frequency into a news station, after the success of Scud FM in the Gulf War and before the launch of 5 Live.
The middle classes rose in revolt, and one Saturday afternoon around 200 of them marched on Broadcasting House. I recorded their protest chant and included it in my report on the 6 o’clock news – it was played again on Feedback, earlier this year, to the delight of the presenter Roger Bolton, who’d not heard it before.
It was the politest protest you ever heard. They chanted: “What do we want? Radio 4. Where do we want it? Long Wave. What do we say? Please.”
And do you remember what happened when the BBC tried to close the digital station 6 Music, as part of its cost-cutting moves following the freezing of the licence fee? Its listeners protested in droves, generating huge publicity. The audience doubled and the BBC Trust ordered that 6 Music be reprieved.
Of course it’s not only BBC stations that have this great rapport with listeners. The outpouring of sorrow and complaints when LBC lost its licence in London was far greater than when Thames TV and TV-am were outbid for THEIR licences.
The Times used to have a column in which people in the news were asked, among other things, whether they regarded themselves as a radio or a TV person. Guess which scored better. Those plumping for radio included such TV luminaries as Jon Snow, Julia Somervile, Sir Trevor McDonald and John Simpson, as well as Charles Kennedy, Lisa Jardine, Kelvin McKenzie, Janet Street-Porter and Fay Weldon. TV did get some votes, including that of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. She said it was more relaxing!
One reason that so many opinion-formers regard themselves as radio people is because of the remarkable position held by Radio 4 and the Today programme in British public life.
Dame Jenny Abramsky, former director of BBC Radio, is quoted in Simon Elmes’ book And Now On Radio 4 as follows: “I think it is one of the things that is defining about this country, that radio is still such a powerful medium. I remember the then Press Councillor of the United States explaining to the new ambassador that the difference between the USA and the UK was that in the USA the most important programme to go on was a television programme; in the UK it was a radio programme.”
Radio 4 is far more than just the Today programme of course – it’s a remarkable mix of news, current affairs and documentaries as well as comedy, drama, panel games and other great entertainment.
As I was putting the finishing touches to this lecture on Saturday evening, I was interrupted by this Twitter exchange, started by David Hepworth, who some of you will know as one of the presenters of Whistle Test and Live Aid, and editor and publisher of magazines from Smash Hits to Q, from Mojo to The Word.
He tweeted: @BBCRadio4 running terrific dramatisation of Waugh’s “Sword Of Honour” but who’s listening on Saturday night?
There was an immediate response from @emily bell, former Guardian News & Media director of digital content, now Director of Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School: I used to listen to tons of Saturday BBC R4 drama, so my guess is people between 35 and 45 with kids under 13.
@David Hepworth replied: Fair enough. Probably also parents slumbering alongside babies.
@emilybell replied: I ended up making excuses not to go out just in case I missed a bit of Tolstoy.
As I hope I’ve demonstrated, BBC radio has adapted remarkably well over the past 80 years, usually when given a kick by commercial radio. It was true in the 1930s when the threat came from Continental Europe, and in the 60s when it came from the pirates, and the 70s with the launch of ILR, and the 90s with commercial radio’s rapid expansion under light touch regulation and the launch of the first national stations.
That is one of the commercial sector’s great legacies to radio, along with its training of so many of the best journalists and presenters, and its introduction of ethnic minority stations and a wealth of different music stations.
Yet what is remarkable about the success of Radio 4 is that IT has rarely had any direct commercial competition. Its challenges have usually come from INTERNAL competition within the BBC, witness the reinvention of broadcast news and current affairs in 1965 with the World At One – remember Jenny Abramsky called it “The start of modern-day broadcast current affairs – I think it was that critical in terms of broadcast journalism.”
LBC and IRN in the 1970s DID sharpen up Radio 4 and the BBC’s news coverage. But for the most part, it’s happened without that competition. And one of the most remarkable things about Radio 4’s success – still the most popular station in London and the South-East bar none, a remarkable achievement for a speech station – is that it has been achieved alongside the launch and growth of Radio 5 Live, the BBC’s 24-hour news and sport station, which – as I say – many regard as the true inheritor of the spirit of LBC.
Of course the BBC and Radio 4 do have huge advantages, some of which are of great frustration to the commercial stations. Throughout the period I’ve been discussing, it has been gifted the best frequencies, on whichever wavelength was available, and fought like a tiger to keep them. It has a large guaranteed income from the licence fee, meaning it can afford to do things in speech radio which are simply beyond the budget of any commercially-funded station.
Yes at times BBC Radio has spent too much money, and sometimes on the wrong things. When it complains that its budget is being cut again and some of the good things are under threat, you can hear the commercial stations grinding their teeth.
Yes it can be pompous and self-satisfied and the Today programme will constantly be under fire from its critics, on all sides of the political spectrum.
But Radio 4 remains a remarkable achievement and, in my view an asset to the UK, and many of us would quite simply be lost without it. Will it survive in such rude health in the uncertain wireless future – along with the rest of the radio sector? I’m afraid that may have to be the subject of another lecture, though I’ll be happy to deal with it if you have any questions….
Older listeners may recall the legendary John Ebdon, who used to delve in the BBC Sound Archives on Monday mornings for more than 25 years. I can do no better than to end with his sign-off: “If you have been, thanks for listening.”
– 000 –
Torin Douglas 