LBC – Where News Comes First

This Sunday commercial radio will mark its 50^th anniversary on the day that LBC launched in London, with Capital Radio coming along eight days later.

Courtesy of Joseph McTaggart here are some signed LBC presenter photo cards dating from the late 1980s (based on the logo) plus this mid-80s card featuring Brian Hayes. 

Brian moved from Capital, where he’d been producing Capital Open Line and their General election coverage, in 1976 to host LBC’s mid-morning phone-in. He left for BBC Radio 2 in 1990 but was back on London News Talk in 1994.  

In the 1970s Douglas Cameron’s voice was one of the most recognised and most frequently heard across the ILR stations reading the morning IRN bulletins. Cameron had moved to IRN from Radio 4’s Today programme in 1974. Mainly associated with breakfast shows, including the AM Programme with Bob Holness, but from 1996 on drive and then lunchtime before retiring in 2003.  

In 8 October 2013 Douglas Cameron made a one-off return to read the 8am news during Nick Ferrari’s show.

Clive Bull is the only broadcaster in this card collection still on LBC after over 30 years. Clive will be on air this anniversary weekend at 1am.

After previous radio work at Clyde and Radio 2 Steve Jones joined LBC in the late 80s.

Therese Birch was with LBC from the mid-70s initially presenting Jellybone for younger listeners. She was on London News Radio and the revived LBC in 1996.  

After a long radio career at Radio Luxembourg and BBC Radio 2 Pete Murray joined LBC in 1984, continuing to appear on the station until 2002.   

Henry Kelly had two stints at LBC either side of his time at Classic FM (1992-2003).

Mike Allen joined LBC from Capital in 1987. Left in 1994 and was later on Talk Radio and Talk Sport. Died in 2015.

Sue Jameson joined LBC from Radio City. She was LBC’s Arts Editor and heard on LBC Reports. Moscow correspondent for LBC 1989-96 before joining ITV at GMTV, later Daybreak and GMB.

Staying with ILR, from 1992 comes this interview with John Whitney about how he co-founded the Local Radio Association and became the first MD of Capital Radio. John is talking to Sunday Times radio critic Paul Donovan for the Radio 2 Arts Programme on 2 February 1992.

This Sunday Boom Radio will be celebrating the anniversary with some voices from the early days of ILR: Dave Jamieson, Phil Fothergill, Dave Marshall, Michael Aspel and Graham Dene, Les Ross, John Peters, Mike Read, Roger Day, Susie Mathis, Len Groat, John Rosborough, Keith Skues, Gillian Reynolds and Bill Bingham.    

Christmas Countdown - 12 December - James O'Brien

Mid-mornings on LBC it's James O'Brien. Talking to Buzzfeed in 2016 about his broadcasting style James had this to say: "I set out to excite an emotional reaction, which I guess the shock jock does. But I would distinguish myself from most shock jocks in America by saying I do it by a telling the truth, speaking up for the people who don’t have a voice, rather than the kind of traditional shock jock, which is pretending that you’re speaking up for the people who haven’t got a voice whereas in fact you’re endorsing the loudest, most privileged voices – usually angry white men, isn’t it – claiming that they are somehow victims of circumstances when it’s never been a better time in history to be an angry white man.”

A year ago James was picking up on the issues of the cost of social care and the working conditions of Amazon employees. Some of those lengthy O'Brien monologues (actually edited here) and some calls too.

Parky at 80

Happy 80th Birthday today to Michael Parkinson.

Parky’s career is pretty well-known: cub reporter on the South Yorkshire Times, National Service (Private Parkinson RAPC, army number 23131269), back to Civvy street and reporting for the Barnsley Chronicle, Yorkshire Evening Post, Manchester Guardian, ABC Television (at their Didsbury studios), down to Fleet Street to work on the Daily Express, back north to Granada TV (Scene at 6.30 and Cinema), a stint with the Beeb on 24 Hours, sports column in the Sunday Times and a daytime show for Thames, Tea Break. And all this was before the start of his eponymously-titled chat show.

 
As Michael recalled in his autobiography; “Tony Preston was head of variety at the BBC. One day in the spring of 1971 he called and said he wanted to suggest me as the host for a new late-night talk show the BBC was contemplating, Would I be interested?” By then he was thirty-six and “never imagined the show I was about to do would define my working life for the next thirty-six years”.   

Meanwhile over on BBC radio Michael was fast becoming ‘Parky the DJ’ on Radio 2. In 1969 he was one of the presenters of Late Night Extra and a couple of years later on the rota for the daily magazine show After Seven. There were also stints deputising for Pete Murray on Open House.

On Radio 4 he was an occasional panellist on Any Questions and teamed up with wife Mary on the talk show Mr and Mrs Parkinson. In 1971 and 1972 he was an occasional presenter on Today. In late 1985 there was a six-part series titled Michael Parkinson, though you didn’t hear that much of him. Instead it was merely a vehicle for clips from the BBC’s Sound Archives. In this, the first edition from 12 November, you’ll hear Malcolm Muggeridge, Jonathan Miller, Round the Horne, Robb Wilton, Arthur Marshall, Peter Sellers and a classic interview about the delights of living in Tunbridge Wells that you’ll have probably heard before.    

When Parkinson himself had appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1972 he’d found it “a profoundly depressing experience.” So when some thirteen year later Radio 4 controller David Hatch asked him to take over the show following the death of its creator Roy Plomley he had “reservations”.

“The problem”, opined Parky, “was Plomley himself. He seemed bored with the show, not the slightest bit interested in the guest’s story, more in favour of a long lunch at the Garrick with a bottle of wine before the interview took place in what seemed like a broom cupboard at Broadcasting House.”  Plomley’s widow, Diana Wong, didn’t think much of the appointment, favouring either John Mortimer or Richard Baker, and thought Michael not “civilised enough”.

With his journalistic background the interview part of Desert Island Discs became more probing and enquiring, perhaps a little intrusive at times, but this was to become the template of the show ever since. Michael’s first guest when DID returned to the airwaves in January 1986 was the film director Alan Parker. This is my recording of the full show. 

Parky’s tenure on Desert Island Discs lasted until March 1988. Two years he was one of the re-launched LBC Newstalk team, along with his old TV-AM colleague Angela Rippon. His daily mid-morning show ran for a couple of years. 

Aside from the cinema and the Great American songbook Michael’s other passion was sport. Between 1994 and 1997 he presented the weekly Radio 5 Live show Parkinson on Sport.   

Parkinson’s Sunday Supplement first aired on 31 March 1996 as part of a number of schedule changes implemented by controller Jim Moir, who’d joined the station the previous November. Moir’s objective was “to gain listeners, especially among the group that every radio station in the country is fighting for – the fortysomethings. My first changes are to signal to them that Radio 2 is on the move on Saturdays and for two hours on Sunday. We want to share our music with a generation that feels a bit dispossessed and give them a radio station that doesn’t just play hits in a repetitive way.” For listeners to the Sunday Supplement this inevitably led to plenty of plays for Sinatra, Jamie Cullum and Diana Krall.

This is a full show from late in the programmes run and was broadcast on Radio 2 on 4 November 2007. Michael’s guests are John Dankworth and Cleo Laine. Helping to review the Sunday papers is Gillian Reynolds and the entertainment guide is provided by Hilary Oliver.

By 2007 Michael had announced his retirement from regular broadcasting, signing off from both the Sunday Supplement and his TV chat show, now over on ITV. Of course he never quite said goodbye. In the interim he’s spent much of the time popping on TV in perfecting his role as an old curmudgeon remarking how TV production at the BBC isn’t what it was and meantime offering daytime viewers of a certain age a free Parker pen. On Radio 2 there have been two series of My Favourite Things.   

Many happy returns Sir Michael!

Promises Promises

In October 1973 The Observer’s radio critic Paul Ferris wondered what the fledging ILR stations would serve up:

LBC’s original application to the Independent Broadcasting Authority for its franchise talked about a daily breakfast-time programme that would “transmit our own editorial conferences ‘live’ so that listeners can be involved in our news-gathering … with no attempts to conceal our own mistakes”. This has been quietly dropped. Says Mr Cudlipp (Michael Cudlipp, chief editor): “I’ve never been at an editorial conference where journalists do anything other than mutter or swear.”

The programme director of Capital Radio, in which the Observer has an 11½% interest, is a former BBC television producer Micahel Bukht, who says they will be an “adult pop music station in the daytime”.  Between the music will be the usual interviews and news.

Drama will be represented by several soap operas. The Mistresses will be a bit of romance about King Charles II and his girls (Mr Bukht describes it as “thigh-squeezing time”), Bed Sit will be about a London boarding house, and Me and ‘Er will be a topical five-minuter. “If it’s raining outside,” says Mr Bukht, “we can have it raining in the script.”

With an Independent Air

                                    

It’s no accident that commercial radio, which is forty years old this week, was referred to as independent local radio. “Commercial” was a dirty word. Excessive profits were frowned on. The White Paper that paved the way for ILR spoke of “public service” and stations being “firmly rooted in their locality”.  

LBC was mainly staffed with ex-newspaper men and women. And well-staffed, indeed over-staffed, too: at the start there were about 150 on the payroll. Its headquarters at Communications House in Gough Square were just off Fleet Street. In the early days it struggled; it was under-capitalised, there were various run-ins with the NUJ and, though it had plenty of newspaper experience, there was little in the way of radio skills, and most of that came from “Antipodean freelancers”.

Capital too had some early issues. The initial music policy with its slant to the more “hippier” stuff was not a success, there were spats with its London neighbour about just how much news coverage it should take and in early 1974 the three-day week hit advertising revenue.

Despite this the stations were a hit with listeners: early audience figures showed LBC had one million and Capital one and a half million. Though the Government’s plans had been to introduce sixty stations they restricted this to just nineteen, at least during the 1970s, with Beacon Radio the last the go on-air on 12 April 1976.

It’s against this background that Ann Leslie wrote this piece, With an Independent Air, for Punch magazine published on 28 April 1976. It offers a somewhat metro-centric view of commercial radio; one suspects she’d not heard anything of the other seventeen stations.  

Elsie of Westminster and I are getting a bit stroppy with each other over the airwaves of LBC’s Nightline phone-in programme, and she’s shouting into my earphones that them coloureds are VICIOUS! VICIOUS” not like us native British what are more placid, not that she’s got anything against black people mind you, there’s good and bad in all of us, granted – but Ann, any spot of bother’ll set the coloureds off fighting an’ that…

And in between shouting back “But Elsie!” I’m coughing and blinking and waving my arms about because I happen to have set the studio on fire.

Behind the glass sits studio engineer Dave, a pleasant, professional lad who nevertheless looks about fifteen and has the somewhat nibbled-looking hair of a typical Bay City Rollers fan. Ciggie stapled to his lip, he gazes on, unmoved, as I flap the air like a fire-dancer with flaming sheets of paper plucked from the melting waster bin.

Had I burnt the Nightline studio down, I’d have cut LBC’s studio-count by half, but oh well, that kind of disaster is just about par for the course for this, the first and most accident-prone of Britain’s nineteen commercial radio stations.

Incidentally, there isn’t an Ann Leslie spot on Nightline. I’d merely wandered down with my notebook that evening into the pokey basement huddled beneath the eighteenth-century elegance of Dr Johnson’s Gough Square and found myself instantly lassooed into ‘guesting’ on the show. Had I been a passing mouse, they’d have doubtless grabbed my tail, shoved a mike in my whiskers and pushed me squeaking onto the air: LBC’s in need of endless free squeaks to fill up the spaces between Alka Seltzer ads. Thanks to phone-freaks like Westminster Elsie, they rarely run short.

Nightline’s host is a nice worthy bearded chap called Nick Page (“yes I’m a practising Christian”) who, every weekday night, dispenses four hours of spiritual Ovaltine in his gentle foody voice to the lonely souls in London’s bedsitter land. (Nightline, he believes, is partly responsible for a decline in suicides in those trackless wastes).

So while I’m beating out the flames, he’s fiddling with his blue cardie and soothing Elsie down with “well, as you say Elsie I think there’s good and bad in everyone and we’ll have to agree to differ on the other pints you’ve made, and now we’ll go down to Putney and say hello to Ray. Roy? Hello Roy? Are you there? Roy? … Well, we’ll come back to Roy in a minute. Over now to Marie in Battersea, hello Marie! Marie? …”

And he and I soldier on into the night with Maggie if Muswell Hill who’s against bingo halls; and Ted of Shoreditch who says Lenin and Jewish bankers are responsible for our “inflammatory money” and the decline-and-fall-of-this-once-great-nation-of-ours; and Charles of St John’s Wood who says there’s too many black faces around and Ann, are you as beautiful as you sound on the phone because if you are, tell Nick to push off as I’m going to put on my pyjamas and come right over…

London has two commercial radio stations – dear, worthy news-and-views LBC and the all-music-all-fun Capital. “Capit-a-al! Capit-a-al” Capit-a-al Radio-o-o!” sings the persistent radio jingle.

Capital has pzazz! Capital has sex-appeal! Capital has MONEY! No apologetic lurking in the basements for them: Capital prances manically about in the glossy splendour of the Euston Tower and Capital has thick carpeting and digital clocks and DJs like Dave Cash-by-name, Cash-by-nature and Capit-a-al! Capit-a-al! is wow! zowie! b-boom!

Easter Saturday morning and Capital is running its marathon radio auction to raise money to “help a London Child” and its huge foyer is full of adenoidal Capital fans gawping at leaping DJs and being frisked by security men and, up in her office, lovely press-lady Sian is being photographed with Cliff Richard’s belt and a Womble blanket and wow! even a Led Zeppelin tee-shirt donated by the luminaries themselves!

And in the studio, Kenny Everett and Roger Scott are howling and shrieking and jamming on records and singing Hello Dolly for a bet and it’s Capit-a-al! Capit-a-al! and thirteen phone lines are blinking and in yet another studio Dave Cash is yelling “Great news! A Mr Crown has just bid £51 for the Garrard record-deck – any more offers on that? – and there’s plenty more wunnerful things coming up for grabs now! A snare-drum from the PINK FLOTD! Twenty tickets to see Emmanuelle! A personal horoscope from Terri King!  And, wait for it, a complete hair-transplant!” Capit-a-al! Capit-a-al! And oops, here come the ads “Try the Big Fresh Flavour of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum!” and oh, wow! I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s all about, it’s just Capit-a-al! Capit-a-al! Capit-a-al! Radi-o-o!

 

Commercial radio was born at 6 a.m. on the morning of October 8th 1973 with the launch of LBC; Capital took to the air a week later. Originally sixty such stations were planned: the Government has now decided nineteen are enough. Most of the others which have emerged so far have settled for varying combinations of the LBC and Capital styles.

So how do we assess the results of the last thirty months? Professional radio critics, of course, instantly assume the facial expressions of men with knitting needles stuck up their noses when asked to evaluate the wild pot-pourri of Gary Glitter, fish-fingers, crossed-lines, Fred Kites, National Fronters, Zionists, jew-baiters, corner-shop fascists, loonies who’ve lost their parrots and pensioners who’ve lost their teeth, who’ve all come tumbling and gibbering down out of the ether onto this green and garrulous land.

It’s “boring old do-it-yourself radio”, jumble-sale-radio”, radio-wot-fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry”, and not what we were promised at all! What were we promised? Well, what we were promised makes for merry reading. What’s quite clear in retrospect – and should have been at the time – was that British commercial radio was sired by a typically British marriage of amateurism and hypocrisy.

Amateurism decreed that those with the least experience in running a radio station should, almost on those grounds alone, be selected for the job. Poor little LBC – dubbed Radio Toytown – was expected to outdo the mighty Beeb in world news coverage; soon virtually hysterical staff were collapsing like exhausted flies. The Gough Square basement became radio’s Ekaterinburg, with the mass slaughter of decent misguided programmes, followed by endless Stalinist purges of idealistic Old Bolsheviks who’d taken their brief seriously and died under machine-gun volleys from cadres of ruthless accountants.

Hypocrisy? Well, God knows there was enough of that. Since admitting that you want to sell anything and actually make money is a fearful social gaffe in this country, the commercial radio lobby had to pretend that the last thing they wanted to do was get rich from selling fish-finger eaters to fish-finger makers. Dear me, what a vulgar, gutter-press interpretation of these noble gentlemen’s aims!

For a start, they did wish people wouldn’t talk about “commercial” radio – it was “independent” radio. Independent of what? Of the pointy-headed mandarins of the Establishment Beeb, of course. Commercial – oops, sorry, independent- radio was to be a collection of brave little Davids slinging pebbles on behalf of the wonderful-little-people-of-our-great-democracy against the Goliath of the Corporation.

Since money-making was, like Queen Anne’s legs, not considered a fit subject for polite conversation, the motives of the commercial radio lobby were draped in yards of swishing verbiage about “community needs”, grass-roots feeling”, “ access”, “participation”, “the British People”.

Christopher Chataway, the Tory Minister who legalised commercial radio, assured the Doubting Thomases that “independent” radio was going to spurn the “pop and prattle” of the BBC’s Radio One, and instead provide “a worthwhile service to the community”. And Brian Young, Director-General of the IBA, movingly pledged his belief that it would not all turn out to be “just the round of pop music and plugs which disdainful critics have predicted”.

The IBA issued “guidelines” to hopeful consortia scrambling for contracts. Like a rich but bashful spinster letting on that she’s partial to chocolate fudge, Auntie IBA then lay back and awaited her seducers.

The seducers, having duly studied her tastes, told her what she wanted to hear and then, the minute they’d bedded the contracts, told her to forget the chocolate fudge promises on account of this is a hard world and such romantic twaddle costs too much.

(Take Capital, for example, which promised sweet music, serials, quizzes – all nice, clean, short-back-and sides stuff. Auntie IBA might have liked it but hip young Londoners didn’t, so it went out the window.)

So where are all the shock horror probes into corruption in the local Parks and Cemeteries Committees? And where the searing exposes of small-town sewerage politics? They’re still there – but tucked away in the stations’ “social conscience” slots at dead, unprofitable areas of the day or night when people are either watching telly or are asleep.

As Tommy Vance, a Capital DJ, told me, “Yeah, well, the, ah, incidence of Social Idealism has to be strictly limited in commercial radio: you gotta make a living right? Right!”

But this large gap between stated aims and actual performance is not perhaps the only reason for much of the critical response to commercial radio. Many genuinely believed in such concepts as “grass-roots participation” and “media access” so long as they remained concepts. I suspect that reality has dealt roughly with much woolly-minded Fabian-bookshop sentimentality about The Grass-Roots and The People. To these romantics, The People were symbolised by a kind of myths, cloud-capped Noble Prole, like one of those chunks of socialist statuary celebrating some Soviet Hero of the Best-harvest Norm.

It was assured that once this Noble Prole was allowed “access”, his stout-hearted, rough-hewn common sense and his natural feeling for fair play would emerge and astonish us all.

Did it heck. What happened when this Noble Prole seized hold of the air-waves was that he gabbed on about deporting blacks in banana boats, sending squatters to labour camps and shooting the Arts Council – in short, he turned out to be no more noble or fair-minded than anybody else.

What’s more he actually liked the “trivia and pap” he was expected to scorn. He produced most of it himself: he wanted to know what blighter in Tulse Hill had nicked his Cortina, and whether fin-rot would kill his guppy-fish, and if any OAP in Willesden wanted an old piano, and if Dave or Kenny or Mike would play Diana Ross’s latest waxing for Tracy, the best wife in the world…

Now while I’m a loyal listener, and indeed contributor to, Radio Four, I’m delighted by the sheer serendipity offered by commercial radio. I love the chaos, the mess, the rudeness, the prejudices, the unstructured, unsanitised anarchy.

It’s occasionally very moving: how else can you describe the sudden upsurges of kindness from listeners who, the night I was on LBC for example, rang in desperate to ease the grief of poor Marlees of Lea Green who’d told us of the cot-death of her baby son?

It even produces bizarre flashes of surreal horror: as when a woman rang George Gale on LBC to say she was worried about her nephew who celebrated May 10th every year by buying a couple of parrots, stuffing them down his wellies, and plodging around on them till they’re dead.  And since it clearly hadn’t occurred to her, George’s advice to send the parrot-plodger to a doctor does strike me as a “worthwhile service to the community”, if only to the community’s parrots.

But the basic joy of commercial radio is that it provides a series of scruffy old pubs-of-the-air where all classes unselfconsciously get together to share gossip, misinformation, tell terrible jokes and say they know for a fact that… It’s no more, nor no less, valuable a community service than that.

In the London area, the various mine-hosts include grumpy old buzz-saw Gale, loony little Kenny, sweet ‘n mimsy Joan Shenton, quirky Adrian Love, my very favourite (passed your driving test yet, Adrian?) and that pompous old wind-bag David Bassett.

Which reminds me, David. I’m Ann of Kentish Town and I’m a cat-lover and I’m furious at what you said to that lady on Easter Sunday who wanted to know if her neighbour was allowed to shoot her Siamese cat for trespassing… What? Hello? Are you there, David? Can you hear me? Hello? I’m Ann of Kentish Town and I’m…

Punch finally closed in 2002 with the archives being acquired by the British Library some two years later. Back issues can, no doubt, still be found in dentist’s waiting rooms. All copyrights acknowledged. Cartoons by Mac and Honeysett.