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.
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