It’s 50 years since the first local radio stations were launched by the BBC in yet another instance of the corporation working hard to stay ahead of the game, on this occasion responding to the challenge of the pirate stations, whose audiences were local and known to be very loyal. Radio Leicester was the first to go on air on8 November 1967, launched by a very plummy-voiced postmaster-general as ‘the first hometown radio station in Britain’. (The BBC executive behind the idea, Frank Gillard, had spent time in America and been impressed by local radio there, wishing to replicate its homespun feel.) Others followed quickly, dependent on whether the local council was happy to provide part-funding (they are now solely funded by the BBC). Known for their cheesy jingles (Radio Merseyside boasted that their call-sign was composed by Gerry Marsden, of the Pacemakers), the BBC’s local stations were often treated like a poor relation of grand old 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Underfunded, understaffed, relegated to the back pages of Radio Times, they were designed for listeners like ‘Dave and Sue’ (the fictional target audience created by the Beeb’s marketing department), who were in their fifties, not interested in politics or piano concertos, shopped at Asda, wore ‘casual clothes’, and wanted to be cheered up and made to laugh by what they listened to. But very soon the network of stations expanded to 39, and they established themselves as vital agents of local life in times of crisis, responsive in a way the national stations never could be, their reporters on the spot, with crucial local knowledge and insight.
In recent years local radio has been under threat, seen as taking too much away from the BBC’s centralising budget. But at last a director-general has come along who understands radio and why it’s thriving in this visual age (its immediacy, its intimacy, its connectivity).
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