50 years of commercial radio -- how ILR changed my life, and kept doing it.
From a shaky start, commercial radio was a huge hit. The BBC improved in response to its new rival. Radio remains a big deal, but local broadcasting seems to be in a death spiral, with those in charge apparently indifferent to the impact on communities across the country.
It's fair to say I was not a normal child. Normal 7-year-olds don't ask for copies of the IBA yearbook. A dry, technical manual about commercial television and radio, which I read from cover to cover, over and over again (I still do, actually).
I grew up in Lancashire, which was not among the first eighteen areas to get Independent Local Radio. That changed in 1982, with the launch of Red Rose Radio. It was impossibly exciting.
We already had BBC Radio Lancashire, but Red Rose was different. Livelier, more entertaining, and based just down the road, in an old church in the centre of Preston.
Commercial radio was tightly regulated in its early years, and Red Rose filled its evenings with classical, country, folk and big band music, deep dives into local politics, religion, and the arts. An hour on education, half an hour "for the disabled", and the curiously titled "Hi-Fi hour".
Only a handful of these programmes survived the first few years, but Red Rose remained distinctly local, proudly proclaiming it was "in tune with Lancashire."
All kinds of everything. The original Red Rose Radio Schedule.
A pop-heavy playlist, with studio guests and phone-ins, helped to make it an instant hit – not least the daily "Morning Market", radio's classified ads ("no firearms or pets").
We listened all the time. From the school run through to bedtime. At 5 on weeknights, Red Rose Reports offered "a full hour of national and local news". The BBC was still staffed by people who sounded like they were related to the royal family, but the presenters and journalists on Red Rose sounded like the rest of us. Was this the kind of thing you could do for a living? Get paid to be on the radio?
Four years later I made my on-air debut–filling the Saturday afternoon "Junior DJ" slot. I got to pick 5 songs, interviewed another kid about his Lego collection. It must have been riveting listening.
Ten years later I was back, this time on a university placement in the newsroom. I did not want to be there. Convinced by now I would make my career in the BBC, I had no interest in being sent to Red Rose.
Within half an hour of arriving on day one, I was given the number for Blackpool CID, tasked with tracking down a detective and getting an interview. Over those three weeks I raced around in the news editor's car from one story to the next. It was busy, fun and scary – every day an opportunity to either prove yourself or very obviously fail.
Meanwhile a friend, doing the placement I had wanted at Radio Lancashire, spent a fortnight doing check calls to the police and fire brigade, and a week putting together a single piece that went out on his final day.
The BBC by now forgotten, I started applying for jobs at ILR stations, the details passed on by Red Rose's then news editor, John Barnes. That's how, a couple of days after finishing my degree, I was on the train to Swansea.
All roads (used to) lead to London
It was 1996, but Swansea Sound was a radio station from another age. Just a few months earlier, it had belatedly split its AM and FM frequencies into semi-separate stations.
On FM, Sound Wave played the hits with a bit of local news. On AM, Swansea Sound still carried three long news magazines every day, regular bulletins in Welsh, hymns every Sunday morning.
I spent two years reporting across its south-west Wales patch, reading news bulletins, and working on my Welsh pronunciation. We had a tiny team, with three full-time reporters – all young, and pretty much willing to try anything.
Just as Red Rose had been at its height, Swansea Sound dominated its community – blaring out of half the shops and cafes on the high street. Arriving at a story the station's name gave you a cache -- a nod of acknowledgment from others on the scene.
The main thing I remember from two years there was how much fun it was. Starting every day with a blank sheet of paper, a huge amount of freedom to fill it as you saw fit. The ridiculous charity appeals at Christmas, the chaotic nights out in distinctly dodgy local clubs.
But, in search of more money and "career progression", I moved onto another of the original ILR stations from the 1970s. By the late 90s, Wolverhampton's Beacon Radio was in the hands of the GWR group–much of its output networked, playlists arriving by e-mail from the other end of the country, and news seemingly an inconvenient afterthought.
After my first day, writing 60 second updates heavy on the showbiz and light on actual news, I picked up a copy of The Guardian on my way home to plough through the media job ads.
Within a few months, I'd engineered an escape to London, and to IRN, commercial radio's news agency, launched 50 years ago alongside LBC. A speculative letter had led to an invite to pop in.
"We'd better see what you sound like in a studio" said a news editor who, rather than giving me a demo script to read, announced I would read the next network bulletin.
This would be sent to almost every commercial station in the UK, including the speaker in the newsroom at Beacon – who did not know I was in London, trying to get another job. Oops.
IRN was, again, fun and terrifying. The reporters and newsreaders I'd heard a thousand times were now my colleagues. Every day was again a chance to prove yourself, or fall flat on your face. It felt like being a busker, suddenly asked to perform on stage at Glastonbury with your favourite band.
Acceptance came when I largely ad-libbed a bulletin on Budget day, and managed to finish on time. For the first (and only) time in my career, I left the studio to a round of applause.
This was the late-90s IRN of Peter Murphy making politics relevant and interesting to audiences unlikely to turn to Newsnight, of reporters like Kevin Murphy explaining complex stories in just a few superbly-crafted sentences. John Anderson and Andrew Cheal taking over entire bulletins to convey the atmosphere inside Sydney's Olympic Stadium, or at improbable European soccer victories.
After a couple of years in IRN's sunlight-free basement, I moved to Classic FM, and stayed there for much of the 2000s. One of many corporate mergers brought us into the newsroom at Capital Radio's Leicester Square HQ.
Capital reminded me of those days in Swansea, albeit on a bigger scale. Busy, with lots to do, but also fun. Every hour we fanned out across the building with updates for listeners focused on pop, hip-hop, indie, classical and 60s hits. I carved out a bizarre side-hustle as "Choice FM's money-man", explaining the early days of the global financial crisis by way of the wads of notes being waved in rap videos.
"You commercial radio johnnies..."
From work experience at Red Rose to running the IRN newsdesk, commercial radio rewarded you for being willing to step up. In retrospect, it seems ridiculous to have been left in charge of news provision to the entire commercial radio network in your mid-twenties, or to shape how 7-million listeners perceived the world every morning. But the opportunities were there, if you were willing to push yourself.
Years later, as a freelance, a senior BBC manager dismissed my CV because it was filled with non-BBC experience. "You commercial radio johnnies" he told me "are very good at writing snappy top-lines, but you never really understand the story."
I preferred to see it as an ability to make complex stories relatable and interesting, and foolishly imagined that to be the point of journalism. The lesson was not lost on all BBC managers – the original version of Radio 5 live was a near carbon copy of LBC.
I left Classic FM as Global was rising to dominance, replacing long-standing stations with identikit Hearts and Capitals. You can't deny the scale of Global's ambition, and what it's achieved with LBC and podcasts like The News Agents is truly admirable.
But it's not just nostalgia that leaves me thinking it's a pity big towns and cities no longer have truly local radio of significant scale. Stations like Trent or Fox bound communities together, and made you feel yours was the best town, and that you were lucky to be living in it.
Red Rose's 1990s incarnation, Rock FM, was ludicrously good in its early years, dominating the north-west, and making Preston feel improbably glamorous. The station survives, but as a shadow of its former self. One daily programme, no longer broadcast from Lancashire, the Preston studios shut down and sold off.
It wasn’t just me listening to Rock FM, then…
The drawn-out death of local commercial radio frequently left the BBC as the only large-scale local broadcaster. But rather than grow its audience, as ILR hits its 50th birthday the BBC is busily dismantling its local radio network, losing hundreds of years of collective experience as presenters and producers are cast aside.
Local communities are being bodged together into nonsensical regions, endless hours filled with tedious non-specific chat about nothing in particular, frequently delivered with far less technical skill than ILR was managing 30 years ago.
Allan Beswick was one of the first big names I heard on the radio. The king of late-night talk on Red Rose in the mid-80s, and a fixture for many years at BBC Radio Manchester. I somehow engineered an interview with him for our school magazine, when he pulled back the curtain on some of the tricks of the trade, tricks I tried to remember decades later when taking the calls on Radio London.
Beswick's late show, his skills and his experience are no longer wanted by a BBC seemingly in the hands of managers with no understanding of local radio, how it works or why it matters.
The BBC is following commercial networks down a path that offers more economic stability, but a lot less fun – for listeners and broadcasters.
Commercial radio is bigger, bolder, more professional – a business first, with public service a far-distant second. It can, at least, say that it is meant to be a business. The BBC is supposed to be something more than that.
I loved my time in ILR and its national offshoots, and it's sad to think there are far fewer opportunities for people starting out today. Like me, they'll be making podcasts instead, and of course nothing goes on forever.
It was, however, great while it lasted.
