When I was a kid growing up in the UK back in the 60/70s, radio was king. In the 80/90s radio got even richer and broader. Then I moved to Spain. I couldn't believe how dull the radio was. Let me explain.
Unless you were there, it must be difficult for people to imagine how lean our diet of media was in Britain back in the sixties.
Television was very much an evening affair like going to the theatre. There was nothing much on during the day. If you were lucky you got the Potter's Wheel (a short film shown as the first programme of the day which I think they played while the electricians at the TV station checked all the valves were working) This was then followed by a couple of schools programmes. Some days there were some programmes specially commissioned to integrate immigrants. (I used to love those as they often had sitar music). Then there was the lunchtime news and fifteen minutes of 'Watch with Mother', either some form of puppetry like ‘Andy Pandy’ or the live action ‘Tales of the River Bank’ which seemed to consist of a variety of suspiciously uncomfortable animals, hamsters, frogs and so forth, that were tethered to model speed-boats or aeroplanes for the purpose of telling of some dubious narrative. That was about it. Drama or light entertainment was the preserve of the grown ups, and the stuffy thinking of the time must have been 'why show material of such a mature and challenging nature during the day when daddy was at work?'
Radio however was a different kettle of fish. We had the Archers! Mother always had the radio on while slaving away in the kitchen. 'Just a Minute' was a show she enjoyed with the outrageous Kenneth Williams who was always good for a double-entendre. I liked Sundays best, as we would listen to 'Family Favourites' while mum was cooking the Sunday roast. The musical fayre was appetite-inducing be it Puff the Magic Dragon or Walk in the Black Forest. Soul standards etched their first tracks in my mind during this period as they used to slip in the odd Stevie Wonder and Otis Redding song in between the more stateley and domestic Anthony Newley and Engelbert Humperdinck hits of the day.
As I grew older, my taste in music matured and I naturally veered towards making my own decisions, choosing my own stations and programmes. The Saudis raised the price of oil back then so the country was plagued with power cuts. With no electricity we lived with candles and battery powered radios. I listened to the wireless a lot at this time. Radio London was a favourite. I became hooked on the station and soon discovered The Manhattan Transfer and Dire Straits thanks to my favourite host, Robbie Vincent. London also had Capital Radio with Nicky Horn, who played the Eagles, followed by the Eagles, then more Eagles! Then of course, for the music connoisseur, the BBC had John Peel, who used play all the trendy, intellectual, esoteric stuff like Tom Verlaine, Brian Eno and various Krautrock bands, curiously juxtaposed with Irish folk music.
Pirate radio drew me like a moth to a flame. Radio Luxembourg was ever present as was Radio Caroline, which, though it went on and off due to legal challenges, was the only place to get a good belt of Pink Floyd over the airwaves at the time. Locally though the best station by far in the early to mid seventies was Radio Jackie.
I didn't realise how local Radio Jackie was while I was first listening to it, but it turned out my high school science teacher, who will remain nameless, was the brains behind the electronics of radio Jackie, and the station transmitted many a show from his garden shed. I learned from him how pirate radio transitioned from an offshore activity to an inland one. He explained to me that like everything technical, this was down to miniaturisation.
Prior to the 1970s, the hardware required to make radio possible over a decent range was pretty heavy duty. Valves, transformers, power supplies etc were so big and weighty that, like the computers of yesteryear, they needed a room to house them. So if you tried to operate illegally inland, as soon as the authorities located your signal they would send the police round and you were toast. To avoid this, operations like Radio Luxembourg used equipment powerful enough to broadcast across international borders, thus avoiding domestic legalisation in the UK. Radio Caroline used smaller equipment with less range but brought it nearer by putting it on a boat just outside British waters to transmit with freedom, though with the added insurance that they were still fairly mobile if there was a change in the law. Radio Jackie used equipment of lower power still, taking advantage of further clever miniaturisation in electronics that meant their equipment was light enough to be picked up by hand if the rozzers appeared, and my science teacher proudly related how on one occasion a shout went up and the whole kit and kaboodal was quickly ferried over his garden fence, narrowly escaping a raid by the police.
We're still talking valves and fairly large transformers back in the mid seventies, but the equipment continued to become smaller, lighter and more compact. While the NME was extolling the virtues of 'punk' as the next big thing, pirate radio was becoming transistorised. All of a sudden, it was possible to run a pretty powerful FM radio station from the backseat of a car. The practice was taken up most enthusiastically by London's Caribbean community. Turning the dial in the late seventies to the early eighties was wonderful. I fondly remember explorations in which I discovered Lover's Reggae, Soca (Soul Calypso), Prince, Luther Vandross and a host of other genres and artists, all thanks to London's rich pirate radio scene.
Although the Thatcher years were more remembered for deregulation of print and television media she also planted the seeds that led to the 1990 Broadcasting act which allowed for the creation of even more commercial radio stations in the UK. By the turn of the millennium, British radio had never looked better. We were spoilt for choice.
Then in 2003 I moved to Spain. What a difference!
Spain has a few national broadcasters but in the main though, the radio landscape, at least back then, seemed to be quite local. In fact, after much experimentation driving across the country, the only signal that persisted over a long journey would always be the classical music station, ‘Radio Clásica’. Don't get me wrong, I like a bit of classical but there is a time and a place for Holst's Planets Suite, and driving down the RM-15 for a day at the beach isn't one of them! There were a handful of other stations run by the national public broadcaster RNE but they seem to come and go in signal strength as one drives through mountain passes. It was as though there wasn't much effort being put into providing an adequate signal in rural areas. The same seems to be true of national commercial broadcasters, who seem to prefer a model of piping their centralised, national content in to franchised areas of high population where it is combined with locally produced programming.
Local stations, at least where I lived, only seemed to provide a binary choice. Either you listened to music, (which would most often be the dreaded, mind-numbing beat of reggaeton), or talk radio, which would confound you with an impenetrable local accent. After a lot of spectrum-cruising I finally came across a presenter with a Spanish accent that I could pretty much wholey understand. His name was Luis Del Olmo, a jolly man who had a morning show on the national commercial channel Onda Cero, which he affectionately referred to as his "Fiesta Radiofónica" (radio party). His shows were always entertaining and well put together, and he would often visit different parts of Spain, exposing my ears to guests with differing accents. I learned a lot of Spanish listening to his programmes but unfortunately he retired in 2004. I kind of gave up on using the wireless in Spain after that.
I must say here, that being a foreigner, there maybe another side to the story of Spanish radio that I’m not aware of. Perhaps pirate radio flourished in Madrid during ‘La Movida Madrileña’. I wasn’t here then and my ability to research it is somewhat limited, so if anybody knows, please leave a comment or message me.
Radio has morphed over the years yet remains a valid form of mass communication. Someone put me on to the Radio Garden app recently which lets me listen to thousands of radio stations online from my phone. Indeed, streaming over the Internet seems destined to replace wireless as the main means of transmission. I hope the sensibilities of radio are maintained and that we still get quality programming the way we did back in the sixties where content was decided by human taste and not a mathematical algorithm (like say, Spotify, whose supposedly 'personal' recommendations I find so often unpalatable that I seriously doubt there is any artificial intelligence at all going on, just random picks from the same genre).
A great benefit of radio apps though is that I can now listen to Spanish speaking radio around the world from Bogota to Lanzarote so that at last I have a fighting chance of finding someone speaking in an accent that my tin-ear for languages can actually understand!