Robin Day adjusted his bow tie and wheezed.
Across a black and white TV studio, the Swingometer nudged a touch into the red in
the dark hours of night. His sweaty Conservative front-bencher guest shifted
uncomfortably in his leathern seat as the UK prepared to wake up to another
Labour morning.
It was March 1966. Good old Harold had called a quick General Election to fix his small majority. Young Ted Heath had barely sailed his way around the Opposition leadership. He lost. Labour was returned to Number 10.
What might have happened had the swing been the other way? It could so easily have been.
A fresh Conservative government would have quietly been just as eager to sideline the pirate chappies broadcasting from the North Sea, as the 70s were to prove. It would, though, have been more sympathetic to the prospect of legitimate commercial radio. And less at ease with the prospect of the BBC spreading its wings at all, let alone into pop and local radio. History suggests that BBC Local Radio's eventual arrival turned out to be touch and go: it dawned, thanks in no small part to the persuasive case from the great Frank Gillard. And Auntie's foray into pop music radio certainly had its critics within and outwith its own camp.
A smug, new 1966 Conservative Culture Secretary who smiled to camera as he walked across Downing Street in that March sunshine would have had a number of exciting ideas in his head. What would he do with the huge swathe of unused FM spectrum? Although FM radios were few and far between, the likelihood was that they would catch on. Maybe an F-Love ad campaign or something similar might have helped. So, nothing to be lost. Give the private sector a bash. Charge them for spectrum usage and see what happens.
Local or national? Well, there was no proven
track record of local radio; and, we know for sure, plenty of voices suggesting
that it would amount to but "triviality and mediocrity...even if the parish pump could be kept gurgling...it would have no listeners" (The Times, Feb 1962). So, to get maybe a
little more Treasury trove for that spectrum than maybe the 2013 Government got for 4G,
probably a few national radio licences would have been prepared for the rubber
stamp.
Roll on February 1967. Test transmissions crackle through the ether for the new national commercial
Radio Elizabeth.
It wouldn’t have been very good.
History suggests that some early
commercial blood clearly understood competitive format radio, programming slick stations some way ahead of their time. Other early
commercial operators were more comfortable with stentorian Lost Dog radio. The record shows that many led the charge against, not for, large
regional and national commercial stations.
Ironically, the eventual architect of BBC Radio 1,
Robin Scott, would probably have made a decent fist of programming the commercial Radio
Elizabeth in 1967, had he sat in the PD chair with his pile of ¼ inch tapes of the pirate
Radio London. 'Stand-by for switching. Radio Elizabeth. Go!" He would have been wisely complemented
by one of the more rational and commercially-astute pirate chaps in the office
next door as Sales Director/MD; and a miserable FD to remind him not to hire every single DJ off the pirate ships. And Tony Blackburn would still have been first on. Woof woof.
Its audience success,
however, would probably have depended just how free the regulatory codes were. Would these foolscap pages have permitted a national station
which sounded like an early brash and colourful Trent or Beacon; or would the regulator have insisted
on something more akin to a nascent, more reserved Hallam or BRMB? One imagines a brave Tory Culture Secretary
would have been less inclined to deposit radio’s regulatory duties down Brompton
Road with the IBA; and invent a new,
more liberal radio regulator. Not least
because the latter might be more likely to offer him some Brits tickets, so he
could take his mistress to see the Rolling Stones.
It would have sorted itself out. As would the next commercial national. They would have been sold on a few times; and
settled. No station would have been made to do speech, so TalkSPORT would never
have been born. Similarly, the management of Radio Elizabeth would not have been
inclined to nod through an Xcel spreadsheet about a format change to Classical
music.
Seeing the glint of cash, the regulator would have shoved the police messages off 105-108 MHz by the end of the 60s, and made way for a
limited network of local commercial radio in major cities.
Then, as the 1966 Tory Government was pushed
aside in a hasty 1970 Election, the BBC would be able to make headway and
persuade an excited re-elected Harold Wilson that BBC Local Radio was the only way communities
of under 300,000 were going to get a local radio service at all.
Where would we be by 2013? Brand-led national commercial radio would be
a generation ahead of where it is now; and advertisers would have been able to
grasp the medium and buy it with ease. Without Radio 1, commercial radio would be
delivering the lion’s share of listening and a share of advertising a few %
ahead of where it now sits. Brand
integration would never have been banned, let alone un-banned. Powerful national pop-brands would be
complemented by successful and proud big-city radio; and the BBC would be better-funded to do more of exactly what it does best in top quality speech, smaller markets, minority formats, and older demographics.
As it has turned out, we are wisely engineering much
of the above backwards, with some necessary pain along the way, probably to a slightly less satisfactory conclusion. We’ve had little choice. The last 40 years have been a tough journey
with huge frustrations. Its
idiosyncrasies though have provided a fund of some truly great memories and rich learnings. Radio will never be quite like it again.
