Reeling In The Years

This is a revised version of an article that was published in the 1,000th issue of The Radio Magazine.
( Photo: © Martin Stevens)

37 years ago today, on 1st July 1974, I joined LBC as a young ‘Sound Technician/Studio Operator’; my first radio job; I had been involved with hospital radio for the previous four years. This week has also seen The Radio Magazine’s 1000th edition and between us we’ve seen a lot of changes in radio over the years. 

When I entered radio there were just five ILR stations: LBC, Capital, Clyde, BRMB and Piccadilly. Metropolitan Broadcasting, in Newcastle, launched a couple of weeks later.

Issue No. 1 of The Radio Magazine, in April 1992, reported on plans by the Radio Authority to licence a new tier of regional commercial radio stations, as well as around 300 projected local stations. Perhaps if the industry knew then what it now painfully knows, those plans might have been very different.

The way we make radio has certainly changed. In 1974 a typical radio studio was equipped with record turntables, cart machines and reel-to-reel tape machines. All of those have now been replaced by computer playout systems and presenters are no longer required to juggle records, carts and tapes throughout their shows; something a friend of mine once called “the ballet of radio”. Mind you it did keep you on your toes.

Tape editing was done using razor blades; can you imagine dealing with the inevitable Health & Safety risk assessment you would need to go through in order to do it like that today? Instead the ‘Undo’ button makes life so much easier and avoids having to rummage through the bin to find the bit of tape you discarded earlier. It could be argued, though, that the old-fashioned method did force you think more carefully before making that cut.

The way people listen to radio has also changed, thanks to the emergence of the RadioPlayer, iPhone applications, podcasts, downloads and online streaming, while radio itself is facing increasing competition for people’s time from multi-channel TV, the internet and games. Radio is becoming a multi-platform medium which now means, as Absolute Radio’s Clive Dickens put it “We go where our audience is - online, on demand, on-air, on everywhere.”

While it’s important to remain aware of the way radio is changing and evolving, I believe it’s equally important to be aware of its past.

This is not a lament about how the industry has changed, or a call for a return to the sort of radio many of us of “a certain age” grew up with. Those days are gone, the world has moved on and listeners’ tastes and expectations have changed. It is, though, about the need to retain a sense of perspective on what we are doing.

Historians often remind us that in order to understand the present and the future we have to understand the past, otherwise we learn nothing about ourselves.

One common complaint about the UK radio industry is that too often it seems unable, or unwilling, to learn from its mistakes. New managers seem keen to re-invent the wheel simply because they want to make their mark rather than because what they are doing will actually improve their station’s performance. Once they’ve finished sorting out the inevitable mess, they move on (or are moved on) and someone else then comes in and starts changing everything again.

Wanting to change something just because “it’s always been done that way” isn’t the way to go about it. Obviously a station should continually be evaluating itself, and finding new and better ways of doing things; that’s how you continue to remain relevant to your target audience. It’s when the new methods turn out not to be better, or have not been thought through properly in the first place, that the problems begin. “If it ain’t broke…break it, then bodge it back together again” becomes the new mantra; even though things rarely work as well as they did before.

Similarly, some less-enlightened members of senior radio management have been known to dismiss the past as “irrelevant”, with the result that large quantities of (often valuable) archive recordings have ended up in a skip as a ‘heritage’ ILR dumped its, er, heritage. I’ve heard many stories of people rescuing such material and then being asked to lend it back to the same station some years later because it’s needed for their 25th etc. birthday celebrations.

I mentioned earlier that we need to retain a sense of perspective. Without it we are in danger of finding ourselves in the position where, as Oscar Wilde once put it, we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

Then the future of radio will indeed be bleak!