BBC Radio Manchester is about to be 40
Post categories: BBC Radio Manchester
|12:49 UK time, Thursday, 2 September 2010
BBC Radio Manchester is about to celebrate four decades on the air. I was two when it began. Little did I know that forty years later, I'd be organising a birthday party for what was then the biggest local radio station in the country.
It's a project that's taken me to Clitheroe and a TARDIS-like bungalow on the outskirts of Reading where the BBC keeps its written archives.
As Managing Editor of BBC Radio Manchester (for the most recent eighth of its history at least), my first thought was to do the post-modern thing and ignore our fortieth altogether. What difference does it make to today's listener when we started? Radio is the ultimate fashion medium - it's at its best in the moment, the now. Nothing dates like radio.
But then I found out more about the pioneering team who were there at the start, making it up as they went along from cramped studios in Piccadilly Gardens. I heard the jingles, some from the Northern Dance Orchestra, others from those kooky types at the Radiophonic Workshop. In those dusty Caversham archives, the faded leaves of leather bound Radio Times spoke of shows like the pub quiz Down Your Pint, the daily children's show Mini Manchester - and the mysterious Baron who hosted a late night show 'for the city's groovers.'
How could we not share those moments with a new generation of Mancunians? As we get ready to join the rest of BBC North at Media City in Salford, it feels like the right time to celebrate our long history in Manchester.
Which led me back to Clitheroe Castle, the unlikely home of the labour-of-love depository known as the North West Sound Archive - and the search for the very first two hours of BBC Radio Manchester, first broadcast at 6am on 10 September 1970.
To be continued.
John Ryan is Managing Editor of Radio Manchester
It's a project that's taken me to Clitheroe and a TARDIS-like bungalow on the outskirts of Reading where the BBC keeps its written archives.
As Managing Editor of BBC Radio Manchester (for the most recent eighth of its history at least), my first thought was to do the post-modern thing and ignore our fortieth altogether. What difference does it make to today's listener when we started? Radio is the ultimate fashion medium - it's at its best in the moment, the now. Nothing dates like radio.
But then I found out more about the pioneering team who were there at the start, making it up as they went along from cramped studios in Piccadilly Gardens. I heard the jingles, some from the Northern Dance Orchestra, others from those kooky types at the Radiophonic Workshop. In those dusty Caversham archives, the faded leaves of leather bound Radio Times spoke of shows like the pub quiz Down Your Pint, the daily children's show Mini Manchester - and the mysterious Baron who hosted a late night show 'for the city's groovers.'
How could we not share those moments with a new generation of Mancunians? As we get ready to join the rest of BBC North at Media City in Salford, it feels like the right time to celebrate our long history in Manchester.
Which led me back to Clitheroe Castle, the unlikely home of the labour-of-love depository known as the North West Sound Archive - and the search for the very first two hours of BBC Radio Manchester, first broadcast at 6am on 10 September 1970.
To be continued.
John Ryan is Managing Editor of Radio Manchester
- Press release - Radio Manchester celebrates 40 years
Comments Post your comment