Riding Hull’s radio waves for 40 years
LOOKING BACK AT VIKING FM AS THE RADIO STATION MARKS 40 YEARS AND A NEW ERA
AHISTORIC double milestone in local radio is about to be marked in Hull. The 40th anniversary of Viking
Radio’s birth comes coupled with the disappearance of its name. On April 17, 1984, over a million listeners could tune in to brand new Viking Radio.
The first record played was Celebration, by Kool And The Gang, and for the Viking team it was the culmination of months of hard work. Within two years, Viking overtook all its opposition, including the BBC’S local station
Radio Humberside and its national Radio 1 and Radio 2 offerings.
The station was not originally called Viking, however. The licence was issued to a group of local investors as Humber Bridge Radio.
Founding managing director
Roger Brooks suggested the name Viking, because “Viking had a catchier, more distinctive ring to it”. Viking’s programme head Dave Jameson’s canny recruitment policy brought in top presenters such as locally-born Dave Fewster, whose cheery and irreverent style at breakfast was followed by the amiable and inventive Steve King - remember his chipmunk-style cohort Erik the Viking?
The populace had already been alerted to the new station’s arrival via a free eight-page tabloid newspaper, distributed to almost every household in the area, and whose front page featured the new DJ line-up. “Miss Viking, local beauty Cheryl Hakeney, was inside, appropriately for those sexist times on page 3,” said Roger.
He recalls that persuading local advertisers to offer their products to an unknown and unmeasured audience was difficult but undertaken with gusto and determination by a sales team that
included the “terrier-like” persistence of Malcolm Woodcock. “Selling airtime on an unknown medium was a very skilled job and Malcolm excelled at it,” Roger said.
“After all, we had no actual proof that anyone was listening. We had seminars to show how radio could work, and had a huge number of Viking car stickers on view, but advertisers wanted hard evidence, and it came with the first independent audience ratings from the company employed by UK radio that we could show how many people were listening.”
Viking became one of the UK’S best ever radio station launches, later leading to a split frequency experiment with Viking Gold launched on its medium wave frequency - a formula later “borrowed” by many other stations across Britain. But the name Viking is about to disappear from Britain’s airwaves.
Roger said: “The advertising revenue we needed to survive lagged behind the audience growth, our directors lost their nerve and merged with Sheffield’s bigger Radio Hallam. Eventually, the bigger radio group was taken over by a Newcastle radio company, who were themselves taken over by a publishing group, and so on and on it went.
“Now there are only a few huge groups - Viking forms part of one of them - so a national name Greatest Hits will be on the former Viking frequency. That’s life.”