As Radio 1 becomes a golden oldie, it’s a broadcast from the past

THE AIRWAVES are already rich with self-congratulation as the BBC celebrates the 50th anniversary of Radio 1, and with it Radios 2,3 and 4. But the occasion hides some uncomfortable questions about the Corporation’s grasp on reality.

It was ever thus; I just didn’t notice at the time. In 1967, I loved Radio 1, and it perhaps says much about my repressive, lower middle-class upbringing that I considered listening to Tony Blackburn at breakfast time the coolest thing to have happened since the time I thought I saw one of Herman’s Hermits in Lewis’s.

I knew that the new station had been foisted on the BBC to placate listeners disenfranchised by the closure of the pirate radio ships the previous month, but I had been able to pick up Radio Caroline North only fitfully; Radio 1 was everywhere.

I didn’t have the critical faculties at the time to realise how heavily the new station’s output was diluted – the aural equivalent of a crafty cig behind the bike sheds while the rest of the world was getting high at its summer of love. Instead, I sent off for my lapel badge and turned up to see the disc jockey Emperor Rosko at the Radio 1 Club in Manchester.

It seems incredible now that the BBC retained a complete monopoly of radio broadcasting in Britain as late as 1974. It was still clinging to the idea in the 1980s, when Radio 1 had become a parody of itself and should have been phased out to allow commercial radio to flourish.

Still, it’s fascinating to look back now at the climate which prevailed at the Corporation and within the industry when the new station made its debut. Radio 1, despite being a pop music service, was restricted to playing only a few hours of actual pop records each day; the rest of the output had to be filled with recordings of popular tunes by session musicians hired by the BBC.

The Northern Dance Orchestra was a staple supplier of tepid facsimiles, and the resources of the stand-ins did not often match those of the original artistes. On one occasion, the sound of a whip was replaced by someone apparently popping his thumb in his cheek.

The policy – Needle Time, they called it – was imposed on the BBC by outside interests, but it did bring benefits, and many original acts recorded sessions especially for the new station just as The Beatles had done in 1963 for the old Light Programme.

Among these were the Jimi Hendrix Experience, purveyors of a new strain of psychedelic rock that was about as in sync with the BBC as a badly-dubbed episode of Robinson Crusoe. It wasn’t their music that the producers liked – it was the fact that there were only three of them. The practice at the time was to make a standard Musicians’ Union payment to each individual, so Hendrix cost them only three-fifths as much as the Dave Clark Five.

It has been said by a former station controller that the presence of Radio 1, coupled with our social security system, is the reason Britain has so long enjoyed a successful music industry: no other country has a taxpayer-funded station tasked with championing emerging musicians, who are in turn sustained in full-time rehearsal by the same public purse.

I couldn’t tell you much about the station’s output today: I believe it is illegal for someone of my age to listen to it. I do know that it has been responsible for some genuine innovation down the years but that its most original broadcasters, the likes of John Peel and Mark Radcliffe, have done their best work despite, not because of, the Corporation’s best efforts.

Will anyone celebrate Radio 1’s continued existence in another 50 years? I doubt it. It meant the world to the teenage me because radio and television was all we had – but for my son, a few years older than I was when Tony Blackburn first went on air, radio is no more relevant than a pair of platform soles. He has never heard of the word “tranny” in its 1960s sense, and although he could listen on his phone, the medium is simply not on his radar. He loves music, and plays in a band, but Spotify is his stage, and if Radio 1 were to play his demo tape, he doubts his friends would hear it. They have internet sharing services for that.

So the station is as behind the times now as it ever was. Does it really justify the near £50m it drained from our licence fees last year? Did it ever?

It meant the world to the teenage me, but for my son it is no more relevant than a pair of platform soles.