New laws blew radio pirates out of the water
IT was seen as another nail in the coffin of the Swinging Sixties.
The 1967 UK Marine Broadcasting Offences Act effectively declared participation in offshore pirate radio to be illegal.
The romantic image of pirate radio stations is that portrayed in Richard Curtis’s film The Boat That Rocked – a decrepit former trawler anchored in international waters, manned by a band of beatniks and hippies bringing the latest rock and pop sounds to humdrum Britain. And there’s some truth in this. Radio Caroline broadcast from a one-time Danish passenger ferry moored off Felixstowe from where Tony Blackburn, Simon Dee and Emperor Rosko all made their names spinning 45s while bobbing about on the North Sea.
But despite its nautical name, pirate radio doesn’t just mean from the waves to the airwaves and actually refers to all unlicensed broadcasts.
Radio Luxembourg was, technically, a pirate radio station because it didn’t have a licence to broadcast in the UK and could only do so because it had one of the most-powerful privatelyowned transmitters.
Using a US-style format completely at odds with hidebound BBC programming, it inspired dozens of imitators such as Kenny Everett’s Radio London, which soon ringed the UK, broadcasting from vessels or abandoned sea forts.
By 1965, the pirates enjoyed an audience of 15 million and sold £2 million worth of advertising.
And that was the crux of the problem.
The BBC and ITV were fiercely protective of their income from licences and advertising respectively, and wanted the upstarts shut down.
The reasons actually given were that the pirates had misappropriated wartime installations and were using wavelengths allocated to others.
Their boats were described as a hazard to shipping and it was claimed their signals could interfere with those of aircraft and the emergency services.
The aforementioned Act extended existing law beyond territorial waters, and made it a criminal offence for anyone subject to UK law to operate or assist a pirate station.
It also dealt them a massive blow by cutting off their British advertising revenue.
And at the same time, the BBC launched Radio 1, which not only aped the style of the pirates, it nicked several of their top DJs.
Mind you, pirate radio wasn’t completely killed off.
They moved to dry land and it’s estimated there are 150-odd pirate radio stations in the UK, many operating in inner London.
Think of the Lenny Henry character Delbert Wilkins, founder of the BBC – the Brixton Broadcasting Corporation – operating out of the back of a kebab shop.
The boats were described as a hazard to shipping