after we arrived in town and looking round at Wilding whilst uttering, ‘Wow, it looks just like a fire station.’ I have often been grateful for the restraint that Phil showed over the years, especially in the face of my colossal ignorance. Especially when it came to quite obviously repurposed municipal buildings.
We were due to be interviewing singer Victoria Bergsman and set up our microphones in some dim backstage nook and patiently waited for her to finish soundchecking. As various healthy, Nordic members of the band and the crew darted around us conversing with each other in Swedish, Phil and I could only sit there gurning like idiots every time a new face poked round the door. Each friendly Scandinavian face offered a friendly smile usually followed by, ‘Can I help you?’ Each time this happened one of us would blurt out something about being from the BBC and waiting for Victoria. ‘Ah yes, she is soundchecking at this moment, but she will be with you soon, I think!’ I couldn’t be that polite in English, let alone a second language.
I wandered out into the auditorium to watch them running through the brilliant opening track from the In Colour album, ‘On the Radio’. I always had a weakness for songs about radio. One of my favourite bands, The Members, had two belters in ‘Radio’ and ‘Phone-in Show’. Joe Jackson had ‘On the Radio’, Costello sang ‘Radio Radio’, electro keyboard whiz Thomas Dolby had ‘Radio Silence’. There was ‘Rex Bob Lowenstein’, ‘Radio Sweet-heart’, ‘The Spirit of Radio’. Possibly my favourite song about radio is ‘This Is a Low’ by Blur which uses the Radio 4 shipping forecast as inspiration. The list in my head was growing as I watched the band wander through another perfunctory rendition for the benefit of their sound man. As I dwelt on this, Wilding gave me an urgent wave: it seemed our interview was now on.
Now I can’t speak a word of Swedish, and that as far as I’m concerned is my loss. But even without it I could sense that Victoria was not too happy to be doing an interview now. This would always throw me in an interview situation. I was always far too reliant on the good will of my subjects. I found it almost impossible to maintain a sheen of journalistic detachment. Whenever this happened, I’d try to find some common ground or some link with the band, which might open up the talk a little. Victoria’s English was OK and possibly a little better than she was giving us at first, but I took a gamble on a compliment. ‘Can I just say, Victoria, that having heard the new album, and seen you soundchecking briefly, you do remind me very much of another band…’
She eyed me with curiosity. ‘Really? Which band?’
‘Fairport Convention.’ She smiled and the rest of the chat was a breeze. It was a calculated gamble that paid off. I often wonder how things would have gone if I’d said Dollar.
The studio facilities at Bournemouth University were actually a little bit better than those we had at Broadcasting House. It was a much newer desk, and there were two fully functioning vinyl decks as well as the CD players. The room was full of students, all of whom were studying for a career in radio. In fact shortly after this Jo Tyler (who lectures in radio at Bournemouth) invited me to do a question-and-answer session with a group of students. After an over-long and quite sweary session, I thanked the students and made my way out of the room. As I did so a smiling, bearded man approached me.
‘I think you know my son-in-law, Dylan Howe! I’m Zoe’s dad, Sean.’
Professor Sean Street has been working in and around the world of broadcast radio for forty years. As he was now the Director for the Centre of Broadcasting History Research, I felt quietly confident that he could give me a good deal more background on breakfast radio than the internet. Well, perhaps not more, but certainly less than 32 million websites. I started out by asking him how breakfast radio came to be so important to the daily schedules rather than at night like prime-time television is.
‘In the beginning both here and in the States it was the other way round. Before television, families would gather round the radio in the evening. In pre-1940s America the great desire was to lure people away from the evening radio where they knew they could sell advertising because everybody was listening. The trick was to try and get people to listen to pre-nine o’clock radio in the morning.’
So it was the pursuit of new revenue streams for radio which drove it to develop new programming for the morning audience. But surely this would require a completely different style to those big variety shows that families listened to in the evening?
‘The first radio show I could find with the word “breakfast” mentioned in it was Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club and that ran from 1933 until 1960 with the same presenter, Don McNeil. He totally built the show around his persona. It had music, inspirational readings, philosophy, a bit of poetry, all that kind of thing. It was a variety-based entertainment show, and it was completely unrehearsed, there was no script, they had a live band and the whole thing was done in front of a live audience. There was one famous incident where Bob missed his train, so they just had to soldier on without him. Then in the middle of an interview he arrives and it’s all “Look who’s here!” The whole thing was totally ad-libbed. Meanwhile in this country the BBC wouldn’t allow anything on the wireless unless it was very tightly scripted.
‘American broadcasters were also trying other shows at the time like the husband-and-wife hosted Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick with Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kollmar. This show actually came from their home, and they made breakfast and chatted and he’d say things like, “I’ve got a headache. I shouldn’t have drunk that wine last night…” and all that sort of thing. But the whole approach was very gentle.
‘You always come back to America when talking about breakfast radio because the whole issue was being addressed far earlier than it was here. The first thing that could be called a breakfast radio show ran in the States from 1930 to 1943 and was presented by a man called Tony Wons. It was a fifteen-minute mixture of chat and poetry. He used material that he sourced, but he also used items from listeners, so people would think, “I’ve got a quote he might like to read,” and they’d send it in. So he developed the idea of that relationship with the listeners where they contributed to the show.’
So while American commercial radio was defining the form, the BBC was operating along very different lines. In fact the BBC didn’t start to develop breakfast radio properly until the 1960s. Sean recalls that period quite clearly:
‘The switch came about in this country in the early 1960s with the arrival of the transistor radio. This is the first time that you have music that’s truly portable. And kids who would want to listen to Radio Luxembourg or the pirates or later on Radio One have a means of getting away from their parents’ space. My awakening to breakfast radio was with Radio Caroline and Radio London and that sense that when you were getting ready to go to school there was actually something cool to listen to on the radio and there never had been before. The Light Programme had Breakfast Special presented by John Dunne, but I had very little recollection of what had gone before. For a teenager in the early sixties, having Radio Caroline and listening to Johnny Walker playing really cool stuff was a revelation. I didn’t think getting up in the morning could be fun.’
So the pirates were the first people to make mornings fun, but how long after that did it take the BBC to get on the early morning radio bandwagon?
‘The thing is that the BBC is so often held up as the history of broadcasting in this country and yet when you look historically at it the BBC has more often than not responded to trends rather than creating them. It did it in the 1930s because commercial broadcasting hit a market that they weren’t hitting, which was Sundays. This was because Reith believed that Sunday was the Lord’s Day, and you only broadcast hymns and prayers. In comes Radio Normandy broadcasting from outside the country on a Sunday with a programme sponsored by a firm of bookmakers and blowing the audience completely out of the water. Then the war comes along and they get their act together, and
