Is your station’s history Virgin on extinction?
Posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 7:33pm. #
The Virgin brand guidelines say “Under no circumstances whatsoever can the Virgin brand be incorporated into a pun or strapline (unless you’re Sir Richard Branson and want to call your autobiography Losing my Virginity, of course)”, but that’s not stopping me – either here or on the front of Media UK right now.
As a guest of One Golden Square, as the company is temporarily being branded, I was at the very enjoyable V Festival this weekend, and had the very bizarre experience of being in a VIP area for a company with no branding. The wooden boxes knocking around, as in this photo, was the closest the company had to any branding whatsoever. It’s a fascinating experience being in an entirely un-branded area, in what’s normally a very branded environment.
It’s an odd time – a company where the brand has meant everything, now has no brand. Adam Bowie is posting old television ads from Virgin Radio’s history. Which is a nice idea – I suspect a ton of old Virgin Radio stuff will come out of the woodwork… more than I originally found when researching the station’s history page. So, let me add to the list of nostalgia, with three screenshots of Virgin Radio’s original website, from 1996 (PDF, 5M). Aw, bless – Netscape.
Which leads me on to my point.
I worked at Pennine FM, at a time when that station was being rebranded The Pulse. (There’s now another, unrelated, Pennine FM). Everything with Pennine on it was literally chucked out. Pennine’s last jingle package, on reel, was ready for the skip – as well as their first ad reel. With Ian James, I remember saying that we shouldn’t get rid of this stuff; and we were able to keep some of it back. (It’s probably in Ian’s house now, I’d bet). And while I’ve got hoary old presenter photographs, I’ve no tapes at all of my eight years on-air – whether it was with the excellent Chris Moyles, the similarly splendid Alex Hall or Simon Hirst.
Radio has no in-built archiving system. There’s no archive.org for radio. While there are notable exceptions, most radio stations don’t care about the past. Nothing is kept, except for a few old Sony Radio Academy Award entries (and even those are pretty hard to find).
The BBC’s Information and Archives section is a triumph – but perhaps commercial radio needs a librarian: someone to conserve the best of radio. You never know – it might be worthwhile keeping for any number of reasons. Not just to help oldies like me celebrate the loss of a heritage radio brand.
Paul
maria
Ben
Phil Merrin
There is, sadly, a tendency among some people in commercial radio management to dismiss the past as “irrelevant”, with the result that large quantities of (often valuable) archive recordings have been in danger of ending up in a builders’ skip as the ‘heritage’ ILR dumps its, er, heritage. I’ve heard countless horror stories of people rescuing valuable archive material, only to find themselves being asked to lend it back to the same station some years later because it’s needed for their 25th etc. birthday celebrations.
When I left LBC – where I was Head of Production – in December 1987 I donated my department’s archive to the nascent National Sound Archive (now part of the British Library). The office/studio area was being rebuilt at the time and, I suspect, those reels of tape, containing years of commercials and station promos etc. – would otherwise simply have been sentenced to to rot in a landfill site.
Manwhile LBC/IRN’s main tape archives (from the pre-Chrysalis era – 1973-2003) are now in the custody of Bournemouth University, where Professor Sean Street has been overseeing the long task of digitising hundreds of thousands of hours of programmes, news reports and interviews.