Paul Easton said at August 18th, 2008 at 7:52pm

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.

Paul said at August 18th, 2008 at 8:24pm

Is it just me James, or is the Virgin branding on http://www.virginradio.co.uk/ slowly getting more and more low-key ?

James Masterton said at August 18th, 2008 at 9:20pm

Perhaps unusually there is a vast and extensive archive at talkSPORT. Virtually every single minute of the stations output has since 1996 been logged to a Sonifex archiver and lovingly preserved on DAT. There are a few gaps (most of 1999 seems to be missing due to a reconfiguration of the machine) but by and large every minute that counts of the stations history is there to be scraped off.

It has been known to come in very handy, even if I do seem to be the only person in the office with the patience to spend a morning crouched on the floor feeding the machine with tapes to find the one bit needed.

Adam Bowie said at August 19th, 2008 at 10:57am

It’s actually been very hard work finding all the material that I’ve been collating over on YouTube. Once a campaign is gone, it’s gone, and nobody’s really interested in keeping high quality creative. Of course it’s getting better now that disk space is more available and instead of getting a VHS tape of the creative, we get sent digital copies. But the fact remains that a lot of stuff is long gone, or we’re reliant on members of the public who’ve recorded stuff off-air.

I think actually that the advertising industry in general has been very poor. There was a recent series on TV advertising on BBC Four and it was shocking to see how poor the ad quality was. Creative that was made in the relatively recent past – the 70s and 80s – looked like it had been take off second generation VHS copies. And this is despite the fact that it was almost certainly originally shot on 16mm or even 35mm film and so should look great. No doubt negatives are long gone, and the masters not around.

But if anyone does have Virgin Radio’s old “Tune in, or next time he’s naked” ad featuring “Joey Bag O Donuts”, I’d love to hear from you.

maria said at August 20th, 2008 at 11:20am

one of my v. favourite episodes of FRASIER is the one where we see his ‘cartwall’ of show tapes and he is devastated to find 1 is missing – hilarious … but SO TRUE
:)

Ben said at August 21st, 2008 at 2:10pm

Is there enough quality in Radio now to warrant expensive archiving? Will me want to hear “that was, Buzz FM, this is” in 25 years? It’s a shame when the advertising has bags more quality than the presenters.

I do agree it’s such a shame to lose archive material from the past though.

Farewell, then, local radio station brands - blog - James Cridland said at December 27th, 2008 at 1:20pm

[...] written before on celebrating your station’s history, and I’d be interested to know whether any stations are daring to celebrate their years in [...]

Phil Merrin said at December 30th, 2008 at 3:26am

James I really enjoyed reading the great article on SGR Ipswich & Colchester losing their identities to The heart Suffolk and The heart of Essex respectively – how droll!

I now live in Australia, but when I left North Essex in 1988 had been involved with a group of local radio enthusiasts lobbying the Independent Local Radio (ILR) for a station for Colchester, as the Town and district fell between the broadcast areas of both Radio Orwell & Essex Radio. I always thought Essex Radio was a misleading name, as all that stations transmitters are actually located in the Southern half of Essex as they’re intended for the Chelmsford and Southend districts and thats at least 40 miles from Harwich in the NE of the county.

Radio Orwell through its transmitters at Foxwell Heath are only 20 or so miles from the centre of Colchester but never powerful nor high enough to lob much of a signal south of the Essex border. However, our group lobbying for independent local radio for Colchester did believe the town had a greater affinity culturally with Ipswich than it had with Southend, the then power base of Essex Radio. The ILR accepted this argument and awarded the franchise for Colchester to the Suffolk Group Radio (SGR).

Now what do we see today? SGR and Essex FM in bed as the same company and soon to lose their identity altogether, whats worse for Colchester is it’ll be seperated from Ipswich and lumped in with the “Heart of Essex”. Virtually everything that was fought & won a couple of decades ago has been undone.

I personally feel these ‘local stations’ are nothing of the sort these days, there is no local flavour, programmes are networked. Thank God for BBC local radio and more power to the elbow of community stations like Town 102 and Dream. Hopefully, many more community stations for moderately large towns like Braintree will be formed in the not too distant future and localness can then be allowed to make a comeback.

I’ve listened to Essex & SGR FM, they have no characters behind the mike, they are sanitised products, if a real maverick like Kenny Everett came on the scene I’m quite certain he wouldn’t get a look in today – sad that.

Thanks for letting me air my views and loved the