Ah, 2012. What will it bring?

We know for sure it’ll bring cuts to BBC services: but we still don’t quite know what. Is the BBC going backwards in its radio ambitions? It helps, I think, to look back – not in terms of 2011, but rather earlier. And what environment better to do this than the new home of BBC Radio 5 live (above) in MediaCityUK, Salford, which – apart from having impressive, modern-looking offices bedecked in thought-wheels and flat-screen TVs, is also home, in the station’s coffee area, to the archives of the northern edition of the Radio Times.

So, back to Thursday March 18, 1971 – a near-typical day in a near-typical year just over 40 years ago.

In 1971, the BBC’s four radio channels (today they have ten) had remarkably similar schedules. BBC Radio 1 had names like Tony Blackburn, Johnnie Walker, Anne Nightingale and Terry Wogan: yet only started at 7.00am and closed down after Sounds of the 70s with Stuart Henry – “and storyteller champion Jack Duprée” – at 7.02pm.

BBC Radio 2 looks both consistent and alien: Pause for Thought is still there (now subsumed into Chris Evan’s Breakfast Show) as is Desmond Carrington, Big Band Sound (now Big Band Special), and, yes, The Organist Entertains.

But BBC Radio 2 was also the sports network for the BBC, and programming was interrupted for racing commentary from the Cheltenham Gold Cup as well as two installments of Sports Desk. And at “2.1″, the Radio Times’s precise way of billing a programme that started just after the 2.00pm news headlines, the Radio 2 audience were treated to Woman’s Hour. The programme contained a book (The March Hare), and an item interestingly entitled “Sex Education for want of a better term”, with guests Baroness Birk, Thornton Pearn, and Dr James Hemming. Also of note in the Radio 2 schedules was some odd-shaped dipping into Radio 1 (3.02 to 3.35pm, then again at 3.50pm to 4.15pm – surrounding the racing).

But it’s BBC Radio 4 which is the most interesting. Once more, lots of consistent names still on the network today. Today (subtitled “The world this morning”, interestingly, with Jack de Manio and John Timpson), Yesterday in Parliament, You and Yours (a piece on dentures today), The World at One, The Archers and PM.

But look closer: because Radio 4 is very different. 6.50am – 7.00am, just before “Today”, we’d get regional news and weather: and again at 7.50am. At 8.00am, there’s a section of Today called simply “The News”. Following that, “more of Today (including, in the Midlands and E Anglia, Regional Extra; and Today in the South and West introduced by Derek Jones)”. Local news and information was broadcast inside the main Radio 4 network – so called because it was a network in those days – in much the same way as I put forward in July last year. The local optouts pepper the output throughout the day.

Radio 4′s schedule, too, is full of schools programmes. 9.05 to 9.25′s taken up with “Religious Service for Primary Schools”, then after an interview with Beatles producer George Martin at 9.25am, we’re back into schools programmes until 10.15am; the Daily Service (two hymns, two passages from the Bible, both helpfully itemised); another one and a half hours of schools programmes till midday, and another hour at 2.00pm. How the network retained any listeners is beyond comprehension.

Finally, these schedules show that the interactiveness of radio has changed, too. In Radio 2′s schedule there’s a nice long panel explaining details of “Eric Robinson’s Competition” – the rules, the address and closing date. Eric Robinson’s Music Club was on-air between 9.15pm and 10.01pm – up for grabs were some record tokens. And on Radio 4, “Any Answers”, now a phone-in following the Saturday repeat of Friday night’s “Any Questions”, is on a Thursday night, called “A radio correspondence column in which listeners add their comments to views expressed in last Friday’s Any Questions”. The programme, produced in Bristol, lasted half an hour.

Was radio better in the early 1970s? Or was there simply nothing else on? Commercial radio was two years away; Radio Caroline was off-air and other pirates had been outlawed four years ealier; and BBC Local Radio was comparatively new, with 20 stations (now there are 40) on-air, most for less than a year.

Are there any ideas to be taken from these old schedules? Certainly the amount of programme-sharing between Radio 1 and Radio 2 is surprising, as is also the cut down broadcasting hours; and the amount of localness on-air on national BBC radio. As BBC television continues to have a healthy amount of local opt-outs, and as the government promotes local television channels, is the national-ness of the BBC’s services a potential problem: or a benefit for local commercial radio to capitalise on, if you’ll pardon the pun?

- Full schedules for Thursday March 18 1971: Radio 1, 2 and 3 and Radio 4
- March 18th 1971 is a “near-typical” day? Only if you ignore the small matter of my birth. :)
- I’m in Australia (Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne), and will be here during the first few weeks of 2012. My best wishes to you and your family for 2012.

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