What's the best local radio station you've ever heard?
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The best for me would probably be Signal 1 in Stoke, though it's been a few years since I listened, so it might have gone downhill?
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Mystery 87.5
LBC London
Southend Radio Chelmsford Radio Essex
BBC Radio Essex
Radio Jackie
CTR 105.6 Maidstone (Now KMFM)
RTM and Millennium FM before Milestone and LMC took over as Time FM.
Soul City 107.5.
GLR
Invicta Radio/FM until 2005.
Radio Mercury and Mercury FM up to the GWR takeover.
LBC (Both FM and AM spin offs, except LBC News 1152 in recent years)
Power FM/Ocean FM (The latter until Global flipped it to a Heart format)
lol, not any more? I know what you mean. There was more than one occasion last year when they got the football scores wrong.
For me Power FM in th early 90s had it all for me. It was bang on target for my age group at the time, sounded fresher and better than Radio One, had that FAB news at two minutes to the hour and "another five songs in a row" right on the hour. Local content wise the news and travel were as strong as any at the time.
Unfortunately, I suspect, it was too intelligent for the advertisers target audience.
Radio City 1982 - 1989 - can't remember it before then!!
Red Rose Radio around 84 85 was awesome but so was the music of the time!
Piccadilly Radio of the early 80s
All really local and really good
Atlantic 252.
Hereward FM in the early - mid 1990s. Paul Coyte, Paul Stainton, Dave Asher etc. And their sister station CN-FM a few years later with Tony West, Craig Morris etc.
Southern FM in the late 1990s. Danny & Nicky in their prime, Richard Reynolds, Chris Copsey and the excellent Last Bus To Whitehawk with Terry Garroghan.
Those were the days...
I did with Centre Radio, opened with Timmy Mallet on September 7th 1981, and closed in October 1983.
http://www.kps.org.uk/centre_radio/centre_radio.htm
You are right though, the 70's and 80's were the high water mark of local commercial radio, they were all local and different. I can't comment on Capital as I never heard it often, just occasionally if I was driving near London. But Radio Trent in those days was great, even the early Leicester Sound when it was part of the Trent Group. The rot set in when they became the better music mix.
Agreed
2: 102 The Bear (Stratford) Now 'Touch'
3: Sunshine Radio (on air)
I really cannot think of anything better I have heard as of late.
Beacon was great in the late 70's to mid 90's and I grew up with it. Also BRMB was a fantastic station too in the 80's, although these days neither of them are a shadow of their former selves.
Radio Nova in Dublin '82-5
Sunshine 101, Dublin '86-9
LBC 97.3
Capital's sounding great of late.
Very strong station musically and it had the kind of success that many other ILRs could only dream of.
I studied the output of this radio station, due to its success in the RAJARs, to find out why it was working so well and to see if any lessons could be learned from it because I was working with a group of people to help to get a new local station for Lanarkshire.
As soon as I tuned in, it became quite obvious.
Throughout the 90's, a lot of ILR's had music policies that were not much more than the present week's chart slightly remixed on FM, plus a golden oldies service on AM.
However, if I was to look through the CD collections of the people I knew and visited, the CD's that they had did not reflect the music being played on the radio stations. Their CD collections (unless they had very specialist musical tastes) tended to go towards soft-AC, middle-of-the-road classic hits.
The Bay was one of exceedingly few stations at that time that played this kind of music entirely throughout the day and night and to quote what one listener in the Lake District said to me:-
"The Bay, great station. Every song's a belter!"
That line, coming from an ordinary member of the public, suggests so much - and could probably account for why, at that time, The Bay had the UK's 10th most listened to Breakfast Show, the UK's most listened to Drivetime Show and was the 8th biggest ILR station, in terms of percentage audience reach.