Origins

The limited reach of early transmitters meant that it was only feasible to broadcast locally produced programming. In 1923 a further six main stations were added to the network, Newcastle, Cardiff, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Bournemouth, and Belfast. ​​Between 1924 and 1925 more "relay stations" were set up at Sheffield, Plymouth, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds-Bradford, Hull, Nottingham, Dundee, Stoke-on-Trent, and Swansea. Telephone lines linked the stations, allowing a pool of national programming to be received and relayed from London. In 1925 London programs would be provided on two complete evenings every week. Frequently stations would pool their resources and stage simultaneous broadcasts.

There do not appear to be any sound archives that would enable the modern listener to appreciate the local flavor of the broadcasting from this period. But early issues of the Radio Times and other magazines for radio enthusiasts present a picture of a warm relationship between early broadcasters and their audiences and of programming that was both popular and cultural. Scannell and Cardiff (1991) report that local stations originated programs ranging from early quiz shows and phone-in programs to live interactive dramas with listeners winning prizes for supplying the best endings. Writer Patrick Campbell recalled that his first introduction to radio was in 1924 when he went to the Bournemouth studio every Wednesday to talk in Children's Hour on behalf of a young person's charity group. The edition of the Radio Times for 30 August 1929 reveals the preparations for a play called The Pennillion Singer, which "deals with an exciting time in the 'Hungry Forties' when the small farmers and yeoman of South Wales were up against adverse fate in many ways, and specially against the tyranny of the toll-gate." This play about an armed rebellion with farmers disguising themselves as "Rebecca's Daughters" touched local political sensitivities and was originated and broadcast from the BBC's Cardiff station 5WA. In the same week listeners could hear Professor Patchett from Bournemouth's 6BM on his summer holiday experiences in the "New Germany," and Captain H. La Chard at Plymouth's 5PY on "various aspects of life in Borneo." A lively local radio culture generated a rich exchange of local music, storytelling, entertainment, and information, but Scannell and Cardiff (1991) argue that between 1927 and 1930 this would be "quite deliberately eradicated by the policy of centralization."

By 1929 the BBC's Director-General Sir John Reith and his executives at the London station 2LO had already embarked on a process of centralization and control. It took the form of regular meetings between London and local station directors, touring by London inspectors, and the submission of program schedules to London in advance of broadcast. Soon the BBC eradicated the high cost of local radio repertories and orchestras through centralization. The savings enabled the concentration of budgets in London, which was thought better suited to producing expensive concerts, variety shows, and extravagant drama productions. Head of Talks Charles Siepmann and Director of Drama Productions Val Gielgud were given full authority over their regional strands of programming to maintain "London standards" throughout the country. Local radio gave way to "regionalization," with production centers at Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, and London. The call signs of the smaller stations had disappeared by 1930, and the spontaneity of their programs and loyalty of their audiences were quickly forgotten.

U.S. Radio Inspires a Revival

  A proposal for reviving local radio appeared in the report of the Beveridge Broadcasting Committee in 1949. VHF (FM) radio extended the spectrum of wavelengths. The former BBC war correspondent Frank Gillard was now climbing up the ladder of BBC management, and in 1954 he had submitted a report on his observations of U.S. radio. He was impressed by WVPO Stroudsburg, in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, which operated in daylight hours only, served a community of 15,000 people with a staff of 13, and, according to Gillard, "spoke to its listeners as a familiar friend and neighbour." He noticed that the whole operation was conducted "with the utmost informality." When he became responsible for BBC radio programming, Gillard campaigned passionately for a local dimension to BBC broadcasting. He was responsible for the BBC promise to the Pilkington Committee's enquiry into broadcasting in 1961 that "BBC Local Radio will be friendly, reliable and in touch with people's lives." In the same year Gillard had arranged 16 closed-circuit radio experiments in towns such as Dumfries, Dundee, the Isle of Wight, and at Bournemouth on the South Coast, which had been the location of the BBC's first local stations started in 1923. When he realized that nobody on the Pilkington Committee seemed sympathetic to the idea of local radio, Gillard impressed some of the members by playing recordings of the closed circuit experiment.

By 1966 the government had approved the start of nine BBC local stations as a two-year experiment. Initially some of the funding came from local authorities. The first of the new BBC local radio stations started in Leicester because the local City Council was prepared to contribute £io4,ooo toward its costs. The notion of "radio on the rates," or tax-supported radio, would not last, however, and local radio is now wholly funded by a share of the BBC's license fee income. Unlike public radio in the USA and Australia, there is no listener subscription, and any pledges for money from listeners are reserved for charitable projects such as the annual "Children in Need."

BBC Radio Leicester first aired on 8 November 1967 with a pledge from a government minister that the station "should never forget that it is hometown radio with its own Leicester individuality and that it must always be bright and attractive." The first audience figures disclosed that 25 percent of local listeners were tuning in.

It is important to emphasize that the BBC's commitment to local radio was not simply a romantic celebration of the diversity of local cultures. Gillard's ambitious plan for a network of more than 90 BBC local stations was a political tactic to head off the clamor for legalizing commercial radio. It enabled the BBC to justify its monopolistic control of all license fee funds. Leicester was followed by seven other local services in Brighton, Durham, Leeds, Merseyside, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Stoke-on-Trent. The BBC's Chief Correspondent Kate Adie was then one of the first reporters working at the station in Durham. Local radio pioneered live and unscripted programming. It tended to be a mixture of news, local current affairs, sport, and record request programs. The first charter for local radio, written by Frank Gillard, declared: "Station managers will be free to provide programmes, which in their judgement best meet the needs of their communities."

A second wave of BBC local stations was opened in 1969, in Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Derby, Humberside, London, Manchester, Medway, Newcastle, Oxford, Solent, and Teesside. By 1978, 22 local stations were broadcasting at least six hours of programming every day with news on the hour, talk at breakfast, and sports coverage on Saturdays. Some stations were able to originate drama. BBC Merseyside in Liverpool became a platform for local dramatists. Merseyside and other stations such as BBC Stoke originated soap operas, which were funded by police and health authorities. Although BBC services are not permitted to receive commercial sponsorship or sell air time for advertising, the BBC Charter does permit the receipt of funding from government/public bodies for educational and public information services. Using entertainment and dramatic formats to educate listeners became an imaginative mechanism to secure funding from outside the license fee.

Competition with Commercial Local Radio

  Britain's first licensed independent station, the news and speech service LBC in London, began broadcasting in October 1973. A week later the music format station Capital opened. British independent radio was legislated on a local basis with a public service broadcasting remit. A proportion of profits was "taxed" and reinvested in training, engineering, and prestigious programming projects. In its early days Capital was able to include a range of program styles such as news features at breakfast, a soap opera, and a daily social action campaign. The BBC stations found themselves in a head-to-head competition even though the program schedules of Independent Local Radio stations were primarily music based.

The impact on BBC Radio London was catastrophic, and since the inception and expansion of commercial radio the BBC's local London service has never been able to establish any significant market share. It has repeatedly reinvented itself. Radio London became GLR (Greater London Radio, "London Live") and more recently "BBC London." In the provinces, however, BBC local services were able to sustain a commanding share of listeners.

By 1997 the weekly audience for BBC local stations was in the region of 7 million listeners. By 2003 the weekly reach had increased to to 7 million listeners per week-over 20 percent of the population. It saw itself as providing a service to those over the age of 55 with a speech-based programming format, which provided space for local comment and opinion. In view of the fact that BBC local radio's 39 stations compete with more than 250 local commercial stations, the desire to target people over 5 5 might be seen as a decision to cater to market­ ing categories not prioritized by Independent Local Radio. The early ambition to establish a network of more than 90 stations had to be tempered by the periodical financial crises affecting the BBC in the 1980s and 1990s. The relatively unfashionable arena of local radio was an easy target for staff cutbacks and cancelled capital projects. There were occasional aberrations of management judgment that had to be reversed, such as merging BBC Berkshire with BBC Oxford to form the station BBC Thames Valley. The fusion of these two stations liquidated the reflection of the separate cultural dimensions and social identities of a significant city and town in southern England. It caused resentment. It was the equivalent of expect­ing the respective soccer teams for Oxford and Reading to merge under a different name. The current policy of respecting "localness" has resulted in stations with regional reaches such as Southern Counties, Wiltshire Sound, and Radio Devon introducing separate output at key times of the day from the major towns and cities of their catchment areas. Merging BBC Guildford and BBC Brighton created BBC Southern Counties. The effective closure of the station in Brighton, which is a thriving town on the South Coast and in a different county, and running the programming from Guildford, which is in the county of Surrey, was the antithesis of the spirit of "localness." By the 1980s the U.K. Home Office had given approval for the establishment of 38 local stations that could broadcast to 90 percent of the population. As independent commercial radio became both regional and national, with a substantial diversification into niche musical formats, it could be argued that BBC local radio found itself being marginalized into providing programming for marketing categories in the upper middle-age range that did not interest advertisers.

Deregulation of commercial radio and the reduction of newsrooms by independent stations increased the importance of BBC local radio journalism. BBC local stations perfected the technique of "snowline" services during weather crises, and they have been given official roles in future emergency plans. The BBC saw its local services as "a helping hand in times of trial, a smiling friend in times of success, and a questioning intelligence in times of controversy. And at all times it was to be ambassador, inquisitor, commentator and reporter."

By 1990 a new charter, primarily written by Ronald Neil, the then Managing Director of Regional Broadcasting, committed BBC local radio to a minimum speech/music ratio of 60/40 between 6 AM and 6 PM, with speech rising to roo per­ cent at the peak periods of breakfast and afternoon com­ mute-wide-ranging speech, addressing local concerns and interests, and journalism as the bedrock that should be respected in local radio as it is on the programs World at One and Panorama.

Social and Cultural Objectives

  By 1997 commercial radio had overtaken the BBC with a 50.6 percent share of all listeners. By 2002 BBC radio's share had bounced back to 5 r.6 percent, and radio had overtaken television as the most used medium in the U.K. The loyalty of many BBC local listeners has now been challenged by the rich offerings of formats elsewhere. Audiences in most metropolitan markets have shrunk, although the Birmingham station BBC Radio WM has been a notable exception. With the commercial stations abandoning their public service speech-based programming, and concentrating on music from the pop charts, contemporary, and "gold" nostalgia hits, the BBC local stations have catered to an older audience that prefers a speech format. Simulcast "regional" programs share costs, and a sustaining overnight service of the national network BBC Radio Five Live has provided for 24-hour broadcasting. The BBC seems to see those over 55 as its main audience for local radio; 30 percent of its audience under 45 tunes in for shorter periods, to cherry pick specific programs and information services such as news, sports, travel, and weather. The remit is therefore overwhelmingly public service. A survey by the BBC has discovered that 9I percent of the population think it is important to continue with public service radio and over 80 percent thought this genre of radio should be informative, educational, entertaining, and catering to all age groups and tastes. The BBC's Head of Radio at the time of writing, Jenny Abramsky, believes public service radio should have range, ambition, and "a duty to contribute to culture-both popular and high." This may be the case with the national networks such as Radio 4 where programming is budgeted on the basis of £11,000 an hour. BBC local radio costs £300 an hour.

     In 2002 all of the BBC's local stations were underwritten by a budget of £108 million. This means that the costs and resources are not available to deliver significant educational objectives. However, the local stations have made some contribution to the collection of oral history. In 1999 BBC local staff interviewed over 6,000 people about their lives over the 20th century. In conclusion, the profile of the audience and the very style of broadcasting do not encourage the expression of non­ mainstream views in either the arts or journalism.

    A BBC poll of listeners between 1994 and 1997 sought to determine local radio's strengths and weaknesses. BBC local stations were often seen as "a phone-in Citizens Advice Bureau." Listeners' loyalty was based on the absence of advertising, their perception of better presented, more in-depth news, presenters asking more intelligent questions, a calmer texture of programming, and a feeling that BBC local stations offered better coverage of local affairs. Criticisms were that BBC local radio was too parochial, sounded like institutional radio at times, was amateurish, and transmitted badly researched interviews and uninteresting chat.

     The BBC has encouraged its local stations to be more upbeat, to broadcast more interesting and varied content, as it tries to meet the challenge of increasing competition in the 21st century. A key objective is radio programming with an element of fun and professional presenters who seem to be more accessible than their national counterparts. Its public service role is also centered on serving specialist subject areas such as religion output, serving ethnic communities, and presenting sports and social action broadcasting. BBC local stations are firmly committed to digital radio and" multi-media provision through the internet, and many BBC local radio services are now establishing and exploring their presence on the internet.

     Many commentators feel that BBC local radio is well placed to meet the social demands of contemporary Britain. Demographic trends indicate an increasing older population, one with a continuing appetite for local radio services, for news about "where I live," which is consistent with sociological research that reveals a stability in communities and a sense of the importance of local identity and attachment.

     Although Britain has become a much more multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-religious society, the BBC was shaken by 1994 research indicating that listeners from ethnic communities found the license fee poor value for money. The BBC responded with improved ethnic representation in BBC local stations, and the BBC local service in London has since then certainly maintained a better record for employing non-white broadcasters and journalists. The BBC Asian Network in the Midlands is regarded as a success story: it tries to meet the needs of a substantial British Asian population in Central England and connects them with BBC World Service broadcasts in English and Asian languages.

     In October 2002 the BBC Asian Network went nationwide when it was launched as a digital station dedicated to broadcasting a mix of speech and music to second and third generation British Asians. Vijay Sharma said it would become "a one stop shop for Asian communities where they can get daily national news, top international stories, big consumer stories, and music ranging from the latest in British Asian sounds to old favourites." This development indicates that the BBC's interpretation of "localness" is coming to terms with social associations that go beyond geographical locations and recognizes the diversity of social and cultural communities.