(A revisit to an article I penned some long years ago, republished here unaltered. But, hey, is it still relevant today?)
Many years ago, before land-based sensible attitudes to radio broadcasting were invented, people used boats as a vehicle to house studios and transmitters in order to become a radio station without paying copyright fees, applying for a license, or respecting any UK laws or fair trading practices, in their thirst to make easy tax free cash.
The boat they used was as unimportant as the plastic used in an individual record they played to wrap the commercials around and stop potential listeners tuning away. And we’d think a collector of lumps of plastic was a bit odd, right?
Yet, here we are 17 years after there was a need for a boat as part of the money-making chain, and yet there are bunches of old granddads still to this day trespassing on somebody else’s property, the Motor Vessel Ross Revenge, and looking after it. It belongs to somebody who once thought they’d make cash from offshore radio, but can’t be arsed to do anything with it for the moment. This boat was once used at sea to broadcast Radio Caroline, but has been left to become the plaything of some old people. They shuffle about on the boat imagining what it must have been like at sea as they chip, bang and blast the rust and weathering away. By evenings they get very drunk and party in their squat, sleeping it off in cabins just like real Radio Caroline operatives once did back in the 1980s.
Now let me get this right. These people are supposed to be fans of Radio Caroline, a radio station. Yet, they lovingly tend to a, er, boat. Eh? Are they mad? I mean, right, I like sex, right, but would I lovingly restore and look after a bed I’d once had sex in long after I’d found somewhere else to have sex? Er, no!
So, what’s with the boat fetish? I mean, right, back at the bed example, if I’d lovingly restored and looked after a bed in the expectation that I’d be having sex in it again, or it was the only place I would ever have sex in the future, then fair enough. It would have a purpose and a future. But, this boat madness is, well, madness. The boat will never ever ever be used as part of a broadcasting chain, so why bother restoring it when it should so obviously be recycled as razor-blades?
Supposed fans of Radio Caroline will play with this boat and spend their money on it for no readily apparent reason. Isn’t it about time we rounded them up and had them gently put back in their respective care homes?
(That last sentence was probably a bit cruel, but that’s what it said all those years ago!)
England's England 