Ofcom 87.7, home of the hits?

Sounds like an ideal time for a raid!

Londoners have a choice of a hundred or so radio stations.  They don’t know it of course, but only ten percent of those are actually licensed to broadcast.  The rest, usually the more popular ones, are ‘pirates’.

For nearly fifty years unlicensed radio stations have wooed popular culture.  Even after the slow introduction of commercial radio, and the faster movement by the BBC to try to provide what listeners were searching for, neither has been able to match the needs of listeners as fast as the ever changing ‘pirate’ operators.

In theory, a radio station gets a licence after a painfully awful and highly expensive bidding process to Ofcom, the people in charge of all things ‘wireless’ and custodians of the air-waves.  Ofcom seem to require that the applicant is a multi-million Pound venture owning multiple radio stations already, they never ever licence ordinary people.  In the 1960s the ‘pirates’ operated from ships offshore because there really was no real mechanism for the ordinary man to get to become a radio station operator.   Shamefully, the ordinary man still cannot do this nearly 50 years later, which is why there is always a huge gap in the market that can easily be filled by the ‘pirates’.  I guess it’s fear of proll talking unto proll.  Whilst anybody can start a newspaper or magazine, put themselves on Youtube to be viewed in one day by more people than watch BBC Four in a year, they are not legally allowed access to the radio broadcasting bands.

Ofcom are supposed to stop people broadcasting without a licence. Thirty or forty years ago their predecessors were quite good at this, able to silence ‘pirates’ within a few hours of switching on.  They were so good at it in fact, that ‘pirates’ would only schedule to broadcast one day a week, some for only a few hours on that day, yet they’d still get raided.  Things have slowly changed, and ‘pirates’ broadcast across London with the absolute minimum of interruption to their broadcasts by Ofcom.  In the days when the penalty was a small fine so many ‘pirates’ were successfully prosecuted.  These days the fines can be very heavy, and a prison sentence can be added, plus a ban from working in licensed radio for up to five years, yet proportionally next to nobody is ever raided and caught.

The allocation of who gets what frequency is legally down to Ofcom. However, in the feral world of ‘pirates’ an interesting almost strange system exists now for the distribution of the air-waves.  There are so many stations in London that it is very hard to find a frequency to plonk a new transmitter on that doesn’t cause interference to others.  So, the prime frequencies are ‘owned’ by individuals.  I’m not too sure how one originally got to ‘own’ a frequency, but it is a fact that frequencies are ‘owned’ and most ‘pirates’ get permission to operate on a particular frequency by renting it or even buying it from a current owner.  Hundreds, even thousands of Pounds will change hands in order to use a specific frequency.  It can provide an income for a person who does absolutely nothing but lay claim to a particular frequency.

Operating on a frequency ‘owned’ by somebody else is frowned on.  It can be dangerous.  If it gets round that you don’t have the owners permission to be there, then your transmitter becomes fair game for being silenced and stolen to be ‘recycled’ for use by somebody who does have permission from a frequency’s owner.  Squatting on a frequency you don’t own can also lead to shootings and beatings, so generally speaking this system of policing who uses what appears to work.  It’s a shame this quite liberal control of the air-waves is down to a half-dozen enterprising dodgy people, instead of it being Ofcom itself.

Because of the slapdash way that Ofcom (and predecessors) have policed the broadcasting bands in latter decades, the ‘pirates’ have been allowed to flourish and grow and become established as strong power bases.  There was, many many years ago, a tipping point from which it became impossible for Ofcom (and predecessors) to do anything about them. These days the only stations taken off the air are the ones very badly interfering with others.  Sadly for the reputation of ‘pirate’ radio in general, there are an increasing number using poorly constructed transmitters, and actually causing interference on a dangerous life-threatening level.  Legal stations like LBC are regularly blotted out throughout most of London, seriously damaging their listening figures and advertising revenue, such is the menace of the more rogue ‘pirate’ operators.

Rumours now reach me that Ofcom has a new spurt of funding and has been charged with the responsibility of closing all ‘pirate’ operators down before the 2012 Olympics.  If it’s true, I’m not sure why.  Maybe we mustn’t expose the chaos to those foreigners who will be visiting our capital for all of two weeks.

Ofcom’s own radio station on 87.7 MHz FM even has RDS!

As part of their offensive, Ofcom has now started its own radio station, Ofcom 87.7.  True, it is mainly being blotted out by an adjacent ‘pirate’, and has annoyed at least one other East London ‘pirate’ two days ahead of them ‘renting’ the frequency from some shady character, but it can be heard via strong radios across South and East London.

Ofcom 87.7 broadcasts a loop of an Estuary accented sexy sounding female voice quite badly reading an official statement.  Technically her microphone is ‘popping’ quite a bit, and her inflections are all over the place, but her message is quite direct.  Without saying what frequency she is talking about, which leads me to believe she is going to appear on lots of different frequencies in time, she says that ‘illegal’ operators are using her frequency and spells out all the reasons why that’s bad.  There’s the timely reminder that MCs and DJs might like to apply for a licence rather than be part of the bad illegal pirates who are leading them astray.  Yeah, like an ordinary MC or DJ would ever be granted a licence. Hello?!  The lack of licensing is the problem.

Ofcom 87.7 repeats this message almost as often as a commercial radio station play Adele.  What are they trying to achieve?  Is the idea that ‘pirate’ radio operators will hear it and think, “OMG, I didn’t realise that what I am doing is wrong, I must shut down immediately”?  In reality, the ‘pirates’ have been discussing the great laugh of going in the middle of the night and taking the Ofcom transmitter, leaving a message like “See how annoying it is to have your rig taken?” Others have plans to hijack the audio and replace it with something a bit more funky.  Nobody appears to be running scared, so if that was the purpose, it’s not worked.

If the operators themselves and their MCs and DJs think it’s funny and are not rattled, will other people ‘grass up’ the ‘pirates’, as the sexy Ofcom lady requests?  I suspect not. Currently we hate authority so much that anything they ask us to do immediately generates a knee-jerk snarled ‘fuck off’ response.

At the end of the day, what will Ofcom 87.7 have achieved?  Well, I’d guess for the chattering classes and those who lead us it will appear as if this Government department is hot on the case, determinedly making a stand to scare those damn pesky pirates away.  One could argue that Ofcom 87.7 puts Ofcom is the self-publicity business, providing a sort of self-product placement on the radio.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all works out for them.