This week, to keep in touch with my inner anorak self I spent some time (well, 45 minutes) listening to a 45 minute recording of Radio Caroline from May 1966, starring a disc jockey called Mike Ahern. This appears to be just a random Sunday, not one of the tedious recordings of something eventful happening, thank goodness.
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| “Hey, why not um, buy, no, try, a nice cup, er, bottle of, er, a can of …” |
Anyway, I listened to hear the golden age of ‘wireless’. Not.
Yikes. What the hell was all the fuss about? It was awful. The DJ was terrible. Ok, no disrespect to the dead or anything, but man was he bad. Worse than hospital radio! Yep, that bad!
Firstly, he kept saying the same irritating phrases like “that’s [artist] and one called” when intronouncing the songs, secondly he was constantly putting things on at the wrong speed, thirdly he seemed incapable of reading out anything without stumbling all over his words, and fourthly every link seemed to contain an elongated time check.
The songs being played were dominated by artists like the Bachelors, and there were lots of jazzy trumpet records and Tijuana sounds. Ok, he can’t be blamed for that, music in 1966 was mainly pretty awful.
It was interesting to note that he appeared to be speaking from inside a metal bucket. Also the intonation of his voice was as if his microphone wasn’t working unless he shouted at it as one might shout when using a megaphone. I guess that was the style in those days, cos’ even his news reader was shouting as if he was stuck in the metal bucket.
But, surely it wasn’t the style to put such unprofessional sounding DJs on the air during the daytime without first giving them a modicum of training? It certainly makes one realise what they could get away with broadcasting ‘back in the day’ compared to today.
Speaking of the news reader, I’m not sure where he pulled his news from but it was a single four or five word sentence per news story. His lead story was about a football team called Liverpool ‘United’. Luckily, the DJ was originally from Liverpool so he was able to correct him. Other ‘news’ stories included random traffic and travel information as ‘news’. It was quite bizarre.
They didn’t seem to use any jingles. I guess jingles were more the preserve of the professionally formatted stations like Big L, and Caroline must have acquired some much later in its life than 1966. Or maybe they didn’t play jingles on a Sunday.
It is strange how affectionately radio anoraks will ‘remember’ this era of pirate radio as if there was something good about it, when in truth it was extremely amateurish and quite embarrassing compared to what’s available from today’s golden age of radio.
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