Proof the radio anoraks are sick in the head

A curious thing just happened.  For a little while I thought I’d found a timeslip or a worm-hole into the past.

You see, I was tuning about on my radio looking for any unlicensed broadcasts worthy of entertaining me, and I bizarrely tuned in to Radio Caroline.

(Andy Archer, a ghost broadcaster from yesterday)

Not just any Radio Caroline, but an ancient broadcast from the mid-1970s on ‘389 metres’.  Except I wasn’t tuned to this ‘389’ thing (I think in current parlance that would be ‘771 kHz’) at all.

So, magically I found myself listening to a broadcast from Radio Caroline with the presenter being Andy Archer.  He played a selection of quite awful fluffy safe pop music of the day, mentioned his name and the station name on a number of occasions, and invited listeners to write in.

I listened for about 45 minutes in wonder.  Wonder as to how or why this transmission was suddenly receivable by my radio, and wonder at how awful the playlist had been in those days.  I think this was the embarrassing soft and fluffy period ahead of Radio Caroline deciding to champion progressive and west-coast rock.

The quality was quite awful and it became obvious that it wasn’t a worm-hole or timeslip but that somebody was playing out a recording that had originally been very badly made in 1975 from a radio onto cassette tape.  The recording itself was ‘dropping out’ and fluttering all over the place.

Suddenly, a random record faded down and on came a much clearer voice that sounded like Angelos Epithemiou on helium, and was immediately identifiable as a ‘radio anorak‘ based on how he spoke and what he said.

Apparently, for no readily apparent reason he had decided to re-broadcast a broadcast that was from nearly 40 years ago.

There was nothing special about the broadcast he’d just re-broadcast, it was just pop records and announcements, yet he’d just re-broadcast it wholesale because, well, he had randomly decided to.

Erm, why?

How can it make any sense to go through all the risk, bother and trouble of putting together a pirate transmitter and then just use it to simply re-transmit bad quality recordings of broadcasts of little consequence made 40 years ago?

Come on now, it makes no sense whatsoever, does it?

Look, it makes a lot of sense to me to put a pirate transmission on the air in order to scream out to the waiting world a new truth or wisdom that needs sharing that ‘they’ won’t let you share under normal circumstances.  It also makes sense to do this to give exposure to new music not being aired by licensed radio stations.  But how can it make sense to just re-play old random recordings of radio output?

It’s not as if the original recording was edited down so that some point could be made about the playlist or the radio DJ’s presentation style.  Nope, it was re-broadcast without commentary or any interruptions.

 I can only assume it is some kind of very worrying mental illness that causes people to do this.

Can you imagine the Magistrates scratching their heads and waiting for an explanation had the illegal transmitter been subjected to an Ofcom/police raid and seizure along with its operators!  Yep, they’d hold on the sentencing waiting for full physiatric evaluations to be done on those guilty of operating the transmitter.

These radio anoraks are a danger to normal people and should eventually be locked-up for their own good.