Having been a tad busy with a sudden and unexpected General Election, I totally forgot all about the Radio Caroline sagas. The Radio Caroline in the UK exists as a highly comical parody of its former self, run by bunches of old men who lovingly tend to it with that slightly pervy excitement of a person stroking the shiny outer metal work of a highly polished steam engine.
Hey, whatever floats your boat, I say. In the world of real radio, the UK Radio Caroline is as irrelevant as the steam engine is to daily mass transit. It exists to point at, and to help bring back rose-tinted spectacles memories of a time that never really existed. A bit like the awful old music it plays for those who are stuck in a memory loop reliving the past over and over again.
I’ve said before that of the Radio Carolines available, the one providing the format I personally can listen to lives in France. Well, Bretagne, which is just about France. They play a lot of current and relevant music, and for a passing listen are fun and bubbly, just like the original offshore pirate version of Caroline.
So, I got a private communication that mentioned Radio Caroline (the UK one), which is odd because nobody I know ever talks to me about Radio Caroline. With a large amount of time on my hands (until the next snap General Election, er, in the Autumn?), I thought it time to have a nose around.
I’d heard that Ofcom had granted the UK Caroline an AM broadcasting licence, and sure enough the first thing I found on the over excitable forums and in the Facebork land and Twitterverse was spontaneous ejaculations about this. Personally, I don’t knowingly have any AM radio receivers, and am puzzled why anybody would apply to transmit on a medium that is rarely used these days. Surely, the excitement should be about plonking oneself on a DAB mux where the listeners actually are.
Then I remembered, we are dealing with radio anoraks. Radio anoraks will give much kudos to radio stations nobody normal is bothering to listen to when they infest a platform nobody is listening via. The less listeners, the better the station is in their eyes. So, they will deliberately dust off their old AM radios in order to fondle their erections as they struggle to listen to the distorted signal. I can appreciate how this is all very exciting for old radio anoraks. Hey, who among them will be the first to discuss the allotted transmissions not by frequency, but by ‘wavelength’? Twats. The announcing of ‘wavelengths’ died over 35 years ago. But, hey, so did most of the music they play!
Anyway. Here’s where things got exciting. Follow this very carefully. I’ll be asking questions later! The UK Radio Caroline is on Twitter. It’s at @theradcaroline. There’s another Radio Caroline that has @radiocaroline. And my favourite Radio Caroline is @radiocarolinefr.
It seems that suddenly, one day, the UK Radio Caroline stole, er, ‘acquired’ the @radiocaroline handle. I don’t fully understand how they did this, but I found loads of tweets and chatter telling everybody they were now no longer @theradcaroline but @radiocaroline. With me so far?
Well, mysteriously, they aren’t. Loads of tweets referring to @radiocaroline from people who are pretty obviously meaning @theradcaroline, are now making reference to the wrong Caroline.
There’s one character who seems to be suggesting that the UK version had the @radiocaroline handle snatched away from them fraudulently.
Eh? The last time I looked, @radiocaroline belonged to a Radio Caroline coming from a spaceship. Looking again, it still does. Nothing’s different.
So, did the UK Caroline do a bit of pirating of the spaceship account in order to steal the handle?
Heh. I think we should be told!
England's England 