Radio review: Looking back on 50 years of commercial radio

WHAT do you remember about October 1973? The Yom Kippur war? The Nixon tapes? The second Cod War between the Icelandic coast guard and British fishermen? The Simon Park Orchestra at number one in the charts?
How about the beginning of commercial radio?

It was 50 years ago todayish (last Sunday, actually) that commercial radio launched in the UK. Boom Radio celebrated the anniversary on Sunday with a day of programming that began with Dave Jamieson (no relation) at 6am and saw such veteran commercial radio DJs as Michael Aspel (now aged 90, in case you needed reminding how old we all are now), Nicky Horne and Mike Read taking up the reins at various points
Radio Clyde – the third commercial station after LBC and Capital – didn’t make it onto the airwaves until Hogmanay, but it was well represented here.
Jamieson himself spent a couple of years on the station and he wasn’t the only Clyde veteran taking part in Boom Radio’s celebrations. Dave Marshall, long-term breakfast DJ on Clyde, also turned up to spin a few discs for an hour.
Clyde today is a very different station than the one Jamieson or Marshall worked for. Maybe not for the better. As radio critic and the first programme controller of Liverpool’s Radio City station Gillian Reynolds pointed out whilst being interviewed by Phil Riley, commercial radio has become much more homogenous than it used to be.
But Boom Radio was understandably more interested in celebrating the past than worrying about the present. There were interesting historical snippets scattered throughout the day. The first ever ad on commercial radio was for Birds’ Eye Fish Fingers. Not that there were a lot of ads at the beginning. Capital Radio nearly went under for the lack of them. Its chairman Richard Attenborough used his art collection as collateral to keep it going.
Meanwhile, on Beacon Radio in Wolverhampton the powers that be decided against letting local accents be heard when it launched, opting for a neutral English voice instead. 
Michael Aspel would have fitted in. At 90, his creamy, well-spoken voice remains intact. In his hour with fellow former Capital DJ Graham Dene, he chose a few records and remembered a few of the people he spoke to whilst working on the station. Debbie Harry came in five minutes before the end of one show, “in a dress so tight that she couldn’t sit down,” he recalled.
Nostalgia – libidinous or otherwise – was the order of the day. Once familiar voices playing familiar tunes.
And why knock what works? Commercial radio is currently reaching an audience of 39 million listeners a week (significantly more than the BBC). Some 50 years on, it is a success story. And not even the threat of podcasts is going to change that, Gillian Reynolds reckoned.
“Podcasts are one to one and radio is one to millions,” she pointed out. “I think there is still room for radio.”
Did you know that there are two species of African spiders named in honour of the film The Big Lebowski? Anelosimus biglebowski and Anelosimus dude, if, like me, you weren’t aware of this fact.  That’s one of the things I learnt from the latest episode of Archive on 4 on Radio 4 last Saturday, which asked the question: what made the 1998 Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski such a cult movie? 
Film critic Helen O’Hara used archive clips to examine the question a quarter of a century after the film’s release.  The answer seemed to be a combination of the film’s humour, the quotability of its dialogue and its promulgation of  the philosophy of stoicism (“The Dude abides” after all). 
The programme meandered entertainingly through the dialogue-heavy style of Elmore Leonard, Rose Matafeo’s Starstruck anti-romcom, the work of American visual artist Carolee Schneemann, male friendship and the very concept of a “guy film”.
The movie has been inducted into the US Library of Congress National Film Registry, ie, it’s considered worthy of preservation. The citation that accompanied the induction probably best summed up why The Big Lebowski matters. As it said, the film is “really, really funny”.  In short, it’s the comedy that tied the movie together.