THIS was Radio Clyde’s news team, shortly before the Glasgow station made its long-awaited debut on Hogmanay, 1973.

From left to right, they are Alex Dickson, head of news and current affairs, Sheila Duffy, Tom Steele, David Markey, George Montgomery, Bob King, Richard Roy, George Mackintosh, Paul Murricane and Craig Samet.

This was a time when all of the station’s personnel were preparing for the launch. The news team underwent in November, a week-long initiation programme in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In Glasgow on November 26 they visited the procurator fiscal’s office. the social work department, and the Lord Provost and Corporation committee conveners. At the end of the week the broadcasters began a full month’s dummy run training schedule.

Radio Clyde, Scotland’s first commercial radio station, broadcast for the first time on at 10.30pm on December 31, offering, as its print adverts had it, up-to-the-minute international, national and local news, “music from pop to classical, phone-in programmes [and] competitions”, all in the space of a 20-hour broadcasting day that started at 6am.

“What we have achieved is a broadcasting revolution”, Jimmy Gordon, the station’s managing director, told the Glasgow Herald’s William Hunter on December 31, 1974, as he looked back on the first year’s successful operation.

What he meant, wrote Hunter, was that ‘261’, as it was known, had got closer to the ears of the people of the West of Scotland than the BBC, with its four “knob-twiddling choices”, had.

Furthermore, he added, Clyde had broadcast and boosted local talent – Billy Connolly, Bill Barclay, Sydney Devine amongst them – to whom nobody else had been ready to give an airing.

Gordon added that Clyde was showing a surplus of £20,000 after its first 12 months – “enough to make a dent in the £60,000 expenses that it took us to set up the operation”.

Read more: Herald Diary