SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE [442]

“A locally-oriented music and information station for over 30s in the Solent and adjacent area” is the baldest of descriptions for Wave 105.2 FM, but this was the service it was licenced to broadcast, playing “a spread of adult contemporary and soft adult contemporary hits and treating speech as an important ingredient”. The licence was originally more specific on the music and features broadcast, including percentages to be met for speech content and “current hits”, but these were later relaxed.

 

What made Wave 105, “the South’s best variety of hits”, the most popular commercial radio station in its area – in the last quarter of December 2023, it received 405,000 listeners each week aged 15+, with a 13.9% share of listening, both figures more than twice that of BBC Radio Solent, which plays to an older audience – was the imagination used in how that licence was interpreted. All of its programmes came from its studio base in Fareham, Hampshire, made by friendly, engaging and long-serving presenters and staff, who both lived in, and are knowledgeable about, the area they serve. Listening one day, Steve Power, who presented the breakfast show on the station for nearly eighteen years, asked a listener what their day was like. They told him they had been on, of all things, a crisis management course, to which Power replied, “how do you think that went?” I may have interpreted a genuine question as a punchline, but I have remembered it ever since.

 

Its curated and varied playlist was wide enough to encompass shifts from 1960s and 70s songs to current chart hits and back again, along “Golden Hours” in the morning and evening which, as far as I’ve heard, reached as far back as 1959, and amongst the weekend evening disco and dance shows was “Teenage Kicks”, concentrating on the New Wave of the late 70s to early 80s, which must have inspired the similar “Stereo Underground" on BBC Radio Solent. And each daytime hour featuring at least two of a listener’s top five favourite songs, that listener being added to a monthly draw to win a holiday, a feature that lasted for the station’s entire history. Add in frequent and comprehensive news bulletins, travel news and features across its schedule, and Wave 105 made for the prime example of Independent Local Radio, providing a full service to the local area.

 

Another way of interpreting the same station licence is to provide the local news and information as opt-outs of a network that broadcasts a similar mix of music to other stations. This has already happened to the competitors that sat either side of Wave 105’s music mix: Ocean FM (classic hits) became Heart, and Power FM (current hits) became Galaxy, then Capital FM, most of its output relayed from London. A Media Bill currently making its way through Parliament will eventually do away with prescriptive licences altogether, in favour of reducing “red tape”, maintaining elements of “localness” and reducing weekday hours that must be made regionally from a minimum of three to zero.

 

On Wednesday 28th February 2024, station owners Bauer Radio announced that Wave 105’s frequency would soon start carrying Greatest Hits Radio – newer songs would eventually be dropped from the playlist, with listeners advised to tune to the sister Hits Radio network to hear those, and the earworm jingles that sang “Wave 105” descending G-F-E-C notes to sing the station name, something that never changed since first going on air on 14th June 1998, were replaced by reminders that “Greatest Hits Radio is the new name for Wave 105”. On the night of the announcement, the playlist told a different story: “Love’s Unkind”, “I Wanna Stay With You”, “You’re My Best Friend”, “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”, “Scandalous”, “Please Don’t Go”, “Even Better Than the Real Thing”, “Nothing Loves Forever”, “U Can’t Touch This”...

 

The hallmark of a great music radio station is the curation of its playlist, and under Andy Shier, its programme controller since 2008, Wave 105 proved that a playlist as wide as listeners’ tastes could work in practice, and even with presenters playing songs they felt fit the moment, hearing the playlist gain sentience in what became its last hours of broadcasting, on Thursday 28^th March, became a truly moving experience, let alone switching on just after 7.00am to Chesney Hawkes’ “I Am the One and Only”: “You try to make me forget / Who I really am, don’t tell me I know best / I’m not the same as all the rest.” In the final minutes before 10pm, Wave 105’s male station voice, Rich Cope, opened the door to his Greatest Hits Radio counterpart, Rik Scott, before Cope said, “but, before I go, just two little things: good luck, Greatest Hits Radio, and take care of our lovely listeners, won’t you – they’ll be in safe hands”, before playing “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” by Soft Cell, a wonderful song with a perfect title and spectacularly bitter lyrics. 

 

With the sound of waves washing on the shore, one of the best radio stations I have ever heard had ended. I may try Greatest Hits Radio: Rick Jackson’s breakfast show continues, a unique concession for the network’s English stations, with Mark Collins moving to the same afternoon slot he had when he began at Wave 105, but whether these shows continue when radio licences are simplified is another question. However, Greatest Hits Radio was already available on DAB, if not FM, and I would already have been listening if that was what I wanted to hear. Perhaps Andy Shier could release his old playlists as a PDF download.

 

I had originally intended to write about the BBC preparing to launch its biggest-ever consultation on its future, including what role a public service broadcaster plays in public life, and how that should be funded. All the while, Wave 105, a commercial station that ultimately exists to make a profit, provided a service that served its local audience as good as expected from the BBC, if not better, but there was no longer a regulatory reason for it to exist, no matter how popular it was – for its owners, freed from red tape, relaying a national network was all the imagination they had.

 

The final two hours of Wave 105 had the following playlist:

Andrew Gold - Lonely Boy

Laura Branigan - Gloria

Phil Collins - Another Day in Paradise

Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - I Love Rock and Roll

ABBA - Dancing Queen

Destiny’s Child - Survivor

Tears for Fears - Change

Modern Romance - Best Years of Our Lives

Aswad - Baby I Love Your Way

Billy Joel - We Didn’t Start the Fire

UB40 - Food for Thought

Eagles - Lyin’ Eyes

Elton John - Healing Hands

Stevie Wonder – Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours

Level 42 - To Be With You Again

Sister Sledge - We Are Family

Village People - You Can’t Stop the Music

Gloria Gaynor - Never Can Say Goodbye

Lenny Kravitz - It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over (ironically also the first song played on the station)

Soft Cell - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye 

DRAWN TO THE SORTA LIBRARY MAGIC [47]

I received my first library card when I was around five years old, spending many Saturday mornings at my local library through to my twenties. I started reading graphic novels there, discovered the Sociology section, and it my father introduced me to Spike Milligan and “The Goon Show,” using a cassette rented from there.

However, my last visit there was because the nearby public toilet was being renovated. I can see why the visits became scarce: having a disposable income, buying my own copies of what I had read, and finding ever more information and media online and on demand. What may have finally done it was trying to rediscover some information I once found there before.

I like looking at old programme listings for TV and radio stations: they are like a social document, showing how people used to entertain themselves, and what interests people had. Unless someone finds and puts the information you want online, you have to know where to go yourself and, for me, it was the stacks of old local newspapers kept at the library, so those Saturday mornings were usually spent photocopying yellowed newsprint, or even copying out stuff by hand.

About six years ago, remembering to use the library again, I went in, and was told the papers were taken away some years before, when the library was renovated by the county council and opened as a “Discovery Centre.” It now has a café, computers, children’s play area, arts space, museum space, and the local registry office was shoehorned in some time later – until a local business stepped in, the council nearly put the post office in there too… Yes, there are fewer books than before.

I was advised to check the “Local Studies Centre” across the road, but it turned out the newspapers were not kept there either. If I really did want to find out which DJs were on the local Top 40 station Power FM in 1991, I would have to travel to the next town to find them. Once I also had another, saner reason to travel, I went to that town’s library – it was still called a “library,” and acted more like one.

So, what I can tell you is that 103.2 Power FM, a station whose jingles still ring in my head nine years after it became just another outpost of a national network, had presenters that are still very active in local radio – breakfast presenters Pete Wardman and Cheryl Phillips, daytime DJ Bernie Simmons, and Chris Kelly in the evening. Meanwhile, the teenage overnight presenter, Scott Mills, has been at BBC Radio 1 for nearly twenty years now. However, drive-time host Adrian Lovett left broadcasting to complete a politics degree, become an MP, then work for charities and anti-poverty groups, including Oxfam, Save the Children and ONE. Yes, I have used online resources for the further information, but I had to know where to start.

For many, libraries are still a valuable resource that are too useful to lose, even if I find it harder to find a use for mine. Even for something delightfully obscure, knowledge should not be made harder to find and, if we going to stay online instead, nothing can be left behind.

IF YOU’RE NOT THE ONE [36]

The first act of 2017 appears to be replacing circling hippos with an aerobics class. After ten years, BBC One has replaced its channel idents, themed around “circles,” evocating the globe logos it used for many years, in favour of snapshots of groups of people, directed by photographer Martin Parr, themed around the idea of “oneness.”

So far, we have just four idents, out of a promised twenty-four – the aerobics class, a group of sea swimmers, and a slightly different version of each one. They are a bit sparse, with no music or sound apart from what is in the scene, and too mundane when compared with what they replaced. There are also too few idents available right now, risking outstaying their welcome by the time the next ones appear.

I thought that enthusiasm for TV idents was just an online pursuit, where you can go into as much detail as you want, but I am no longer sure. I really should know, as this happened before.

The first time I appeared on the radio, said in anticipation of a next time, was on Monday 29^th March 2002, when I called Nicky Campbell’s morning show on BBC Radio 5 Live. Earlier that morning, BBC One switched its globe-shaped hot air balloon for “Rhythm and Movement” - groups of people dancing.

One of the idents, filmed at the Minack Theatre in Porthcurno, Cornwall, featured ten ballerinas performing a graceful dance, to the sounds of a string quartet that was led by a cello. This particular ident was described as being “too middle class,” and I called up to point out the sole point is to tell you what channel you are watching. It did sound a bit naïve at the time, but I was let onto Nicky Campbell’s show to say that – I think Nick Knowles was there too.

After making the point that, when I was born, BBC One’s single ident was a turning lime green globe on a blue background, I was thanked for my comments, and the show moved on. They did not discuss the ballet any further, my appearance having killed that conversation stone dead.

TV idents were borne of a time when you physically had to tune your TV to the correct channel, and even then, you were just as likely to have programmes introduced by someone appearing on screen to talk to you. BBC Two continues to show why logos and branding is important, as people are still enjoying watching their older “2” idents, made as early as 1991. Radio jingles fall into the same nostalgia, hoping you remember their frequency – all in the south of Hampshire sing with me now: “One-oh-three-point-two, Power-F-M!”

However, on digital TV, radio and online, where you can simply scan your receiver, and select your viewing from a list, idents are no longer needed – you are already where you need to be. You see more picture postcard-style idents, like those on ITV, and now BBC One, because they reflect their audience, and are easier, and cheaper, to produce.  In addition, getting audiences to programmes do not rely on individual channels so much, unless you count the BBC iPlayer or Netflix as a “channel.” For the BBC, Martin Parr’s new idents may be more important for the “BBC” on screen, rather than for the “One.”