Radio One More Time: Junior Choice

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Radio One More Time: Which Way Now?

As part of the BBC, Radio One has always struggled to justify its existence - mainly to people who felt that all the network did was play pop music (for some people, a waste of money in its own right) or duplicate the work done by the commercial radio sector (a common complaint even before the ILR network was completed, meaning that everyone had access to a Top 40 station; usually heard from someone who couldn't tell them the difference between John Peel and Johnny Vaughan's musical choices).

Radio One, clearly, needed to prove it was different and valuable in a way to critics who couldn't see that there was a difference between a radio giving a session to the Jesus And Mary Chain and one playing Rick Astley seven times a day. An easy way of doing this, of course, was to promote Social Awareness. Of, you know, things.

My first actual intersection with one of the network's big campaigns was when I sent off for a Which Way Now? pack - a plastic folder, crammed with helpful information on choosing your options wisely, and a colour picture of Peter Powell. It arrived too late to actually help me choose my options, and I suspect had I followed its advice I would have wound up doing Geography in the portakabin classroom with Young Mr Curtis rather than History in the bottom of the C-Block with Mr Nicholls, which would have been rather a mistake.

More useful was the Art-E-Fax campaign on Janice Long's show, which although smaller in scope (not breaking in to programming every five minutes across the day) was much more useful. It was, seriously, the first time anyone had suggested to me that working in what we're now expected to term the "creative industries" was something you could seriously aspire to rather than the sort of pipe dream which would see you "starving in a garret". This was back when there were only just four TV networks, four national radio networks and none of that internet business; schools career teachers tended to rely on "bakery or army" as providing 'career choice'. It was just the sort of encouragement I needed; without it, I suspect by now I would be a very, very rich baker. And miserable.

The more usual social action stuff would be what you'd expect - endless campaigns about the dangers of drugs, and AIDS, and getting AIDS while taking drugs. To be fair to the commercial sector, this sort of accessible advice, delivered by djs and tucked between pop songs, wasn't the sole preserve of Radio 1; ILR stations used to do it a lot, too, and for much the same reasons. Partly a desire to be of genuine assistance to their listeners, but mostly because it made good sense for their survival - a promise of community action was essential to persuading the IBA or the Radio Authority to choose your franchise bid. This might seem a cynical viewpoint, but the way the larger commercial stations dropped their in-house teams working on such material as soon as licence terms were made more fluid in the late 90s would suggest conviction was less motivating than the desire to appear a good corporate citizen.

It's not recorded if Simon Bates saved more people from drug misuse than his programme drove to drink.

[Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: Five forty-fives

In recent years, the role of the early evening slot after Newsbeat has been the opportunity for daytime to wind up, slowly thinning out the familiar so that, by the time Zane Lowe comes on, the audience won't be too spooked by a bearded man suddenly shouting at them while he plays something loud and alarming.

It wasn't like that when Peter Powell ruled the roost - coming out of Newsbeat at 5.45, he'd then launch into the Five forty-fives slot. Five new releases, played back to back. A solid twenty-minute chunk of records the listeners would be unfamiliar with. On a programme presented by a man so wet he apologised for having to play Cardiac Arrest by Madness during a chart rundown as "it must be terrible to hear that if someone in your family has just had a heart attack."

You have to remember this was back before the internet, when songs generally weren't known the world over the minute the final mix was signed off. It was even before record labels attempted to make "the first play" of singles into an event in their own right, strictly juggling embargoes on U2 songs to make sure that Chris Moyles gets the rights to be the first presenter to crash the vocals on the track. Back before new releases get sent to radio stations so far in advance of the day they arrive in the shops that Gnarl Barkley's Crazy felt like an oldie before it had registered a single sale.

Five records, back-to-back, which people were unfamiliar with, on what was still - technically - a daytime Radio One programme. And, by the law of mathematics, there had to be a lot more Hollywood Beyond and Modern Romance type acts than there were Duran Duran and Japan tracks in there. Considering the 1980s are generally seen as something of a conservative period for the higher-profile Radio One djs, this was quite a brave feature, putting the commitment to music and discovery ahead of the audience's comfort factor. Does any show on today's Radio 1 - or even 6Music, come to that - schedule such a large chunk of records that listeners will be hearing for the first time, back-to-back, today?

Of course, new music has always played an important role in the programming - the Breakfast Show's Record of the Week which seemed to survive most changes of presenters for the first couple of decades, where a new single would be given the honour of a daily play.

And there were review programmes: Roundtable - grudgingly listened to by Norman Fletcher at the insistence of Lenny Godber - which (aptly) took the 5.45 slot on Fridays for ages, most famously under Emperor Rosko's command; Singled Out; Collins and Maconie's Hit Parade, which took the basic Roundtable format and poked into gaps between David Quantick dismissing something he'd read in the Melody Maker as "arrant wasp toss". But even these shows soothed the shock of the new by inviting the likes of Debbie Harry, David Grant and Steve Wright (Roundtable) or the drummer from Kenickie, the news editor from Select and, oh, David Quantick's here anyway (Hit Parade) to contextualise the new singles.

Even if you tried to do something similar these days, the format of "here are five records you won't have heard before, listen to them and decide if you like them" would be bastardised by the inclusion of instant texts from Spandau Ballet fans. It's almost as if the more seriously Radio One management took music, they less they trusted their audience to cope with it.

[Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: The Record Race

Listen... and win!

One of the all-time great radio competitions, originally heard on Peter Powell's nightly teatime programme before being spun out to support an entire hour or so on Friday nights, filling the gap in the schedule left by the axing of Roundtable. It was a really, really simple premise: a caller would be on the phone, and a record would start playing, accompanied by a slow countdown of "ten... nine... eight...". After enough of the introduction had been got through for the caller to identify the track, they'd call out the name excitedly, and the countdown would stop. The caller would then be rewarded for their ability to recognise a song played seven or eight times a day on Radio One by being given as much of the top ten as the countdown had left to run.

Younger readers will just have to be assured that, back then, getting even three or four seven inch singles was a prize akin, in modern terms, to an X Box and half-a-dozen pair of training shoes. It just was. You had to go into town and fork over lots of money for them songs, whereas nowadays, of course, you could probably download the entire Top 75 in less time than it would take Peter Powell to count backwards from ten.

The only flaw in basing an entire programme on this, of course, was that after the caller had got the song right, the usual social niceties of "a few hellos" and "anyone else who knows me" had be done over the top of the record. During Janice Long's helming of the Friday night programme, Janice's chatty style, coupled with the larger number of contestants and consequent increased number of people getting to 'one' before identifying Like A Virgin by Madonna meant that while a lot of record were played, hardly any music was actually heard.

Janice Long and Peter Powell, besides having shared the Record Race format, did spend a very brief time as the Sonny and Cher of Radio One - a pairing that, in today's terms, would have been on a par with Edith Bowman actually dating Colin Murray.

The best Radio One competitions were the ones which were built on some sort of knowledge of current chart music - supposedly the network's raison d'etre in its first two or three decades. The weekly 'predict the top three' write-in was always fun: actually challenging, impossible to cheat on, simple to understand the rules and requiring actual skill and judgement. Except when Bryan Adams was at number one, of course.

[Radio One More Time: Radio 1 at 40]