Like most people, certainly most people of my vintage, I've spent many an hour listening to the radio over the years. What is probably slightly more unusual is how my choice of radio stations has evolved over the years.
My first radio memories are from the age of around 5 or 6, listening to what was then the BBC Light Programme, which evolved soon after into Radio 1 and Radio 2, which is what my parents listened to. Even at that tender age, I had somewhat offbeat tastes - my favourite 'programme' was the Shipping Forecast! I could quote all the sea areas, in order, before I was 7 (and probably still can, sadly!), I did play around with the tuning dial on the family radiogram whenever I got the chance, and given where we lived, right down in the south east corner of England, we could pick up lots of European stations, but as my linguistic skills didn't stretch beyond English, they unfortunately didn't benefit me much.
The first truly independent steps in my radio listening came when I was 12 or so, when I first had my own bedroom, and my own clock/radio. Most of my peers at school were avid Radio 1 fans, given that was the only official national pop music station, but reception where we lived, down in the bottom of a river valley, wasn't very good, so I scouted around for something else. After a while, I found Radio Northsea International, a pirate station which broadcast in English at night, and Dutch during the day, and began listening virtually every day. Like most offshore, and, at best, dubiously legal, stations of its kind, it didn't last too long, and I listened sadly in summer 1974 (I've just checked that, I hasten to add!) to the last night of their English service.
My next port of call in the radio spectrum, and, once again, hardly a typical choice for a teenager, was the BBC World Service, whose Western European service was easy to pick up at home - it was essentially being broadcast straight over our heads to France, Germany, and so on. I liked the variety of programmes they broadcast, basically a digest of the type of output of the then four BBC national stations. I heard various things I might never have heard otherwise, even musically - I first heard Extreme Noise Terror on the World Service, on a weekly new music programme the legendary John Peel presented - and was certainly better informed on current affairs than just about anyone else I knew.
Another station I listened to, slightly more conventionally for a teenager, certainly the likes of me who had virtually no interest in anything that made the singles charts, was Radio Caroline. Their 'mission statement' at the time was to only play album tracks, and predominantly in the prog/heavy rock genre that I clung to even after punk had started to demolish that particular, rather overblown edifice (but I liked it, and still do, without apology).
For most of my twenties, I was a regular Radio 4 listener. That choice of more or less serious 'talk radio' fitted in with what was probably the most 'intellectual' decade of my life - I discovered, and was regularly reading, the likes of Nabokov, Hesse, Dostoevsky and Icelandic sagas - and, living on my own for nine years, I didn't have to compromise my tastes. Again, it left me extremely well informed, but was hardly much of a chat-up line.
That all changed, hardly surprisingly, when I met my wife in the early 1990's. Radio 4 was 'boring', but I was desperate not to listen to Radio 1, which I hated cordially, given its almost wall-to-wall chart playlist (certainly during the day) at the time. We eventually found a compromise in the shape of Atlantic 252, who were based in the Irish Republic, and had a much more eclectic playlist - I could at least expect to hear a song I liked occasionally! I still listened to Radio 4 when I could get away with it, although my allegiance gradually shifted to BBC Five Live, with its rolling news and sport coverage, in the latter half of the decade, while my wife switched to our local commercial music station, Piccadilly Radio/Key 103, for the most part.
I carried on as I was when we first moved to Cornwall, a mixture of Radio 4 & Five Live, but my wife had to change, although she continued in similar vein, mostly listening to Pirate, the main commercial music station down here.
The final major changes of my radio listening life have happened over the last five years or so, as I've migrated, except in the car, to DAB, mostly Planet Rock, probably the first music radio station I've ever listened to where I like a substantial majority of the output - classic rock from the 1960's onward, it's a no-brainer, really. I have got a Pure Highway in the car, but, doubtless because of the iffy aerial, the reception while driving isn't all that wonderful, and I don't often bother with it. More often than not, I listen to Radio 3 in the car, something I never would've expected to have said a few years ago, as I'd never got into classical music, even as a passing phase. I still draw the line at opera, though!
Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B
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