HALF A CENTURY ON

IF YOU live outside South Devon, England, you probably won't have seen my Torbay Times Pensioners Platform column for January-February 2016 (see photo below), so here's the second of two articles published in that column...

 

FIFTY years ago I was living in my home town of London and fast approaching my twentieth birthday. In common with many of my fellow Post War Baby Boomers, at every opportunity, I was listening to the so-called pirate radio stations Radio London and Radio Caroline. The fantastic Summer of Sixty-Six was just a few months away when Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones; Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks; Paperback Writer by The Beatles; God Only Knows by The Beach Boys and, of course, England’s World Cup win would make it such a memorable summer for music and sport.

However, there were storm clouds looming. The BBC and the government were scheming to outlaw pirate radio stations, and they succeeded in doing so the following year. But we Baby Boomers were – and still are – a fair minded lot, and we demanded a music station to cater for the popular music tastes of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. And so BBC Radio 2 was born, to compliment the younger sounds of Radio 1.

Nearly half a century later, it’s a completely different tune. We are now the older generations and the BBC has chipped away at our share of the music radio cake to leave us with little more than left-over crumbs. Now that can’t be right – or fair – can it? After all, there are more than ten million UK seniors, and most of us pay for our BBC licence. If that doesn’t represent a huge, largely untapped and deserving audience, I don’t know what does!