Bonus Episode: What Happened After BLB?

Despite a nearly ten year on-air and behind the scenes campaign in the 1980's to establish community radio in Bray, County Wicklow and the securing of a legal licence in 1989 by the North Wicklow Community Radio Co-op, we do not have a station such as BLB transmitting community radio in County Wicklow today. 

In this episode Mark Quinn speaks with John Murphy, Lawrie Hallett and at length with Pat Hannon to find out what happened after the radio licenses were issued and about the wider impact of BLB and today's radio landscape.

Credits: 

Post Production

High Wire, Dublin, Ireland 

www.highwire.ie  

Artwork by Jody Hogg Design 

www.jodyhogg.com  

Produced and presented by Mark Quinn 

The copyright for this podcast series is owned by Mark Quinn and is hereby reserved.

Also listen out for and follow Bray Talking Heads - Stories From A Seaside Town - A podcast for Brayites everywhere! With Mark Quinn, Leah Kinsella and Pat Hannon.

https://blb.buzzsprout.com

Bray Talking Heads – Stories from a Seaside Town. A podcast celebrating the stories, history, and people of Bray, past and present. Whether you're a lifelong Brayite or just discovering this special town, join us for conversations that connect, inspire, and bring our community to life - wherever you are in the world. Hosted by Mark Quinn, Leah Kinsella, and Pat Hannon. Connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky @braytalkingheads, or email us at braytalkingheads@gmail.com

https://blb.buzzsprout.com

Transcript

A Radiogenic production.



I believe that nobody has the right to say we are the only people who can decide who can broadcast.

 Competition will do RTÉ good and it will also do the provincial press good.

 Sure, yeah, I think it's a great idea.

 Shout to the top for community radio. That was one of the many on-air promos that were broadcast on pirate radio station BLB, Bray Local Broadcasting, in the latter days of the station in 1988 as we braced ourselves for closed down and our license application. As you can hear, we were pushing hard for community radio to be considered as a viable model for the forthcoming licensed local radio network.



 I'm Mark Quinn and welcome to this bonus episode in the series BLB Sounds from the Past.



 If you followed this series to this point, you'll know that BLB, Bray Local Broadcasting, closed for good at the end of the 1980s. And that was that. The end of pirate broadcasting in Bray and throughout Ireland. Despite the inevitable sadness about having to shut down the station that we'd come to love, I think there was a general mood of optimism among most of us in the group for the future and for the chances of us securing a permanent licensed local community radio station for Bray and North Wicklow. After all, this for us founding members was precisely what we'd campaigned for. And in 1989, 10 years after BLB had started, the North Wicklow Community Radio Cooperative applied for and won the radio license for Bray and North Wicklow.



 The new station was called Horizon Radio and whilst it was legal local radio, it just wasn't quite the same. It wasn't community radio in ethos because the licensing authority didn't have a structure in place for licensing community radio. But many of the old voices from BLB, including myself, had shows on Horizon and for a time it felt somewhat familiar.



 Over the years, I left to pursue my career in television post-production. Others from the past went their separate ways and the radio station evolved into what we have now, East Coast FM. In terms of its output, this station is a million miles away from what we in BLB championed, which in my view is a great pity.



 What follows in this bonus episode is a chat about what happened after BLB and our best guess as to how we ended up with a radio station in Bray that has no community ethos. But first, let's rewind to the early days when a group of us in our twenties came together with a bold vision that would eventually shape a beacon for community radio, with me leading the charge on the broadcasting side and John Murphy driving the technical and philosophical foundations.



 I was reading a magazine called Wireless World. Wireless World was a famous magazine in those days for radio constructors and people who, you know, mostly in ham radio. And there was an article in it about community radio.



 And as I read down through it, I thought, "Well, this sounds very like what we're thinking of. In fact, yes, this is right up our street." And I went down to the bottom on the end with a guy called Norman MacLeod who had written the article. So I tracked him down to the magazine, went to meet him. Sure enough, they were talking our language. And he introduced me to a guy called Peter Lewis who was a lecturer in Goldsmith College in London. And he had it all written up. So from there, I was able to get to talk to people who had thought about this in a more academic way, but gave me, you know, a really good philosophy around it. And that's where all this started.

 So unbeknown to us, others had been developing this all inclusive, all access radio idea that we in BLB were developing. And over the years, despite operating outside the law, we became quite a well-known community radio model.



 Laurie Hallat, or Lawrence, as we knew him, was first introduced to us thanks to his involvement in a temporary pirate radio station at the Glastonbury Music Festival in the 1980s, when some members of BLB popped in to say hello. He and Martin Spencer became great friends and supporters of us at BLB and helped out enormously with the technical side on their extended visits to Bray. Laurie is now a senior lecturer in radio at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton. But way back in 1988, I interviewed him on the last night of broadcasting of BLB. And we discussed the inspiration that BLB had been at the time to prospective community radio stations in the UK.

 A lot of things that BLB has done have demonstrated to myself and a lot of people in the UK that it can be done properly and it can be done on a very small budget and on a level of enthusiasm and practice. I mean, people here started completely cold 10, 11 years ago with Southside and then BLB. But over the years, it's developed into a very professional station. I remember quite clearly being here four years ago and seeing the audience surveys that had been done by a professional audience research company saying that you were knocking spots in audience terms off everything, including RTE. I think RTE 1 had a bigger audience for the Breakfast Show and that was it everywhere else in Bray and in Wicklow. BLB had the biggest audience and clearly you must be doing something right if you can get that sort of response.

 Oh, I think we were doing some things right. And another aspect that shouldn't be overlooked is BLB's global reach as a community radio model. Here's John again.

 I don't think we ever realized our potential. Like when we have a huge fund of stories about how we went beyond Bray. Sure, we set up as a radio station for Bray, but then we got known in Ireland for community radio. And then we got known in the UK and Ireland for community radio. And then we got known on a world stage. You wouldn't believe that if you didn't know the industry, but we did. We represented our point of view community radio from Bray at conferences in Vancouver. We went to Nicaragua at a conference there. We went to conferences all over the UK and we became quite a model for small scale community radio. We published a book. We published papers on that. I remember going to meet people in different parts of Europe to talk about community radio. And I got interviewed on BBC 2 television about what was community radio. What did it mean? What we did in Ireland. So we got well known a small town in a small country. Ended up being quite influential in the world stage of community radio.

 When I look back, I often wonder if we took the right road setting up as a community radio service, because it was much more challenging than becoming a commercial music station, which is what we've ended up with in Bray anyway. Do I regret the decision to pursue community radio only?

 No. I think it would be much easier if we had gone down the commercial route because it was a demand for that anyway. And I think we were very self-righteous in what we wanted to do because we felt it had a purpose. And maybe on the one hand, if we'd gone down the commercial route, we'd had far fewer people. We'd probably have made money at it and we'd probably have grown to a certain scale because we've had a lot of go on us. However, we mightn't have lasted as long because there'd probably never been a split. We'd have gone someplace else. Whereas I think we became very dogged in our philosophy and our beliefs. And when it came time to get licenses, we had developed a very clear philosophy. We developed a very good story. Being a commercial radio would have been just like one of everybody else. Now, the difficulty we had in going for a license was there was not a license category for BLB to go into. There was no way a community station could be community funded the way we were.

 Recently, I had the opportunity to catch up with Laurie Hallis at the University of Bedfordshire, who were hosting a land-based pirate radio conference. So after 40 years, what were his reflections on BLB?

 I think the thing about BLB is that it was something different. If you look at BLB and you look at what was the other one, NDCR, North Dublin Community Radio, they were trying to do something more than just playing records. There's a difference between a radio station that is purely entertainment and a radio station that has a sense of belonging, a sense of involvement in its community. And the outside broadcasts that BLB did that we talked about earlier on today make that point really clear. But it's also the case that when you look at what BLB did, it was a precursor to what a lot of community stations are doing here in the UK, but also the sorts of things that, for example, Connemara Community Radio are still doing today and lots of other smaller stations around in the Republic. So it was a leader. And so when we were running the pirate radio station at the Glastonbury Festival and various people like John Murphy and Karen Shields came over to take part in that, and we then came over to Ireland, it was an eye-opener. You can't deal with the real detail of a community like Bray unless you're part of that community.



 (Blank Audio)