Bradford’s own radio station, BCB 106.6, celebrates its
twentieth anniversary this year. Co-founder Rob Walsh
takes us through the early days.
How to start a radio station? We hadn’t a clue – I’d been djing
on PCR, a Bradford pirate station, as their token John Peel, and
that was it. So, twenty years ago, we improvised.
We were on a radio skills course, learning how the government
favoured the commercial pop-pap-and-prattle format and
would only allow small stations a one month licence. We
thought we could borrow a couple of tape recorders and hire a
transmitter. What else do you need?
A one month licence? The light bulb went on over mine and
Mary’s heads. We marshalled the course trainees and added
a couple of reluctant radio professionals. A community radio
station for Bradford? Why not?
The tipping point was deciding to focus the
broadcast around the two week Bradford Festival.
Bradford Festival Radio? We asked Dusty Rhodes,
keystone, lightning rod and inspiration for the
Festival and many other Bradford events, for some
money. He didn’t let us down.
We snowballed into a shambolically enthusiastic force, meeting
in the Beehive’s back room. I handwrote and photocopied
newsletters.
For the first broadcast in 1992 Nicholas Treadwell volunteered
a room on the top floor of his Little Germany Art Mill, we sort-
of-soundproofed it with mattress ticking, stuck an aerial on
the roof, and we were off, running on adrenalin and twelve
hour days. Mary opened up the station, then I turned up around
lunchtime and stayed till midnight. We gradually built up a
staff team. Simon Ashberry, then music writer and general hack
at the T&A, gave us lots of support in print.
The studios faced Ilkley Moor and the west, so we did sunset
reviews in the late evening. Irna Qureshi did some great
magazine programmes, bringing Asian and Bradford culture
together, Mary focussed on speech programming, and I did an
eclectic music show several evenings a week. Sometimes we
were a bit rubbish, walking the wire in public and learning
as we went. But it never descended to pop-pap-and-prattle.
Maybe my memory has erased that.
For the next two Festival Radio broadcasts we moved into the
Wool Exchange, home to lots of Festival events, and broadcast
from a room in the clock tower. Waterstones may have saved
the Wool Exchange from neglect and disuse, but Bradford lost a
good venue, with acts like the Bhundu Boys, Richard Thompson,
Kirsty McColl, Kevin Coyne, fashion shows and acrobatics. We
were upstairs, broadcasting on a shoestring and still unpaid.
One Wool Exchange broadcast saw us on medium wave, set up
by a radio engineer who decided the MW transmitter should be
on the roof of the Magistrates Court across town, with the aerial
dipped in the pool outside. Medium wave eh? Other unorthodox
MW solutions involved us covering Hustlergate in wet carpet to
boost the signal. I don’t think we went for that one.
Then we geared up, with training grants and permanent
premises. We called ourselves BCB, moved to Forster Square,
set up a better studio, and started broadcasting via the
transmitter tower at Wrose Hill.
Still month-long broadcasts, as the Radio Authority didn’t trust
this newfangled community radio idea. Eventually, ten years
ago, we managed to convince them that we were here to stay
and could be trusted with a full time radio frequency.
Around this time I moved on, becoming press officer for Bradford
Festival, then a communications freelance-cum--proofreader-
editor, a career that sprang from that initial adrenalin radio
buzz.
BCB 106.6 is still going strong, under Mary Dowson’s
direction, with studios at Rawson Place, a focus
for everything Bradford and a hive of activity,
with scores of volunteers putting out a wide range
of programming.
I do a music programme on Sunday nights, and every time I
go in to BCB I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved. Mary,
station manager Jonathan Pinfield, and all those volunteers
made the station what it is today, and I was right behind that
ball when it started rolling twenty years ago.
Rob Walsh
6
