Watercolor

Bradford’s own radio station, BCB 106.6, celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. Co-founder Rob Walsh takes us through the early days.

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.

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.

Rob Walsh

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