Start the world, I want to get on!

We have now been in Portugal for 5 days and at last have settled in to the pace and way of life in Fuseta. To say that it is laid back is an understatement and, as the Young Allotmenteer so accurately declared on his return from a stay here in September, "You just can't spend money in Fuseta!".

For example, a glass of draft Sagres or Super Bock is 0.70p in the quayside bars and bottle of eminently drinkable red or white wine from the local shop is £1.00 for a litre! So reassuring to know that my current Internet employers are paying me 12½ litres of red per hour to update one of their websites.

Eating out is also ridiculously cheap in the local bars, cafes and restaurants. A new establishment, O Buda, has opened since our last visit serving a daily dish of meat or fish with starter, sweet, coffee and a beer or glass of sangria or wine for £7.00 a head!

The weather is much better than we envisaged, sunny every day so far with temperatures of around 16C - 20C during the day and just a little chilly without being really cold at night.

The weekend before we flew out, complete with hangover and Delhi belly after a night out with The Young Allotmenteer, last month's birthday boy Digger and respective other halves, we returned to Ipswich for the first time since my mother died in 2010, to stay with my old friend Mike Harrison and his wife Dawn on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

We had a great weekend, celebrating Mike's big day in true Ipswich tradition, (i.e. loads of beer), on the Friday night and continuing where we had left off on the Saturday night.

In between times, we met up for lunch with another old friend David Kindred and his wife Anne. Mike, David, Anne and I were colleagues at the East Anglian Daily Times for a couple of hectic years in the late sixties.

David, who was a news photographer, was best man at our wedding in 1968 and since we left Ipswich in 1971 our meetings have been few and far between.

Here's a reminder of what we looked like in those days:

What a couple of Likely Lads!

I'll leave you to decide who was Rodney and who was Terry, but here's clip to remind you of life in the 60's.

Must sign off now and read a few more chapters of "The Brentford Triangle", the second novel in the nine book "Brentford Trilogy" featuring the exploits of John Omally & his bicycle Marchant, Jim Pooley, Professor Slocombe, Neville the part-time barman, Norman Hartnell (not to be confused with Norman Hartnell) et al, set in the Flying Swan and the Butts Estate allotments, written in the 80's and 90's by English humourist Robert Rankin, in the Flann O'Brien mould.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brentford_Trilogy

They were recommended to me by one of my faithful Bloggers, to whom I extend my thanks, and are inventive, entertaining and very funny.

Here's a snippet from the "Brentford Triangle":

  "There was something very odd about Camelus bactrimus, the Common Egyptian camel. Norman squatted on his haunches in his rented garage upon the Butts Estate and stared at the brute. There was definitely something very very odd about it. Certainly it was a camel far from home and had been called into its present existence by means which were totally inexplicable, even to the best educated camel this side of the Sahara, but this did not explain its overwhelming oddness. Norman dug a finger into his nose and ruminated upon exactly what that very very oddness might be.

   Very shortly it struck him with all the severity of a well-aimed half-brick.  When he had been leading the thing away to his secret hideout, it had occurred to him at the time just how easy it had been to move. And he recalled that although he, an eight-stone weakling of the pre-Atlas-course persuasion, had left distinctive tracks, the camel, a beasty of eminently greater bulk, had left not a mark.

   And now, there could be little doubt about it, the camel's feet no longer reached the ground. In fact, the creature was floating in open defiance of all the accepted laws of gravity, some eighteen inches above the deck.

   'Now that's what I would call odd,' said Norman, startling the hovering ship of the desert and causing it to break wind loudly - a thing which, in itself, might be tolerable in the sandblown reaches of the Sahara, but which was no laughing matter in an eight-by-twelve lock-up garage. 'Ye gods,' muttered Norman, covering his nose with a soot-stained pullover sleeve."

Later tonight, at 10.00pm, we're off to Bar O'Farol for a late night blast of heavy rock from Domingos e Amigos:

I think I could quite happily live here!

Hey Ho!

This is the BBC Home service...............

In the week where the BBC marks it's 90th anniversary in total disarray over how it has dealt with child abuse allegations, both on air and off, the resignation of director-general George Entwistle, with a controversial 12 month salary pay-off of £450k, and the subsequent resignations of the director of news Helen Broaden and her deputy I thought it a good time to look back at another notorious period of the BBC's chequered history from the late 1950's and the early 1960's', as documented by Peter Moore, owner of the current Radio Caroline station.

In the late fifties the cult of the 'teenager' began to emerge with the appearance of American style 'teddy boys' copying role models seen on American imported movies. With this came American music; rock and roll, blues and rhythm & blues were copied and then modified by young British artists. Opportunity for hearing such music on BBC radio was limited to a Sunday afternoon review of the current charts and a Saturday morning programme, 'The Saturday Skiffle Club,' (later the Saturday Club after the skiffle craze ended.) These 'shows' were hosted by established BBC presenters in the style of a headmaster presiding over a schoolboys picnic.

The only other way to hear modern popular music was to tune to Radio Luxembourg, the only cross border broadcaster to the UK that had been able to restart operations after the war. The Luxembourg signal could only reach the UK after dark when the propagation conditions changed. Even then it faded in and out for long periods. This notwithstanding, Luxembourg was hugely popular.

Station air time was block booked in fifteen minute or half hour slots and taken up entirely by the major record labels of the day; Decca, Capitol, E.M.I., Parlophone etc... Only their own signed and recorded artists could expect any air play.

In the early sixties then, all was fairly comfortable for the BBC with their state monopoly and Luxembourg with their commercial monopoly and yet more and more talented British groups and artists were modifying and Anglicising imported music and then developing their own song writing skills. How could this music be put before the public.

Around this time there arrived in London one Ronan O'Rahilly, the tearaway son of a well known and wealthy Irish family. O'Rahilly possessed a number of pertinent qualities; a back ground of generally getting what he wanted, a quick and lateral thinking brain, a maturity and presence which belied his tender years and an Irish naivety which gave him no knowledge or regard for the accepted way of going about things. He settled into Soho and London's club land. Ray Charles was his hero. Soon Ronan was operating his own Rhythm & Blues Club. He bought the Rolling Stones their first set of stage equipment and briefly managed them together with his friend, Georgiou Gomalski, before entrepreneur Andrew Oldham snapped them up. But he still had the blues singer Alexis Korner and northerner Georgie Fame as his protégés. He was influential in the early days of Eric Burdon and the Animals even suggesting the name for the band. Live gigs at small venues were a slow way to achieve popularity, but nobody would record his artists. O'Rahilly created his own record label and paid for his own acetates. When presenting these to the BBC he learned that the Corporation only played music by established artists which begged the obvious question 'how to get established.'

At Radio Luxembourg he fared worse, station bosses laughed heartily showing him the programme schedules block booked by the major labels. Independents had no chance of air play at all. The answer? Give up his artists and hope they could be signed by a major label. 'Well,' O'Rahilly told the Luxembourg directors, 'If after managing my own artists I have to create my own record label because nobody will record them and if I then find that no radio station will play their music, it seems that the only thing now is to have my own radio station.' Radio Luxembourg thought this hugely funny and showed him the door.

Soon after, at a party, a girl told Ronan about the station Voice of America which was operating at sea from the official USA vessel the MV Courier. He gleaned information about this operation from the US Embassy and also travelled to visit Jack Kotschack, the owner of the marine station, Radio Nord and the owners of Radio Veronica an efficiently run Dutch offshore radio station. Radio law in the Netherlands was as restrictive as in the UK. In Holland as in Britain the law of the land only extended as far as territorial waters, three miles out from the coast. Beyond that lay international waters where there was no law other than that defined by the flag states of ships. A ship registered to Panama for example, whilst in international waters recognised Panamanian law. If the law of the flag state had no objection to international marine broadcasting then the ship could make broadcasts which were not illegal and could not be stopped. Even Veronica was using precedent created by earlier marine broadcasts made off the Danish and Swedish coasts. The UK however with the young population created by the post war baby boom and with burgeoning youth culture and a new pop industry had untapped potential.

This was the breakthrough O'Rahilly needed and he had certain advantages to build from.

He was now mixing in the clubs and coffee bars of Soho and Chelsea with the young sons of very wealthy people. With his upbringing, large sums of money did not faze him. His family wholly owned the Irish port of Greenore, an ideal place to quietly convert a ship into a floating radio station.

On a fund raising trip to the USA he was captivated by a photograph in Life magazine showing president John F. Kennedy's daughter Caroline playing in the Oval Office of the White House and disrupting the serious business of government. This was exactly the image he wanted for his station. The name had to be Radio Caroline.

With finance in place, the ex ferry Fredericia was purchased and taken to his family owned port Greenore for conversion. Radio studios were built on the upper decks behind the ships bridge. In the hold were A.C. generators connected to two 10KW medium wave (AM ) broadcast transmitters. The combined power from these was fed to a tall aerial tower near the bow of the ship.

Renamed the MV Caroline the ship headed for the British coast off Essex, from where it would cover London and the South East.

On Easter Sunday 1964, with their words having been pre-recorded since they were too nervous to broadcast live, Chris Moore and the then unknown actor Simon Dee announced 'This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all day music station.'

Then this record was played and dedicated to Ronan O'Rahilly.

Caroline was on the air!

A couple of months later Caroline was joined off the Essex coat by Radio Atlanta broadcasting from the MV Mia Amigo. Within weeks the stations merged and the original ship the MV Caroline sailed to Ramsey Bay becoming Radio Caroline North and the Mi Amigo stayed off Frinton-on-Sea becoming Radio Caroline South.

Now O'Rahilly had almost all of the UK plus Southern Ireland and substantial parts of the continent in range of his transmitters.

With Caroline as the catalyst and its audience of tens of millions, new music and youth fashion accelerated at astonishing speed and hundreds of new bands achieved massive and sometimes lasting success, a fact still not  forgotten to this day by the now ageing stars that it helped get started:

"...... Radio Caroline was an exciting part of all our lives and summed up the spirit of the times, culturally and musically." Sir Paul McCartney

"For The Who, Radio Caroline was an angelic force ........without Caroline we would not have sold a single record." Pete Townshend

"Radio Caroline was more adventurous than most of the stations around, it championed bands like The Kinks, who owe much of their early success to Radio Caroline." Ray Davies

"Radio Caroline gave us our start, my eternal thanks." Spencer Davis

"Did you ever wonder why so much fantastic music came out of Britain starting in the 60s? Pirates did it. The story of how they did it seems unbelievable, but it really happened. It completely altered the course of rock n roll." Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's band

"Radio Caroline was a great breakthrough in pop music radio - the one place you could hear the charts and new releases you couldn't hear anywhere else." Noddy Holder

"We wrote the song 'Rock n Roll' which included the lyric ' waiting all the time to find radio plays on Caroline'. This ballad was a big part of remembering how important Radio Caroline was to us. The fact that private radio stations played our songs and that they included some of the best DJs prompted the government to give the country top 40 stations." Francis Rossi, Status Quo.

"I had already started my recording career when Caroline launched. I loved lazing in bed in the morning listening to all my favourite records. It was amazing!" Sandie Shaw

"Tuning in to Radio Caroline in the 60s was an integral part of keeping abreast with the chart action of the day. For us recording artists, it not only kept us on our toes, but - upon hearing some sparkling new release - made us even more determined to match or surpass the musical standards being set!" Mike d'Abo, Manfred Mann.

" Everyone needs competition to maintain quality and provide alternatives and Radio Caroline was just what we needed in the 60's, being one of the first to do this in radio .." Joe Brown

"If there had been no Radio Caroline, there would have been no Wild Thing and no Troggs, plus many other groups we still know today from the 60s. God bless all who sailed in her." Reg Presley, The Troggs

By the end of 1964 Caroline had more listeners than the three BBC networks combined.

The monopolies of the BBC and Luxembourg were shattered and UK radio was changed forever.

As always, the BBC was totally out of touch with what their audience wanted.

Nothing's changed there then!

LONG LIVE RADIO

With the blue skies and sunshine of Paphos a distant memory, we closed the door on the caravan for the final time of 2012 in torrential rain and winds on Sunday.

Wading from the van to the car in our wellies we reflected on another great year at Lesley culminating in our winning a runners up prize in the Best Kept Caravan competition which is quite an achievement considering we lost just about all our bedding plants and shrubs to the savage winds and salt spray during the first week of June. Let's hope for a summer in 2013. 

The news is just as depressing as the weather and none more so than the controversies surrounding the good old British Broadcasting Company. Leaving aside the horrendous revelations and accusations surrounding the late Sir James Wilson Vincent "Jimmy" Savile, OBE, KCSG, from a purely selfish point of view I am more angry about the dramatic cuts planned for local radio services.

In common with most of my generation I was brought up on radio and still remember sitting round the radio listening to Paul Temple, Journey into Space, Educating Archie, the Billy Cotton Band Show and of course The Goon Show in the mid 50's and later, once I was hooked on music, Saturday Club with Brian Matthew, Pick of the Pops with Fluff Freeman and falling to sleep every night to the in and out fadings of Radio Luxembourg.

I can still vividly remember laying in the bath every Saturday morning after football listening to the Daddy of the Disc Jockeys, Jack Jackson.

Later, in the 60's we use laze on the east coast beaches listening to Radio Caroline and Radio London which were both just off the Suffolk-Essex shore.

Now I champion the cause of BBC local radio. It is far and away the best vehicle for local news, travel and weather and its locally themed chat shows, phone-ins and live discussion of community issues. It offers listeners an interactive local service that far surpasses that available in weekly local newspapers who are only interested in their circulation, regional TV and on the internet. Local radio stations, like local newspapers, are often the training ground for new journalists who could end up working in national or international media.

The BBC are planning to make drastic cuts across the corporation in a bid to save money.  Of course it’s our money they wish to save, the BBC belongs to every one of us licence payers. The BBC is the envy of the world, the planet’s no.1 broadcaster and it is ours and should be treasured.  Those who run the BBC should be of the understanding that they are simply looking after it for the benefit of us and our children and our children’s children.

I am a regular listener to BBC Radio Surrey and its sister station BBC Radio Sussex when in Selsey. They have their own local early morning breakfast and early evening drive time programs and at the weekends local sports commentaries and updates from all around Surrey, Sussex and North East Hampshire. Most of the rest of the time they have common programming but in the evening they join forces with other regional BBC stations for a 50's, 60's and 70's music show hosted by the excellent Roger "Twiggy" Day, of Radio Caroline fame, with nightly studio guests from the world of pop and rock music. At the weekend it's another stalwart from pirate radio, Kenny Everett's partner in crime, Dave Cash.

Despite the BBC reducing the annual cuts from £15m to £8m the whole identity of local radio is in threat of becoming at best regional radio which totally defeats the whole object. As an example Roger Day’s evening programme will vanish as between 7pm and 10pm they are preparing to broadcast a single show across the whole UK local radio network. Somebody tell me how this qualifies as local radio. Aren't Radio1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc enough channels for national radio?

The BBC wishes to apply a 20% of staff across the Local Radio network.  In doing so they will save less than 5% of operating costs.  To give you some perspective, local stations are staffed by on average 35 people and they produce around 4600 hours of programmes a year.  In contrast, Radio 1’s Newsbeat is staffed by 52 people and produce easily less than a few hundred hours each year in the form of news bulletins.

Doesn't seem like rocket science to me to work out where to make the cuts.

Now I hear that one of the most experienced and entertaining BBC radio presenters, so accurately described by a colleague of mine as a "Student of Life", having fought through throat and mouth cancer and returned to BBC Radio London, is losing all his weekday shows:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2003288/Danny-Baker-Ive-beaten-throat-mouth-cancer.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/01/danny-baker-bbc-show-axed
How stupid is that. Cut out the middle management not the people who entertain us and really care about radio. Love him or hate him, Danny Baker is nothing but entertaining and a radio institution. Let the listeners decide want they want to listen to, not make unwanted program changes in a desperate attempt to justify their jobs.

Local radio must NOT be allowed to die.

Click this link and sign the petition to Save BBC Local Radio :

http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/theindependentbbc

LONG LIVE RADIO

My thanks to The Surrey Heath Residents Blog for the facts and some of the words included in this blog.