Location Location Location

I think Cheshire is divided up between Radios Stoke, Merseyside and Manchester.


There are a quite a number of cases where the station coverage areas don't match county boundaries. Some have already been mentioned, but there is also Hampshire where the main station is of course Radio Solent, but the northern part of the county around Basingstoke comes under Radio Berkshire, while the Aldershot area comes under BBC Surrey. The northern parts of Sussex, around Crawley and East Grinstead, receive better FM coverage of BBC Surrey than BBC Sussex, so as a compromise, news concerning those areas appears on both Surrey and Sussex - in practice, though, almost all the output of both is joined together anyway.

I seem to remember it was referred to on air as 'Beds, Herts and Bucks' for a while before the 3 counties name. Though I don't know if that was more a tagline rather than a name

More or less, the name used on air was the clunky 'BBC Radio Bedfordshire with Herts and Bucks' for about six months leading up to the name change.

Beds, Herts and Bucks is the name of the editorial region on the BBC News website. Most of them match local radio stations but not all have the same name for example WM's patch is called Birmingham & Black Country on BBC News.

There has been a bit of pruning in recent years. Radio stations often had multiple online sites, eg Leeds and the awfully named "Bradford and West Yorkshire", which had been consolidated into a Leeds site that covers the whole of West Yorkshire.

Incidentally I understand that Radio Leeds has established a new Bradford office with a studio of some kind. Not long after a new Managing Editor arrived who used to be the Asian Affairs Producer and presenter of a daily news show from the original Bradford studio at City Hall.

Yes, I think that was around 2011 when the local sites were downgraded from being sites in their own right with lots of local features, to being little more than news index pages, in order to try to appease other local news providers.


They were pruned back so that in England the sites mirror the local radio stations, with the exception of Dorset which still has its own page but not a dedicated radio station.

Dorset's a bit of a mess TV wise too, split across three regions. A result of transmitter siting and local topography

Yes. It's a bit odd, because Andover really looks more to Southampton and the coast, than towards Reading and the Thames Valley (though the present arrangements mirror the legacy ILR station's coverage) Though in Basingstoke it's both directions in equal measures.
It's because of the use of Hannington for local radio, and its regional sized coverage !

Ofcom were talking about extending the local 'Solent' DAB mux to Hannington, that would effect give us here in N Hants a choice of either Solent or Berks. (Which to be fair we now get on Freeview, so there has been progress)

And of course, Radio York got on the cover of the Radio Times...



This was at least partly because there was a long strike at the Radio Times in 1983, lasting over three months, which meant there was only one edition for the whole of the UK and a new local radio station therefore wouldn't have got any proper coverage. So they tied it in with a special feature devoted to local radio in general, with Radio York getting nationwide listings for its first week.



Yeah, there's no way you'd get Radio Stoke in Chester. Chester and Ellesmere Port are very much Merseyside territory and places like Stockport and Macclesfield would be covered by Manchester. You'd probably get Radio Stoke in Crewe and Nantwich, but I'm not sure there's much that really unites the whole of Cheshire that would justify its own station.

Actually Chester is a bit of a blackspot in terms of media, as the ILR station was Marcher Sound, based in Wrexham, and the daily local paper is the Chester Leader which is a spin-off of the Wrexham Leader and published by North Wales Newspapers. The Chester Chronicle (or as I hilariously called it when I did work experience there, the Chester Chronic) is a weekly, but that's it. Everything else comes from Wrexham.

Though as we all know, Wrexham is better than Chester. The football teams are another example.

The Radio Times often had spells of a single national, or fewer regional editions, throughout the 70s in particular, owing to industrial action.
What was the problem ?

I was only six and seven at the time, but I was already an avid Radio Times fan so I well remember the long periods of industrial action that affected RT production in 1983 and early 1984, which led to a few issues not getting published at all (hence the gaps in Genome coverage), while others had limited availability (such as the Holy Week issue, and later in the year the Five Doctors issue, both of which we were not able to get hold of in my area, but was able to acquire via friends of the family who lived in other parts of the country).


And then there were those 'National Editions' which occured from April to July 1983, and again from the end of 1983 (it seemed a bit touch and go as to whether the Christmas edition would come out at all) and into the early months of 1984.

It was the print union Sogat 82 that was causing the problems, though I'm not sure exactly what the issue was. Tony Currie's book The Radio Times Story might well explain what was going on, though I don't have it to hand at this moment.

I remember the TV Times suffered from similar industrial action, notably in 1980. Often national editions would be produced, or trimmed-down editions with very little additional content. Sometimes there would be no issue produced at all.



Radio Tees (as it is now known) was on air well before Radio York, and covered a large part of North Yorkshire, officially and unofficially. Are the northern parts of the county (the areas bordering the Tees Valley, etc) covered by both stations in terms of news content?