New BBC Local Radio jingles

I think the style of the new jingles is a likely sign that they're going to start aiming for a younger audience and trying to fill the gap left by local commercial stations which have been regionalised/networked.

Tony Hall confirmed 'changes are coming', so it's a case of watch this space.

Well the shorthand for Warwickshire usually WARKS but that’s hardly the point. They weren’t compelled to brand the drive time slot based on a target area.


I could understand an evening shows one night a week branded as such. But it’s a bit like branding Midlands Today as ‘Birmingham Tonight’. It’s not like the county of Warwickshire is a small area added on to the TSA it’s got a larger population than Cov and I’m not sure the people of Warwickshire at large feel as though they would describe themselves as from near Coventry like those of us from towns near Birmingham sometimes simply say we’re from near Birmingham.

I think rebrand to CWR is to appeal to those who used to listening to commercial radio and would probably have an image of ‘BBC Coventry and Warwickshire’ of being quite formal and stuffy. My guess would be BBC local radio will be going for more of a commercial radio sound with tighter playlists and more music, but it would be interesting to see how they do that whilst keeping up public service commitments but not losing airtime to commercials should help to insure a good level of speech.

Something to do with the 2021 City of Culture I think, at least telhats the impression I got from the article in Radio Today

Still doesn’t make it seem any less of a strange decision though.

They could call themselves BBC Mercia, seeing as that's the heritage market they are attempting to capture, why not?

Is there still a lot of variation regarding the inclusion of the word "Radio" in the official station names?

I'm sure that at least a few stations which didn't include the word previously have changed over in the last couple of years or so (e.g. BBC Radio London, BBC Three Counties Radio).

This seemed to possibly suggest some desire to gradually standardise with universal inclusion of the word Radio, but I suppose there'd simply have to be at least some exceptions in order to avoid ultra-long names (e.g. BBC Hereford & Worcester, BBC Coventry & Warwickshire). That, and the Beeb's general chronic inability to achieve 100% blanket implementation of anything ever...

Essex never had radio in the branding due to the local commercial competition launching first as Essex Radio, so would have been confusing.

London started off as Radio London from 70-88, GLR (Greater London Radio) took over as the brand until 2000 and then a brief stint as BBC London Live, then BBC London first of all stylised as LDN and then London before going back to the original brand.

Sussex and Surrey started off with Radio in the branding, changed to Southern Counties Radio before the then LR policy to have the county or city name in the branding as BBC Surrey or BBC Sussex.

I've always disliked the name "BBC WM". Literally nothing but initials and no actual words, which feels "un-BBC" to me. Commercial stations with initials-only names, fine. If it were my decision to make, I would force them to stick the word Radio in the middle of that.

And BBC Sussex began life as BBC Radio Brighton. Pretty sure there was a brief period in 1993 when they’d pretty much given up on Surrey and became Southern Counties Radio in all but name, under the clumsy branding ‘BBC Radio Sussex and Surrey’.

That's right, although I think the Guildford studio was still used during this period for some output. I think with the relaunch was when SCR went all speech too.

The rebrand from Radio Brighton to Radio Sussex was when they launched transmitters at Heathfield on FM and Bexhill on AM to cover mid and East Sussex in 83. West Sussex (outside mid Sussex, Worthing and Littlehampton) didn't get proper FM coverage until much later.

There's definately been phases of naming styles that got introduced or tried but never got any further.


I think the word radio started to be omitted mainly when the plan was to make the stations tri-media in the 2000s. So it would have been 'BBC Bristol TV' rather than the odd 'BBC Radio Bristol TV'. However the local TV experiment never went any further and the stations online presence has been scaled back massively.

The 3 Counties/Southern Counties/Thames Valley names were all 90s renames, the latter to solve the problem of two new and underperforming stations. Possibly there could have been similar names if other mergers happened - BBC Bristol and Somerset for example. I think Radio Leeds toyed with a similar name

Thames Valley of course also went for the 90s fad of suffixing 'FM' as did Dorset FM. That didn't go any further.

When BBC London Live launched I'm sure there were rumblings that it's name was a reaction to the success of 5 Live. The vague plan that didn't go any further was that local radio would become essentially become local opt outs of 5 Live which would of course then get some exposure on FM. Never happened, although all local stations now take 5 Live overnight, which wasn't universally the case.




Personally I liked the initialed ones - GLR, GMR, WM, CWR, I think they are just more catchy, interesting and roll off the tongue. Though they don't work as well on the more rural stations. I don't think they ever officially used BBC SCR or 3CR on air

I always liked the name of the rival to WM in Wolverhampton: WABC which stood for Wolverhampton And Black Country. Very American sounding but very clever