New BBC Local Radio jingles: Launched on Radio Leicester - Page 6

RW

Robert Williams Founding member 21 January 2020 7:45am

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...

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.

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 pretty much correct - between July and December 1993, the amount of separate programming between BBC Radio Surrey and BBC Radio Sussex was gradually reduced, and from October they were both identified on air as BBC Radio Sussex & Surrey. Then at the start of 1994 it officially became a single station (I remember the previous evening the newsreader finished the 10pm bulletin with the words 'and that's the news on the final day of Radio Sussex'), and from then on there were no more split news bulletins or jingles.

London Lite posted:

WMD posted:

London Lite posted:

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.

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 name change was at the start of August 1994, but they had already drastically reduced the amount of music a few weeks earlier. However they didn't go officially all-talk until early September 1994, with an all-new schedule featuring the likes of Gordon Astley and Tommy Boyd.

In September 1997 they reintroduced music, had another drastic schedule change and reintroduced separate breakfast shows and news bulletins. I had hoped the change in 2009 to BBC Sussex and BBC Surrey would lead to greater separation between the two, but unfortunately this hasn't come to pass.

RW

Robert Williams Founding member 21 January 2020 9:08am

Inspector Sands posted:

Lou Scannon posted:

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...

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.

I think they did plan to ditch the word 'Radio' altogether from all stations around 2008, and the new logos that were introduced in the autumn of that year for all stations (except Southern Counties, the reason for which became clear a few months later) did omit the word 'Radio'. However they never went through with it in the end, and the word was eventually reinstated on the logos.

Oxford have twice ditched and reinstated the word 'Radio', while Wiltshire removed it when they ditched the separate 'BBC Radio Wiltshire' and 'BBC Radio Swindon' branding. In other cases I think it's just to make it less of a mouthful for presenters, for example in my area they announce the station as 'BBC Sussex and BBC Surrey' - having the word 'Radio' in there twice would be too much - while in Newcastle they have to utter 'BBC Newcastle, Radio for the North East' in every link.

The problem is, that even if you try to call a station 'BBC x', the listeners will still always call it 'Radio x' - they admitted as much when BBC London reverted to BBC Radio London in 2015.

Thames Valley FM ditched the 'FM' after two-and-a-half years and became simply BBC Thames Valley for 18 months before reverting to Radio Oxford and Radio Berkshire. Three Counties Radio has always had the word 'Radio' in its name since it changed from Radio Bedfordshire. I always disliked the 'Counties' names because they sound vague and not very 'local'.

MA

Markymark 21 January 2020 9:40am

Inspector Sands posted:

Lou Scannon posted:

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...

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.

Lou Scannon posted:

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.

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

Presumably BRMB was a similar attempt?

The RDS ID for BBC Thames Valley was BBC TVFM which amused me

Originally Berkshire was to have been twinned with Surrey, I have a early 80s transmitter plan. BBC Surrey and Berks using Hannington and Guildford. Makes sense because the area around Aldershot, Farnborough, Camberley etc are more afiliated to Reading than Sussex. Reigate was shown as carrying Sussex

WM

WMD 21 January 2020 9:54am

Markymark posted:

The RDS ID for BBC Thames Valley was BBC TVFM which amused me

Originally Berkshire was to have been twinned with Surrey, I have a early 80s transmitter plan. BBC Surrey and Berks using Hannington and Guildford. Makes sense because the area around Aldershot, Farnborough, Camberley etc are more afiliated to Reading than Sussex. Reigate was shown as carrying Sussex

BBC.TVFM (with a dot instead of a space) on the Berkshire frequencies. /geek

Berkshire retained county-specific TOTH news bulletins, and there were split jingles (mainly to plug 95.2FM in Oxford and 104.1 in Berks).

There was a proposal to retain the BBC Thames Valley name for the Berkshire station after the demerger, but public opinion prevailed and the name BBC Radio Berkshire was restored. By this time, there was already split programming for breakfast and drivetime.

RW

Robert Williams Founding member 21 January 2020 10:08am

Markymark posted:

Reigate was shown as carrying Sussex

The Reigate transmitter did indeed carry Radio Sussex, even after Radio Surrey launched from the Guildford transmitter, which was always a source of annoyance that I could hear the station that didn't cover my area in crystal clear quality, but struggled to pick up the one that did.

They eventually changed Reigate to Surrey output in 1997 when SCR reintroduced separate breakfast shows, but briefly changed it back to Sussex for about six months in 2006, until listener complaints and common sense prevailed.

IS

Inspector Sands 21 January 2020 11:20am

Robert Williams posted:

The problem is, that even if you try to call a station 'BBC x', the listeners will still always call it 'Radio x' - they admitted as much when BBC London reverted to BBC Radio London in 2015.

My in-laws all call their BBC local station 'x radio' even though its had the same name for 30 years and there's never been a rival with that name

EL

elmarko 21 January 2020 2:24pm

I distinctly remember a woman calling LBC/Iain Lee on a Sunday night Triple M show at stupid o'clock and asking "is that Essex?" when Iain put her straight to air.

No Radio Essex, just "is that Essex?"

Old people are baffling.

JO

Jon 21 January 2020 3:31pm

elmarko posted:

I distinctly remember a woman calling LBC/Iain Lee on a Sunday night Triple M show at stupid o'clock and asking "is that Essex?" when Iain put her straight to air.

No Radio Essex, just "is that Essex?"

Old people are baffling.

Presumably she meant the commercial station Essex FM now Heart branded.

IS

Inspector Sands 21 January 2020 3:58pm

Going back to the new jingles, Solent got them this week and they sound great. A much better implementation than the ones Leicester are using I think:
(top of the hour is at 2:00)

And after the speculation on page 1 about slogans, Solent is 'the sound of the south'

Last edited by Inspector Sands on 21 January 2020 4:04pm

LL

London Lite Founding member 21 January 2020 4:52pm

With the inevitable rebrand of Eagle Radio in Guildford once Bauer take control of UKRD's portfolio, I'd like to hope that BBC Surrey would then have the reason to seperate from the awful Sussex output and go fully local.

County Sound and Eagle have been the de facto local station in West Surrey and NE Hants for years as the BBC didn't launch local radio in the county until 1991, so if Bauer decide to network the hell out of the station, BBC Surrey really need to raise their game instead of lazy networking from Brighton for most of the day and a token 60 minutes during drive on weekdays.

IS

Inspector Sands 21 January 2020 5:24pm

London Lite posted:

County Sound and Eagle have been the de facto local station in West Surrey and NE Hants for years as the BBC didn't launch local radio in the county until 1991.

Although that was the same year that County Sound and Radio Mercury merged and the station became part networked

The FM service became Radio Mercury with just daytime weekdays from Guildford, and MW became County Sound and then Mercury Extra, broadcasting from Crawley. The arrangement wasn't very popular and they lost their license 4 years later

For whatever reason the BBC didn't take the opportunity to go after the audience that left Mercury and County Sound back then. These days Eagle is a smaller player, and there's a lot more competition. I don't think it's as much of an opportunity for them.

Radio Surrey will always have been a struggle, the London stations reach a large part of its patch and as you say commercial radio got established there years earlier.

MA

Markymark 21 January 2020 5:27pm

elmarko posted:

Old people are baffling.

If you make it to your 80s, I'm sure the same will be said of you