This weekend in our rockumentary slot, we begin playing a series of documentaries that we’re sure will be fascinating to many of our listeners.
Many of us love the medium of radio, and that’s why we either listen to or participate in Mushroom Fm. There’s something about the connection between broadcaster and listener, and there’s a special something about the music from the decades we feature here on Mushroom FM.
If you’re listening to us from the United States, Canada, Australia and many other countries, and you grew up during the 50s and 60s, you would have been able to tune into your favourite music station and here the hits any time you liked. In some countries, including Britain and New Zealand, that wasn’t how it was. Radio was heavily regulated and operated exclusively by the Government. Pop music was rationed. In an attempt to break the Government stranglehold on radio, a series of offshore radio stations began broadcasting in Britain, starting with Radio Caroline on the Easter weekend of 1964. Radio Caroline still operates in some form to this day.
Over the next few months, we’ll bring you some documentaries about this extraordinary era in radio. It was real, it was raw, it was unpredictable and at times it was incredibly, heart-stoppingly dramatic. It also created broadcasters who made contributions for decades, some of them are still on-air even now.
It is only fitting that our first documentary in this series is about the station that started it all, Radio Caroline. Over the next few weeks, we bring you a documentary produced in the 1980s called “Caroline, Queen of the Pirates”. It’s produced and presented by Dave Windsor, who at the time was working for the British Forces Broadcasting Service. It chronicles Radio Caroline’s turbulent history from its inception through to the 1980s. This is an off-air recording, so it can be a bit rough and ready in places, but it is truly worth a listen. Whether you remember this period as a listener, or you want to educate yourself about this important part of broadcasting history, you’ll want to hear this.
You can hear the first episode of “Caroline, Queen of the Pirates”, on Sunday at 2 PM US Eastern time, 7 PM in the UK. It will repeat at 11 PM Eastern time, 6 AM in the UK on Monday morning.
Stay tuned over the months to come for plenty of fascinating offshore radio memories.