Radio Moments - Clips

Presenters rarely gather on-air and just have fun. Christmas is a decent time to do it, not least if you're on a pirate ship facing long days and nights with your loved ones across the dark North Sea. Enjoy here a few festive moments on a 'loonabaout' with Carl Mitchell, Glen Adams and Stevie Merike on board Radio Caroline as it enjoyed its first Christmas as a lone - and thoroughly illegal -pirate. Studio quality recording too.

When the snow comes, radio comes into its own. Relish here a bit of crisis programming on Leicester Sound and Radio Trent from 1987. The two stations came together, for reasons of other presenters stuck in the drifts, and a presenter from each service chipped in. Andy Marriott and Steve Merike made for an unlikely pairing, but it’s great to hear this. Not least because of the manifold mentions of long forgotten bus companies and electricity boards.

The BBC announced on 16th Nov 2016 that its World Service would launch 11 new language services. The expansion was a result of the funding boost announced by the UK government last year.

The new languages would be Afaan Oromo, Amharic, Gujarati, Igbo, Korean, Marathi, Pidgin, Punjabi, Telugu, Tigrinya, and Yoruba, with the first new services expected to launch in 2017.

The expansion was the largest growth spurt since the 1940s, with languages having been cut from the service in recent years.

"This is a historic day for the BBC" said BBC director general Tony Hall.

His clear tones epitomised a calm era of Radio 2. Armed with some TV experience and a spell with the pirate Radio Caroline, Colin Berry joined the BBC’s new 'Light Programme' in the seventies.

He was to host all of its major dayparts, from time to time, and was said to be the station’s longest continuous-serving news reader until his final bulletin in 2012. Famously too, for 25 years, we heard him deliver the UK’s voting in the Eurovision song contest.

In his own words, this is the Colin Berry story.

(Music by Larry Bryant www.larrybryant.com)