I am not exactly a great fan of Richard Curtis’ films – here is a hilarious spoof of the film, Notting Hill – but this looks like a bit of fun to watch. Radio Caroline, the radio station that was based on an old lightship vessel off the Suffolk/Essex coast in the 1960s, embodied that glorious, British two-fingered gesture at overweening authority that, when allied to a bit of entrepreneurial dash, often explains the rise of many a business sector. It is hard to believe that in a world where radio was dominated by the BBC, that listeners to rock and pop music of the time had to resort to listening to stuff broadcast by a bunch of sea-sick DJs on a boat. Radio Caroline, alas, closed in 1967 when the BBC unveiled what was to become its Radio 1 station. On the television last night, the-then government minister who presided over the old monopoly, the “national treasure”, Tony Benn, claimed that shutting the station was necessary since the buccaneering RC station was “messy”. It is an example of the Soviet mindset that lurks beneath the infantile grin of that old man.
There are obvious parallels with the current assault on the citadels of the MSM by Internet-based writers and broadcasters. As Patri Friedman, grandson of the great Milton Friedman, prepares to head out East to tell us all about seasteading, the story of how a group of DJs briefly enlivened the airwaves via the North Sea is very timely.
Meanwhile, on the whole subject of radio and the rebellion against state-backed monopolists like the BBC, here is a good American perspective from Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker. Recommended.
Talk about Proust’s madeleine . . . .
Happy days. Radio Caroline – 199! – Radio North Sea International, Wonderful Radio London. Tony Blackburn, Emperor Rosko, Johnny Walker, Dave Lee Travis. The Mi Amigo, and the cult-like promos for ‘Loving Awareness’. It’s like it was yesterday.
Those guys were pioneers, to be sure. But I always had a very soft spot for Radio Jackie, which was a land-based pirate radio station, back in the day. Now those folks were taking chances . . . .
I understand they’ve all gone mainstream now. Oh, well . . .
llater,
llamas
Radio Caroline continued way into the 1970s. I think the others closed and maybe Caroline was off the air briefly but I recall listening to it during secondary school.
Having checked on Wikipedia it was active to 1968 and then resumed in 1972. That was when I remembered it.
Apparently it’s still going today
I too saw Wedgie Benn on telly last night. Once a commie, always a commie, no doubt about that.
And not forgetting “All Europe Radio, Laser-558”, a constant background of Charlie Wolf playing Madonna during the summer of ’85.
It’s an ironic parallel to the current Pirate Bay vs Global Media Conglomerate case. Proof perhaps that the spirit of the two-finger salute is not confined to any specific national psyche, but breeds among anyone who can level the playing field using technology (in the case of RC improved radio broadcasting equipment) and, like you say, has a bit of entrepreneurial dash.
Slightly earlier generation here. I started out by twiddling the dial on my Dansette ‘portable’ radio to listen to Radio Luxemburg under the bed covers. Radio Caroline came later. It was still mostly crackle and whine with the odd bit of ‘devil’s music’ breaking through occasionaly.
That old Dansette lasted well into the nineties.
What channel/time/programme was Tony Benn on?
Everything Llamas said, I was an avid Pirate listener too.
But living in Wales, the fade in and out was horrific, you’d get about 40 secs of a 3 minute single with any clarity.
But still we listened, why?
Cos it was the only game in town.
The BBC broadcast 4 hours of what could be considered youth music, back in 1964. Easy Beat and Saturday Club on Radio, and Juke Box Jury and Thank your Lucky Stars on ITV.
The Pirates fired the whole music scene in those days. You heard music you could hear nowhere else, and like a snowball rolling down hill…
You felt you were part of something, something alive and vital. I was one of Johnnie Walkers Under the bedclothes club members.
I was listening when he did the great South Coast car headlight illumination number.
I felt like I was there and part of it. Great days to be young!
Ah, Radio Caroline! Luxembourg! RNI! Radio Jackie! Fond memories of listening to such stations on my “Sinclair Micromatic” matchbox-sized radio [so easily concealed in the dorm at night, so the housemaster couldn’t tell you were listening after lights-out].
Hell, a schoolboy fascination with such stuff steered me towards a subsequent profitable career in electronic engineering!
Yes, but do you remember what a struggle it could be to get batteries for the thing?
I was in South London so my reception for most of the pirate stations was quite good, especially after they moved further offshore into the Thames Estuary. I had a Micromatic 2, which worked OK as manufactured – but my Dear Old Dad worked at a major electronic parts manufacturer and we upgraded to newer transistors with much-higher gain. I wish I had it still . . .
I think the pirates may have helped to form my anti-establishment streak. In the June 1970 general election in the UK, pirate radio, and specifically, the jamming of Radio Northsea International, was actually a significant issue. The Conservative Party sorta-kinda let the voters think that they would take a more relaxed approach to pirate radio – right up until about 4 milliseconds after they were elected, at which point, the jamming and the legal efforts to silence them were redoubled.
It was an object lesson in how governments – or those who want to be the government – will simply do whatever’s easiest, most-convenient and least-troublesome – for them.
llater,
llamas
I saw a section of “The Boat that Rocked” in the ads when I last went to see a film (about which I wrote a posting – but, like so many I do, it never appeared, such is life).
Anyway it looked as if the film presented the government minister who shut down the “pirate” radio station as a stuffy conservative – rather than the socialist “Tony” Benn who actually shut the independents down.
Standard leftist rewriting of history.
And for people who say “comedy does not matter” I would remind you that most young people get their main “knowledge” of politics and history from the entertainment media.
In the United States most young people watch “Jon Stewart” (perhaps if I dropped my dropped my Jewish family name I would do better in life) or Stephen Colbert – and that is their source of news and current affairs information (the Colbert Report is particularly odd – as it is a long attack on the supposedly establishment Bill O’Relly, even though Colbert does not sound Long Island Irish-American to me, and O’Reilly is on cable – he is a foe of the real establishment, the big broacasting networks especially N.B.C., the peoiple that Stephen Colbert is actually a lap dog of).
“The internet Paul, the internet”.
Errrr most young people do not use the internet to correct the leftist stuff they see on T.V.
They use the internet for other things.
The first person I know of (although, most likely, there were many before him) to notice that youthful “revolt” was normally just some young people shouting out what they had been taught – was Ludwig Von Mises.
He noticed (even before the First World War) that young collectivists (although they thougt of themselves as “free spirits” of course) thougth they were “rebelling” when they ran with the principles they had been taught in school and university.
It is much the same now.
Teachers are produced in teacher training colleges (which is unfortunate – it was better when they were not), and what is taught in these colleges?
Well in the most “respected” teacher training college in the United States (Columbia) the main works are those on teaching in relation to “social justice” by that adviser on Chicago Education, “Bill” Ayers.
I rather doubt that F.A. Hayek’s “The Mirage of Social Justice” is on the reading list – or any of Antony Flew’s attacks on “social justice”.
And, if they were, student teachers who cited such works with approval would not have a happy time.
Either at Columbia or most of the other teacher training colleges in the United States or Britain.
So off the teachers go to the schools.
So it is no suprise that the “rebels” turn out to be have been “good students”, teacher’s pets who are just shouting out what they have been taught.
No doubt the rebel young will go off together to see the film – and to laugh at the silly, and mythical, conservative minister.
All “rebels” because they march to a tune written by the real “establisment”.
And they march in lockstep.