The history and development of radio in the UK

The UK radio market today is a product of over 80 years of radio broadcasting in the UK and 30 years of commercial radio broadcasting.

The launch of the BBC

The BBC was formed in 1922 as a number of radio manufacturers came together to promote the new medium. The government of the day worried that broadcasting was too important to be left to the market and set up an enquiry. In giving evidence to the 1926 Crawford Committee, John Reith – then Managing Director of the British Broadcasting Company – stated that “Broadcasting must be conducted in the future as it has been in the past, as a Public Service with definite standards.”

The government accepted the findings of the committee and, in 1927 the BBC became a public corporation under a new Royal Charter, which set out its remit and governance structure.

BBC Radio started as local radio, partly for technical reasons, as it was not at first possible to retransmit the same programme to different areas. The local programmes were appreciated but, by the early 1930s, as the airwaves became more crowded and interference increased, the BBC abandoned local radio and the first national and regional services were born.

This situation continued until 1967, when the three BBC networks – Home (with regional programmes), Light and Third – were renamed Radio 4, Radio 2 and Radio 3 respectively and were joined by the new national Radio 1, designed to counter the loss of listening to the pirate stations, which were taking many listeners away from the BBC. At the same time, the BBC re-started local radio, beginning with BBC Radio Leicester. A further 19 stations followed over the next six years.

Commercial radio begins

In 1973, some 18 years after the BBC faced its first commercial competition in television, commercial radio launched (then known as Independent Local Radio or ILR). Stations were licensed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and were local, generally covering cities or counties. There was only one station per area, except in London, where there were two with different remits: Capital, broadcasting entertainment, and LBC, broadcasting news and information. The rest of the commercial local stations around the country offered a broad range of programming – from news and chat, through pop music to classical music and religion - and were all locally owned and run. Localness has, therefore, been an important feature of commercial radio since its inception.

By 1988, there were 69 local commercial stations, each broadcasting on both MW (AM) and VHF (FM) (a situation known as simulcasting). In that year, the Government permitted local commercial stations to offer different services on their MW and VHF frequencies. Following this liberalisation, a number of different formats were experimented with on MW by the commercial radio companies, but by far the most commonly adopted was the ‘Gold’ format, majoring on chart hits from the 1960s and 70s. The overall number of stations increased dramatically as a result.