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If you don’t live near Nottinghamshire, you may not have heard too much about him. That’s probably the point. Dennis McCarthy MBE belonged purely to the city he came to call his own.  That’s why the streets were lined for his funeral route twenty years ago – and why he remains so fondly remembered …

The Capital network launched five years ago - on 3rd January 2011, bringing together the eponymous London station with a clutch of heritage 'Hit Music' and Galaxy stations across the UK, reaching 7.1m listeners.  Its UK audience has subsequently stood up well over the period - in what can b…

Farewell, dear friend. AM has fallen silent across a chunk of Europe as engineers in France, Germany and Luxembourg flicked the switches and turned off their Medium Wave signals at midnight on New Year's Eve. Au revoir. Amongst others, Deutschlandradio closed down its seven Medium Wave transmit…

Kenny was unbelievably excited as a kid when he was given his second tape recorder as a gift.   Radio anoraks will understand how enjoyment was amplified manifold with a second machine. One machine meant you could record and play; two enabled you to copy and mix. These were simple times. The Radio …

No year-end is complete without a gratuitous chart or two.  My Radiomoments Audioboom channe l, now replete with over a thousand choice cuts  from 1922 to the present day, and amassing over two thirds of a million listens, has had a decent year.  But which clips reaped the most plays in 2015 from t…

The British Broadcasting Company began life with a princely £100,000 in capital, about the same sum as half an Alan Yentob. Six wireless firms chipped in £60k and took up their place round a battered board table at the GEC bui lding at Magnet House. Other manufacturers threw in in the remainder for…

I wrote this blog about eighteen months ago and the only response I feel I can have to recent events is to post it again.  For the passage that begins ‘This week has seen...’, I now write - the massacre of innocent people in Paris, the state killing of an individual by use of a drone, the continuin…

Waiting outside the station for the taxi I watch for anyone else who might also be making their way up to the house that used to belong to the poet, Ted Hughes, for a writing course centred around nature.  When my wife read the description of the course to me so many months ago I felt I had to go; …

Above is blue sky, the pale tender blue of an early spring, crossed by wisps of smoky cloud blown by a sharp breeze. There is a call, a shrill cry, and the form of a bird of prey, long wings outstretched, drifts over the bare trees.  The grey brown of its feathers can be seen and its head moves fro…