The Preservation of Local and Community Radio

5.3 The Preservation of Local and Community Radio

It is often assumed that the BBC has always possessed a monopoly on radio documentaries and features within the UK, but this ceased to be the case withthe arrival of (commercial) Independent Local Radio (ILR) in 1973. Until the 1990 Broadcasting Act, UK commercial radio was highly regulated by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), which compelled ILR to perform a public service role, despite the sector’s commercial status. In terms of programming, this induced stations to create a range of often excellent and largely forgotten speech programming, including radio drama and documentaries (Street 2007).

However, it should also be stressed that other organizations outside the BBC have sometimes felt impelled to take the initiative in the preservation of aural history and radio broadcasting output. The heritage and education sectors have often been cognizant of the need to expand the preservation and educational use of broadcasting throughout the whole of the radio landscape in the UK. For example, with the arrival of ILR, the BBC’s claims to represent local broadcasting in the 1970s became increasingly tenuous, and BBC Local Radio was often ignored aside from being “wheeled out to help dress the rhetoric of localism when the occasion demanded” (Lewis and Booth 1989: 90). Concerns were being voiced that “much of the output of local and community radio stations was…being lost, or at best, left to lie around unused” (Murray 1982: 8).

BBC Radio Solent, in collaboration with the London-based Council for Educational Technology (CET), had set up its own sound archive during the middle 1970s, and in April 1976 a project was launched by BBC Radio Solent and CET to select and circulate broadcast materials for educational use in schools. As a result of this activity, which was subsequently documented in a CET report (Crabb 1978), the Scottish Council for Educational Technology decided to mount a relatively simple project in a suitable area of Scotland to conduct similar work. Discussion with teachers and broadcasters in Orkney suggested that the island, with its distinctive cultural traditions, would provide fertile ground for such a project (Main 1983: 282). The Orkney Sound Archive was founded from this project, in the summer of 1980. The nucleus of this archive was the recorded legacy (over two hundred tapes) of the work of folklorist and broadcaster Ernest Marwick, who had supported the idea of a local sound archive shortly before his tragic death in a road accident in 1977. Over a period of some thirty years Marwick had made more than eight hundred broadcasts, and in his regular work for the BBC he covered topical matters in Orkney, Shetland and Caithness, as well as taking part in national and overseas programmes (Robertson 1991: xvi). The archive to which Marwick was a (more than symbolic) founder and major contributor has since provided a useful resource and repository for the ‘opt-out’ station BBC Radio Orkney (Murray 1982: 54).

As Street recently noted (Street 2007), the arrival of community radio in the UK has presented both huge opportunities and huge challenges for the diffusion and preservation of aural history. In 2004 there were 15 community radio stations operating as part of a pilot programme under OfCom’s remit, sharing the Government’s £500,000 community radio fund as a significant part of their revenue. Now, five years on, there are over 200 (and climbing) stations still sharing the same fund, stations which are not-for-profit organisations with restrictions on the amount of on-air advertising and sponsorship they can carry. Many of these stations are under-funded and heavily reliant on their volunteer bases, struggling to subsist on meagre resources within the context of a media ecology that is heavily biased towards transience and reach and not heritage and localness.

At the time of writing, shortly after the fifth anniversary of the original legislation that established the sector, there is a great deal of advocacy for the increase of the Community Radio Fund, with a petition to the Prime Minister having received well over 3000 signatures. However, even if the Community Radio Fund were to be increased with immediate effect, it is unlikely that the money will be spent on archival preservation, as other needs are more pressing, especially given the obligation of stations under the terms of their licence agreements to achieve ‘social gain’ (the regeneration of communities). As Street has argued,
We have a unique, one-off opportunity to help these new stations to themselves help future generations understand what the very word “community” meant at the start of the 21^st century. Yet, to do so, some form of national, overarching archive strategy needs to be established as a matter of urgency; we cannot keep everything of course, but we should be aware of the importance of this new resource at the time of its genesis. It will be a tragedy if, despite the apparent lessons learned from the preservation and cataloguing of past collections, we find ourselves in a similar – or worse – position in ten or twenty or fifty years time… (Street 2007: 8)