It’s hard to imagine now, but back in the early 1970s, if you wanted to listen to radio in the UK your choices were limited to the 4 national networks offered by the BBC and a handful of BBC local radio stations in key British localities. If you liked your radio a little less “formal”, you might listen to external commercial broadcasters like Radio Luxembourg (“the great 208″, where I used to write the news), or the equally great pirate stations like Radio Caroline.
And then, on October 8th 1973, the world changed. LBC (the London Broadcasting Company) was born, offering Londoners not only Britain’s first licensed commercial radio station….but also its first-ever commercial radio news operation. One week later, legal commercial pop music radio entered the scene in the form of London’s Capital Radio.
In its first year, LBC struggled through industrial disputes, technical problems, and a general failure to inspire the London audience. But by the middle of the 1970s, the situation started to stabilize, and LBC found its niche.
Bob Holness – who died on January 6, 2012, aged 83 – was in large measure responsible for exploiting that niche to the full. He started out as the station’s traffic reporter – the first radio reporter in the UK ever to hover above London’s traffic jams – American-style - in a helicopter, reporting on the inevitable daily catastrophe on the North Circular.
LBC Bob Holness Helicopter 417 by Paul Easton
His LBC bosses rapidly realized that he had natural on-air chemistry with morning show host Douglas Cameron, and Cameron’s original sidekick (Clive Roslin, father of the well-known Gaby) was redeployed to make room for Bob Holness on the anchor desk.
The AM program run from 6am till 10am on LBC’s AM and FM (or, as it was known then, VHF) frequencies. Bob and Doug quickly established the program as the essential wake-up habit for – at its peak – more than 2 million Londoners each day. Imagine that….more than two million people each morning tuning in to a show that was a smart, articulate, engaging alternative to the (excellent) “Today” program on BBC Radio 4.
You can catch just a flavor of it in this television advertisement for the show, screened in around 1979:
Its agenda was – by today’s standards – stunningly up-market, and LBC had a team of correspondents worldwide contributing to the program, plus full access (via Independent Radio News) to content from a growing array of commercial radio newsrooms across the nation.
Whether the major story of the day was in Romford or Rhodesia, AM brought you the news in a crisp, engaging, skillful manner from its windowless and nicotine-stained newsroom in a Gough Square basement (“Communications House”) just off Fleet Street. It was on-the-scene reporting of the kind you rarely hear on UK commercial radio today. And many of the reporters went on to become some of the best in the business: Peter Allen of 5 Live, Malcolm Brabant of the BBC, Jon Snow and the late Carol Barnes and Joan Thirkettle of ITN among many, many others.
Bob Holness on the LBC Breakfast Show by LBC973
To be sure, there was “lifestyle” reporting on “AM”. Every year the show broadcast live from the “Ideal Home Exhibition”, with Bob eagerly experiencing the latest mod-cons that every home was encouraged to acquire. But on “AM”, the hard news always came first, and Bob handled dozens of live interviews each morning, many of them as news was breaking all around him.
My first paid job in radio saw me working in a corner of the Gough Square newsroom as a freelance “wire ripper”. Armed with a machete – literally – it was my job to keep tabs on about 15 teletype machines, and rip the agency copy they brought to LBC from the newsrooms of Reuters, the Press Association, AP, UPI and a variety of other sources. I worked overnights, and in mid-shift – at around 4am – Bob would walk through the door to prepare for another edition of “AM”.
It’s hard always to be cheerful. And even harder always to be cheerful at 4am. But Bob managed it, day-in and day-out. He loved his work, and the program’s stunning success was driven by the fact that he and Douglas (with whom I worked when I was Washington Correspondent for LBC in its later years) were not only an astoundingly-talented professional couple, but also the best of friends.
LBC’s Tribute to Bob Holness by LBC973
In a business that is all-too-often dominated by large egos and prima donnas, Bob and Doug set the standards for the production of accessible, engaging and entrepreneurial journalism that appealed to Londoners regardless of their politics or their socio-economic background. “AM” – now sorely missed, despite the very excellent work of Nick Ferrari on today’s “LBC” – personified the sound of “LBC News Radio”, a station that changed the sound of radio in the UK.
When he retired from LBC (with minimal fuss from which others could learn….”no more shall I say” were his final words to listeners) he went on to enjoy huge success as the host of the “Blockbusters” game show. And as the host of “Anything Goes” on the BBC World Service, his radio skills reached an enormous audience worldwide.
But for those of us who grew up listening to LBC, and were inspired by its buccaneering, yet serious-minded approach to news-gathering, the death of Bob Holness leaves a huge gap. And a reminder that at its best, commercial speech radio should be every-bit as informative, serious and up-market as its non-commercial competitors. If we can all emulate a bit of “Bob and Doug”, we’d be serving our audiences very well.
Finally, here’s a lengthy interview with Bob, conducted by former LBC presenter Steve Jones and broadcast on London Talkback Radio, the successor service on AM to the original LBC, and sourced from Geoff Lumley’s splendid LBC website:
