URB operation and official launch
Jonathan White, Electrical & Electronic Engineering MSc (1974)
Stephen Ainger, Physics BSc (1974)
Listen as Stephen Ainger and Jonathan White remember the operation of URB (University Radio Bath) and its official launch by Radio One’s Annie Nightingale and Pete Brady on 16th May 1973 or read the transcript provided below.
SA: My name’s Stephen Aigner and I studied Applied Physics at Bath University graduating in 1974.
JW: And I’m Jonathan White and I studied Electrical Engineering and I graduated at the same time.
SA: This time we’re going to talk about the operation of the radio station [University Radio Bath]. Jonathan, is that right?
JW: Yeah. The station itself opened on the 16th of May 1973. That’s after a couple of years’ construction. It was opened by Anne Nightingale and Pete Brady of BBC Radio 1.
SA: And I remember making full use of Anne Nightingale. Taking her to The Golden Egg, downtown Bath, for lunch and set up fake taking blood, donating blood, and being on the local tv all promoting the radio station.
JW: Yeah. We got good coverage, didn’t we?
SA: We did.
JW: Certainly, in the papers as well.
SA: And, of course, by that time we had a range of programmes. It wasn’t just music.
JW: No, I think we wanted to try to avoid a sort of ‘jukebox radio’ where people would come along and play records. Although that was part of the output it wasn’t all of it. We tried different things. We tried documentaries. We tried quizzes.
SA: We did University Challenge qualifiers, I remember.
JW: Yes. Yes. We did Election Night, didn’t we? When the results came through in Bath, there was somebody on the telephone in a phone box ringing them through to the studio and we were first with the news if you remember!
SA: Finance as always was a problem but by that time we had the University Radio Bath Road Show and that generated some cash and helped fund the radio station together with the programme magazine Blurb.
JW: Yes, Blurb was quite an operation really. It was like a Radio Times for URB, and it was produced weekly. Very enterprising staff; lots of drawings and illustrations and programme content, of course, and adverts that were sold to shops in Bath again to raise money. Our work was produced every week and it was taken down into a printers in Bath who produced the goods and we distributed them around the University every week. So, everyone got a copy of Blurb delivered to their room.
SA: And it was really fun. Really fun making the broadcasts and knowing that we were equal to Radio1 in terms of listenership. The other thing that we did was make a film and it’s ging to be released in 2023.
JW: Yeah. It’s a ‘Day in the Life of University Radio Bath’. We’ve tried to show everything that we were doing at the time.
SA: It’s taken a while to edit and scan - electronically and digitally scan all the material but we’re almost there and we’re looking forward to releasing it on campus this year.
