A real blast from the past!
Recently we rented the film, Pirate Radio, a somewhat ‘true’ story about the days of broadcasting rock and roll from a ship moored just outside British waters. Here’s the official trailer of the film (somewhat glitzy as is the manner of Hollywood):
Anyone of my sort of vintage living in England during the 1960s will recall the fun and excitement of Radio Caroline, the name of the radio station that started up in 1964.
Here’s a good extract from the WikiPedia entry:
Radio Caroline is an English radio station founded in 1964 by Ronan O’Rahilly, to circumvent the tight hold the record companies had on the broadcast of popular music in the UK. It originally commenced transmissions as an offshore radio station broadcasting from a ship anchored in international waters off the coast of South East England. Originally unlicensed by any government, for the majority of its early life, it was labelled as a pirate radio station.
Amazingly, at its peak Radio Caroline had an audience of 23 million listeners. In a very real way Radio Caroline was another symbol of what became known as the Swinging Sixties, a transformation period for post-war Britain.
Tony Blackburn was just one of many famous disk jockeys who started life out on Radio Caroline, with Tony being the first presenter of the BBC’s Radio 1 station, broadcasting popular music, when it came on air on the 30th September, 1967.
Anyway, if you are nostalgic towards the ‘good’ old days of the sixties, do watch the film.
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 
Released over here in the UK as ‘The Ship That Rocked” it is a deeply enjoyable film, especially for those of us who listened on headphones as we were supposed to be revising for exams to ‘Caroline North’ steaming up the Irish Channel and blasting out continuous summertime music that June in the 1960s.
We didn’t all fling ourselves into unbridled bouts of dancing in the school, street or workplace as the film (and trailer) is fond of picturing. But if that stands as a metaphor for the release we all felt from the dreary, stuffy monopoly of the post-war BBC then it serves its purpose.
The film was so enjoyable on the big screen that I went out and bought the DVD almost immediately
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I sure remember it though that should not have to come with being placed in any vintage. Many years later (1998) it inspired me to suggest placing a huge tanker in the Mediterranean or the Channel selling tax-free petrol (gasoline) to the citizens… Those were days the European taxman were getting about 6 times more out of the gas than the country who extracted oil and gave up that resource for ever… today it is between one to two times… which is why a couple of years ago the UAE offered the UK free petrol (gasoline) if only they could go 50-50 at the pump.
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