As I’ve previously written, when I was much younger, I was a huge fan of Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio. So much so that when I was eleven, I spent hours writing a letter asking to see their studios. That didn’t quite work out, but I got there anyway. A couple of days ago, I was sorting through some old papers and discovered that, apparently, when I was in class J3C at Standish High School, I declared that visit to Piccadilly as my happiest memory. To read it amuses me now, but it’s recreated here for nostalgic reasons:
My Happiest Memory
The happiest memory I have is the time I visited the studios of Piccadilly Radio in Manchester in the Easter holidays in April 1981. We were shown around by Julian. We got there at quarter to four.
First, we went into the master control room in which programmes are recorded, and it is where the producer sits to make sure the programme is running smoothly. At four o’clock we went into studio two w(h)ere DJ Phil Sayer was getting ready for the second hour of his show. As the news was on, he told us how the cart machines work (cart is short for cartridge). The carts are jingles, and advertisements are played on the radio station.
As Piccadilly is an independent radio station, it plays advertisements to cover the running costs. Businesses can buy an advertisement to be played at the time of day they pick. It can cost them well over a hundred pounds! There are a maximum of nine minutes of advertisements in each hour.
After the news finished and Phil faded down the record, he announced the first competition of the day, ‘Beat The Intro’, in which you have to guess the name of the record before the words start. It was a phone-in competition, but nobody could get through because Julian had pressed some buttons and jammed the lines. When somebody got through, Phil read out one name, there was a crackle, and somebody else got on the air. Phil Sayer was in a panic, so he put another record on after the competition and looked in the control room window, saw what happened and told the phone girl to put things right. We left quickly …
Julian then showed us the editing and commercial production booths. When we left, my dad bought me a t-shirt. I also got a lot of stickers.
It was a very interesting day. We were there for about an hour.
June 2009: I scanned a photo of the original; my ten-year-old handwriting isn’t that bad, really.