Month: December 2025

Last Saturday, I took a train to Manchester, walked in the damp to Central Library to look at a handful of cases and a couple of audio pods stuffed with memorabilia from a radio station that no longer broadcasts. I’ve written before about Piccadilly Radio. In the light of last week’s trip, I thought I’d elaborate on how it came to be that a boy who’d never been to Manchester became obsessed with its local radio station in the early 80s.

Some memories are burned into your mind. You might not recall what you ate for dinner last night, but something from fifty years ago still feels real.

I can see the image today: in the summer of 1980 I am sitting on the dining room floor with Mum & Dad’s radio plugged in. We’d just recorded the birthday mention my brother got on Junior Choice hosted, I think, by Tony Blackburn.

For some reason, I was studying the maps in the yellow AA Member’s Handbook and flicking through the gazette at the back. Among the lists was one naming all our local radio stations. BBC Radio Blackburn was probably my nearest, but the stations that, for some reason, fascinated me were Radio City (from Liverpool) and Piccadilly Radio (from Manchester). I tuned around on that radio to find those frequencies and hear sounds from (what seemed) far away. I studied the maps, what roads would take us to central Manchester and which to Liverpool?

I’m pretty sure I know why it’s all etched on my brain: in my newfound fascination with those FM frequencies I taped over the recording of my brother’s name check. I can’t recall whether he had heard by then. I was mortified. But it was the first time I ever taped Piccadilly. I no longer have that tape, but in the cupboard across from me now are cassettes from that era with the sounds of Piccadilly on them. I taped a lot more.

Sometime not long afterwards, I was watching Granada television. I know it was Granada because that was our local ITV station, and there were no other commercial TV channels we could get. There was an advert for Pete Baker’s Breakfast Show on Piccadilly. It was all cartoon; for some reason, I recall a bus, and the soundtrack was a jingle from the show.

I know you think TV advertising doesn’t work, but in that moment two decisions were made: I’d be tuning to Piccadilly from then on, and I’d learn more about the little songs used to identify the radio station.

Piccadilly Radio shaped much of my childhood. In a world with only a handful of stations on the dial, it felt both local and impossibly glamorous, a Manchester window that seemed a very long way from Wigan. I wrote years ago that radio was “the best of all media rolled into one universally accessible package”, and Piccadilly was exactly that for me — my station in a way nothing else quite was.

The presenters and characters were part of the texture of school life. Timmy Mallett’s evening show felt huge; everyone I knew listened, everyone talked about it the next day, and I assumed the entire country must know who he was. His madcap features, the daft characters, even the jingles, all seemed larger than life.

My connection to the station went even further. In April 1981, I was taken to visit the studios. I can still picture the master control room, the DJ (Phil Seyer) prepping his show, the carts with their jingles and ads, and the moment the phone-in competition collapsed because somebody jammed the controls. I left with a t-shirt and stickers and told everybody it was the happiest memory I had.

Looking back, the station was far more than background noise. It provided company, excitement and a sense of connection to a wider world. It was a friend, a habit, and a doorway into music and culture at exactly the age when such things take root.