Your station of the stars 1
15 August 2001 tbs.pm/3180
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In a world of extraordinary radio choice, it is difficult thinking back to those pre-pirates and pre Radio One days, to the joy and satisfaction that Radio Luxembourg brought to the younger generation of the early sixties.
Although Luxembourg had been broadcasting to Britain since the thirties, it was not until around 1960 that it began to aim itself squarely at the youth market. At a time when the amount of pop music on British radio was small, Luxembourg quickly established itself as having the ‘alternative’ status in comparison to the BBC, that Channel 4 was to cultivate over twenty years later.
Radio Luxembourg was transmitted, as the name suggests, from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg – sandwiched between France and Germany, in Northern Europe.
At a time when the U.K. had no commercial radio, the Luxembourg authorities made a profitable ‘invisible export’ by supplying advertising lead radio entertainment to countries without such services at home.
The English service was on the air in the evenings, when medium wave was at its most effective for long distance reception. A daytime station over such distances would not have been possible to receive in the North of Britain. There was also a shortwave transmitter for listeners in the USA, but this was a courtesy, not being regarded as a source of income.
By today’s standards, the format of Radio Luxembourg’s English service seems strange. Variety of personality were the watchwords, with the whole of the evening broken down into a series of 15 and 30 minute segments, each with different presenters. The programmes were sponsored, which gave the advertising a quite different feel to what was familiar on ITV at the time.
The very phrase “the next programme is brought to you by the makers of…” seemed almost subversive, compared to the strict separation of adverts and programmes on ITV. Interestingly a number of Associated-Rediffusion announcers also worked for Radio Luxembourg at weekends, with Howard Williams and Muriel Young having their own programmes.
Indeed ITV was very much seen as Radio Luxembourg’s main competitor – rather than the BBC. Both ‘Luxy’ as teenagers called it, and ITV were on the air in the evening, and both competed for the same cash income from advertisers.
There were certain products that Radio Luxembourg advertising seemed to specialise in. Cosmetics, Confectionery, Beverages, Shampoo, Wines and Spirits, Petrol and bizarrely, patent plans for football pool ‘win formulas’. The latter, banned from television, were a staple of Luxembourg advertising for years, with the famous “Infra-Draw method” of the Pools millionaire Horace Batchelor. There can hardly be a member of the sixties generation who is unaware that Keynsham is a suburb of Bristol, where Horace had his “world headquarters”, nor indeed how to spell it!
The number of presenters required by these shows was so vast, that the company would have been faced with the prospect of flying planeloads of personalities over to Luxembourg on a weekly basis. This problem was solved by pre-recording around 80% of the output on tape in London, and flying a crate of open reel tapes out to the Grand Duchy each week. The company had a special express freight contract with British Eagle airlines for the purpose.
For many years the company had tried to secure live land line facilities from London to Luxembourg – but these were consistently denied by the GPO on instructions of the Postmaster General. It had been British government policy for over thirty years to prohibit commercial radio in the UK, and providing a means for live commercial broadcasts from London was seen at governmental level as being contrary to that policy.
About 20% of the Luxembourg output was produced live, in the Grand Duchy, where a team of 5 “resident announcers” would live for a month at a time, before having a weeks leave back in the UK It was a hard life for these ex-pat broadcasters, at a time when Luxembourg itself was not a sophisticated city in which to live. Famous names, such as Pete Murray, Keith Fordyce, and Teddy Johnson all started their careers as ‘resident announcers’.
The live programmes were mainly the early and late evening fare which relied on ‘spot advertising’. The sponsors were more interested in the mid-evening shows, when audiences were at their highest.
Personalities such as Alan Freeman, Jack Jackson, David Jacobs and Jimmy Savile, all had regular shows on the station.
This happy mixture of live and pre-recorded shows was so well blended, with continuity announcers between each segment doing station idents and spot ads, that most listeners assumed the whole output to be live. The London studios were assumed to have a landline to the foreign transmitters, though this was always a subtle hoax as far as the management were concerned.
Listener loyalty was so great, that no one seemed to mind.
Daily record request shows were produced live, so that postcards bearing dedication to loved ones could be read out on the day they arrived. The daily request show at 7pm in the Winter, but 8 pm in the Summer, ran for over thirty years, a staple of the eight hours per day that the station was on air.
One odd strand that Luxembourg kept up, was imported Christian evangelical rants from the USA. These were relayed for the sponsorship income alone, and the management always found them an embarrassment. They were tucked away after midnight until the early sixties, when they were moved to the very start of transmission at 6pm, to clear the decks for more music after twelve. They were embarrassing almost to the point of parody.
At half an hour a day, they represented a valuable income for the station. The presenters of one show “The World Tomorrow” , became satirised personalities in their own right, when the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, lead by Vivian Stanshall, parodied them in their LP track “The Intro and the Outro”.
The names “Herbert W. Armstrong” and his son “Garner Ted Armstrong” could never be taken seriously again by the teenagers of the time.
So many products became associated with Radio Luxembourg. “Clearasil”, “Gordon Moore’s cosmetic toothpaste”, “Sunsilk Shampoo” and “Fry’s Crunchie” particularly stood out as stalwarts of the Luxembourg range.
The whole operation came across as extremely professional, with many well known TV and Radio stars appearing once a week, for a fifteen minute slot, as guest disc jockeys. Continuity announcers separated the segments and the whole thing felt like ITV without the pictures. The music policy, “Middle of the Road” in the early sixties, became more “Top 40” as the decade wore on, and competition from pirate radio appeared.
In a remarkable tribute to Luxembourg as brand leader, most of the pirate ships that arrived after 1964, curtailed their evening transmissions between 9 pm and midnight, so as to protect Luxembourg’s prime time income. As the manager of Radio London, Philip Birch said “They are the flagship of the commercial radio movement – we respect them for the time they stood alone”
The biggest source of income for the station was record shows sponsored by the record companies themselves. The latest new releases were given an airing, and though years later the practice became frowned upon and regarded as unacceptable, no one at the time seemed to think it wrong for record companies to flog their new releases in this way.
You Say
4 responses to this article
keith martin wrote 17 September 2014 at 10:33 am
Worth more than just a mention from me but, i remember the years just after WW11 when Radio Luxembourg was broadcasting on 1293 metres LongWave with a power of 150Kw. During these years, it would open and close throughout its broadcasting day. – early mornings until around ‘lunchtime’ in French. It would then closedown until 4pm, sometimes 15 minutes later depending upon the length of a ‘faith’ programme in English. Then the French took over until English programmes began again at 10pm, or, 10.30pm. British clock changes dictated re-opening times. Sundays on 1293m was the BIG day for the British Isles when programmes began at 1.30pm closing at around 5pm, reopening at 6pm or 7pm (British Summertime made the telling) and then closing with the first Top Twenty show anywhere?! Yes, it was the top tunes of the moment as published by Music Publishers Association – sheet music sales NOT records. Later, when the Musical Express began listing record sales The Top Twenty Show played the best selling 78rpm records. There is more… but id better stop
Anthony wrote 20 September 2015 at 11:56 am
When Radio Luxembourg went onto the Astra Satellite at 19.2degE via channel 13 RTL-Veronique PAL clear/RTL-4 Luxcrypt PAL in stereo across Europe, I don’t see why they couldn’t carry on via this method, it was excellent stereo quality, it got to millions of Astra satellite homes across northern western eastern and central Europe and also served some cable homes too on cable tv networks that chose to carry it.
All you had do to listen to Luxy from satellite when the picture is scrambled is to connect the stereo phono outputs on the back of your Astra receiver to AUX/Line In on your hi-fi system, position the speakers left and right 10 foot apart from either side of your tv, and select the appropriate input.
This method also allow you to hear Wegener Panda 1 soundtracks in stereo on TV channels using 7.02/7.20Mhz plus other language soundtracks and radio stations on Astra in much better quality than a stereo TV set on SCART and it’s audio limitations of 10-30 watts per channel and quite excruciatingly tinny treble and mega light bass output.
All this rubbish from the CLT (Companee De Luxembourgois Radio en Telediffusion) that it was unprofitable was absolute TOSH, it was quite plainly THEIR OWN DOING, because end of 91, they cut all advertising which brings the money in, so starving the station of resources and running it into the ground at the same time. A shameful waste of a good station indeed.
I also think the shortwave service could have been better planned;I would have gave Radio Luxembourg English in 1992 the 49.26m (6090kHz) transmitter at Junglinster to achieve 24h worldwide coverage, it transmitted 500kW with omnidirectional beam that got to all 4 corners of the globe pulling in an international listenership of friends worldwide.
15350kHz (19.34metres) at Junglinster was only really designed for the French Service to serve listeners in North America particularly Canada where French speakers reside-it had a power of 50kW and had a highly directional curtain antenna with two masts and a plethora of wires in a curtain fashion which beamed to North America.
Today’s radio is ABSOLUTE tosh and totally rubbish bombarding you with the same tracks every other hours and is quite painful to listen to if you ask me-getting rid of Radio Luxembourg English was the worst thing the CLT could have done, 58 million happy listeners around Europe and worldwide wiped out at a stroke, a real shame to broadcasting indeed.
Willie Bone wrote 30 August 2018 at 9:32 am
Anthony, I agree that modern day commercial radio is a ‘lot of tosh,’ with robotised DJ’s on a cluster of channels with duplicated format programming! That stated, Radio Luxembourg and its Captain Plugge concept of programme delivery, actually belongs to the bleak years when the BBC had the monopoly on sound broadcasting!
Back in 1973,the advent of Independent Local Radio (ILR) with its excellent FM Stereo output, did become a serious contender to the Luxy audience! The duopoly of the BBC/Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) governed radio services became very popular in the 1970s/80s and 90s, especially in Scotland with Radio Clyde!
Captain Leonard Plugge’s concept of border blasting a British audience from overseas, bombarding listeners already tuning to a home brewed commercial radio market, was already outdated when Atlantic 252 was launched! Plugge’s outdated concept was partly to blame for the short lived service of “Atlantic long Wave 252!”
Even the era of the old IBA with its tightly regulated ILR radio services, demanding a licorice all sort programme schedule with a public service remit,became outdated towards the end of the last century! Radio Luxembourg’s preceding demise to ILR was already well past its expiry date!
Vašek wrote 15 November 2021 at 4:46 pm
Rádio Luxemburg mě provázelo od chvíle, kdy jako školák v roce 1967 jsem si postavil jednolampovku. Večer silná stanice byla dobře slyšitená a hrála hudbu, která se v té době u nás nabyla slyšitelná. Starší sestra stanici identifikovala slovy to je Laxík. Od té doby mě provázel celý čas, co stanice fungovala. Nostalgicky vzpomínám na šedesátá léta a zpěváky z té doby a na 19 tou hodinu, kdy se ozvala znělka a už to jelo. Vašek
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