► Goodbye Radio Caroline… hello Radio Caroline International
14 August 2017 tbs.pm/13203
Midnight approaches on 14 August 1967. The Marine Broadcasting Offences Act kicks in. Off-shore radio stations around the coast of the UK have to decide what to do. Some closed earlier in the month. Big L shut down its transmitter at 3pm.
Radio Caroline decides to push on. With supplies and advertising from Ireland and continental Europe, Ronan O’Rahilly believes there’s still money to be made, especially in the six weeks of monopoly of pop music radio the station will have until BBC Radio 1 opens.
The relaunched station will be Radio Caroline International, and, the theory goes, if it doesn’t get supplies from the mainland UK, it’s now fully legal.
You Say
2 responses to this article
steve brown wrote 14 August 2017 at 10:17 pm
caroline had to continue,because the station that belonged to us,must not be taken away
Stephen wrote 30 April 2023 at 3:39 pm
It has taken far, far too long for Radio Caroline to gain it’s status of being permitted to broadcast on 648khz AM (Delicious irony that they got granted a former BBC frequency! I’m guessing Ronan would have laughed at that!) It’s about time they were offered a nationwide DAB+ licence.
Caroline & the some of the other pro Pirates like Radio London, 390, etc., should have been consulted and offered the first licences when the IBA brought about ILR commercial radio, especially when they proved their point that commercial radio would work in the UK.
**If you look on the BBC archive website, there’s an interesting survey that the took in the middle of Caroline’s heyday called “The Caroline Phenomenon”, it makes me laugh how the Beeb were trying to make out that it wasn’t that popular as suggested in comparison to The Light, etc. Notice they didn’t hold a similar survey regarding listeners to Big L!
Your comment
Enter it below