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The future of piracy!
Pirate radio, that is.
Back in the 1930s, broadcasting regulations in the United States and
Britain were tightening up and some foresaw the day when enterprising
radio entrepreneurs would construct vast armoured fortresses
containing gigantic transmitters that would float on the high seas and
broadcast to the world without let or hindrance.
In the 1960s, such radio piracy
actually came about, but not in the Blofeldesque way imagined.
In the early 1960s the BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcasting and
teenage pop music programmes were relegated to four hours a week
without a hope of an unestablished band getting on the air.
Enter eccentric, wealthy Irishman Ronan O'Rahilly who decided that the
only way around the problem was to broadcast from the high seas.
 Well, the North
Sea and Irish Sea, anyway. So began
the legendary
Radio Caroline,
which ushered in the era of modern pop music in Britain by
broadcasting 'round the clock what the BBC saw as insignificant.
It even inspired a
Thunderbirds episode.
Unfortunately, even O'Rahilly's money didn't run to Bond Villain
installations, so he had to fall back on clap-out coastal ships that
rusted, leaked, broke anchor, and were generally regarded as a menace
to navigation. He eventually ran through three ships. One
was scrapped, the second sank, and the third struggled on through the
'80s against hostile British and Dutch governments who laid a virtual
siege against the ships and their crew of eccentric deejays to prevent
them from being resupplied. In the end, Radio Caroline fell
silent in 1991; a victim of an ignominious grounding on the Goodwin
Sands, and, ironically, competition from BBC 1 and other pop music
stations that had followed in Caroline's vanguard.
Maybe you don't need a floating
fortress to make history after all. |
