BBC Radio One

Background
The BBC had a virtual monopoly on British radio from its creation in 1922 until the mid 1960s, and strictly limited dissemination of music that would appeal to teenagers in particular, as rock'n'roll was seen as a threat to order and it felt it had a duty to protect the status quo. Challengers to the established system, such as Radio Luxembourg, attempted to breach the stranglehold the Corporation had on broadcasts of popular music, but had to broadcast from abroad, as commercial British stations did not exist and the radio licence fee precluded any UK land-based competition. The signal faded badly after dark, which made for difficult listening. However, with the onset of pirate radio in the form of, among many others, Radio Caroline and Radio London, which broadcast from outside UK waters on ships, the flood of pop music produced finally found a voice in substantially better quality, with DJs who copied the style of those from the US, where commercial radio was the norm.

Threatened by this insurrection, the Government pushed through legislation to outlaw the pirates in the form of the Marine Offences Act, with the result that nearly all of them ceased broadcasting when the act became law on August 14 1967 (with the exception of Radio Caroline, which re-moored its ship off the Dutch coast and continued to broadcast as normal). The BBC responded to the listeners who had tired of many years of staid, safe programming by restructuring its four-tier radio channels. The Third Programme was renamed Radio 3 (classical and drama) and the Home Service was now Radio 4 (talks and documentaries), so in effect their programme content remained the same. However, the Light Programme, long a haven of easy listening entertainment, was split into two: Radio 1 (popular music) and Radio 2 (easy listening and comedy). The former of these debuted on Saturday 30 September 1967 at 7:00 a.m.: its first DJ was Tony Blackburn, who had previously worked on both Caroline and London, in common with many other of One's starting line-up: Keith Skues, Dave Cash, Kenny Everett and Simon Dee, for example (of the now outlawed pirate DJs, only Johnnie Walker stayed with the pirates, yet he too would eventually leave for the BBC).

Peel's BBC Debut
John Peel had been a comparative latecomer to Radio London: he had joined in early 1967, but jumped ship when the MOA became law, and was offered a temporary post on Radio One solely due to the insistence of Bernie Andrews, who put him with anchorman Pete Drummond on a six-week contract as part of a rotating set of 'guest' DJs on the BBC's flagship alternative programme, Top Gear (his sending a tape of the Perfumed Garden to Mark White, of the BBC's Gramophone department, when applying for work as redundancy loomed, came to nothing).

...in progress...

Links

 * Wikipedia


 * Footnotes