Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

The Silicon Valley Show was brilliant, a bit of old school ILR that was perfect for the time.
If I remember correctly it was on Tuesdays at 7.30pm?

Did other ILR stations do anything similar for electronics and the media - Radio West had Datarama, but I suspect with the interest in computers growing, other stations must have been doing shows along the same lines in the 1980s?
I bet those posting on here of the right age would have been avid listeners!

Yep, Silicon Valley Show was Tuesdays at 19:30. One of those things where ILR was more 'BBC' than, err the BBC.

Radio West's Datarama, I worked with one of the co presenters/producers for 20 years, still see him for a beer every now and again (well, not so much now of course!) Signal Radio in Stoke was another ILR that had a similar programme, funilly enough I know the chap that did that show too.

Everyone ended up living and working here in Silicon Valley 😎

I have still got some tapes of the programme somewhere - I must dig them out and see if I still have a working cassette player.
It was where I heard the end of Centre Radio ("Thank you Leicestershire, it's been fun!") and many other items that before the internet was available to us you could only read about in Broadcast.

To be fair, there was no BBC Radio Berkshire back then - it was Radio 210 or national radio, or out of area London stations.
You would have thought that BBC Radio Oxford and Cambridge may well have covered some of this with their student population.

Didn't some ILR stations toy with playing out computer programs that could be recorded onto tape and then loaded into a computer? In a similar way to some computer based TV shows did in the 80s?

Yes. Radio West did this for quite some time.

Somewhere I have a print out of the Radio 210 christmas schedule that was sent out over the air - on thermal paper!

Yes, Radio West, and Signal Radio who also offered a service to adverisers where listeners could download price lists using a burst of software within the ad!

I'm told the engineering standards part of the IBA liked the idea, the advertising standards part didn't. The engineering side won (There's a first!)

Here's Martin Kelner (for it is he) plugging Chips on Pennine Radio in the mid-80s:



"If you're listening on medium wave, it probably just sounds like it normally does," he says as he plays out some computer software over the air.

That's a hell of a mystery voice in itself, I would never have known that was Martin Kelner, but there are a few bits of intonation that are definitely him.

The date surprises me, he was pretty much established as a Radio 2 swing jock by that stage.

I used to listen to BBC Oxford, Solent, and London. I don't remember any technology based programming on any of them. Radio 2's Late Night Extra [1] had a slot about HiFi for a while, and LBC had a technology phone in with Barry Fox on Saturday nights.

[1]. Only available on FM but in mono via BBC LR simulcasts, 88-91 FM would carry R1 10pm to midnight

Simon Mayo will be networked on GHR South Wales when he starts drive on March 15th.

Unlike other GHR stations, there is at least 10 hours a day produced from Swansea.