New BBC Local Radio jingles

BBC Local Radio has been using them much longer than that - for example split jingles were used on the original BBC Radio Sussex and BBC Radio Surrey when the latter began in 1991. The regional evening programmes that started across the South and South East in 1997 also had them.

I think some parts of the network were more advanced than others!

Thanks for the explanation. I hadn't heard of split jingles before until last night while seeing what was on offer elsewhere on the sounds app.

Every now and then they don't fire (or the correct thing's not been routed to air) and you hear a gap in the audio where the studio has left a silence for the jingle.


I believe that in the old days they were sometimes done with having the two jingles on the same cart, with one track going onto one station and the other to the other (or 2 tracks to each when it was stereo)

There's a good split jingle example at 10:40 on this clip. At that time LBC had the same programme on both their stations for a lot of the week but the stations had different names and phone numbers:


Incidently, note how radio branding has changed - each programme had it's own theme tune, but the news jingle etc has the station theme. Doesn't happen much these days with a few exceptions such as those stations with proper programmes like Radio 4

The dual area ILRs were doing split jingles, and more importantly split ads back in the early 80s. Normally two stacks of cart machines, fired off simultaneously. You could sometimes hear the 'other' area's commercial as cross talk in the background. Not very impressive, and I'm not sure how given everything was (or should have been !) balanced audio.

The presenter could also select and do their voice over etc to one area or other only

And that's where the 'fun' ended.
Usually the commercials going out on cart bank 'A' were not the exact duration of the commercials going out on cart bank 'b'. Nor were they the same number of commercials to be played.
Yes, the collective duration was the same - but more often than not, you'd have to watch the magic red timer numbers on the Sonifex carts like a hawk, to pull out the last played cart, and slot in the replacement cart (normally 2 or 3 ads away from going to air) making sure it was for the right split frequency.

Friend of mine once had to steer his way through a 4 minute break on 3 spilt frequencies, using 20 carts, and - if that wasn't a mix of selective hearing, manual dexterity and co-ordination enough - the same one advert cart had to be played on all three cart banks at different times during the same commercial break. He did it - still to this day, not sure how.

Some BBC regions did actually have a cart-based split jingle system as far back as the late 80s. I remember the triple-stack of carts in the racks room when I was at Radio Gloucestershire – one cart was a generic station jingle, another was the phone number, and the third slot was spare, IIRC.

The trouble with this system was there was no clean (jingle-free) network feed, so when the appropriate tones were fired at Bristol, it completely switched the local output at Gloucester and Swindon to their cart machines. It then cut back abruptly to the network feed once the cart had finished playing. So you'd hear the jingle fade out to nothing before rejoining the output from Bristol.

Often as well, the network presenter would neatly segue out of the Bristol jingle, resulting in some nasty clipping if you were listening to Glos or Wilts.

I've heard it go wrong a few times on Stereo Underground (Saturday evenings in the south of England) listening via Kent, with "BBC Radio Kent!" being heard on top of "BBC Radio Solent!"

BBC Radio London at long last have the new jingles today. They are 'The Sound of London' and, as expected, are using the jingles without sung vocals.

BBC Radio Bradford has also quietly launched today, as an part-time opt-out station from Radio Leeds on a temporary basis. Rather than 'The Sound of Bradford', they have gone for 'The Sound of Where We Live', and similarly the station name is spoken rather than sung on the jingles, no doubt because they have not had the opportunity to get the singers back in.

As much as I liked the old jingle package especially on BBC London, the new ones work really well I think. A much better tagine too, the previous top of the hour had the non-sensical 'this is London, this is BBC Radio London'... 'The Sound of London' is much stronger, even though it sounds a bit like the name of a band.

I’m grateful that London finally has the new package. However, I very much dislike the voices chosen.

The female voice that says “Play BBC Radio London” can barely be heard and the words seem congealed together, plus the male voice that says “The Sound of London... is BBC Radio London” is not strong or authoritative enough.

The imaging sounds disjointed from the still niche output on the station. The Mcasso imaging at least matched the odd programming.