Capital Radio - Outside Broadcasts

In the early days of Capital Radio opportunities for outside broadcasts were actively pursued, and financed by the company. Roadshow type public appearances raised the station's profile locally and the community involvement was considered likely to improve the station's reputation with the IBA, with franchise renewal application in mind. Later on, sponsorship to at least partly defray the costs of outside broadcasts was sought.

T-shirt logo for Coca Cola sponsorship of Capital's Venture Day, an annual event in Battersea Park intended to involve young people in various activities, mainly physical.

As part of Venture Day Capital operated an independent MF radio station, under licence. It was low power, 1W merp if I remember correctly, and the antenna height was limited to 10m which, being much less than 1/4 wavelength, required a lot of inductive base loading to achieve resonance.

Some outside broadcasts were pre-recorded on site, such as the Jazz Festival, Wren Orchestra concerts and the political discussion programmes fronted by Alan Hargreaves. Others were broadcast live via land lines or radio links, others were pre-recorded in total but broadcast live in part. Often for OB's where stereo links were impractical, such as for Gerald Harper's show from the Charlotte Rhodes, just the speech, via a mono link, originated from the remote site and the records were played in on cue at Euston Tower.

Live OB's always presented an interesting challenge as there was plenty of scope for things to go wrong, but thanks to teamwork when they did little if anything was obvious to the listener. I well remember a Chris Tarrant show which was being broadcast live from a cross channel ferry sailing between Dover and Calais. The weather was extremely bad and the producer, on board, succumbed to sea sickness but thanks to an experienced OB crew the show went ahead as planned. The ferry was radio linked to a Capital vehicle parked on the cliffs at Dover coastguard station next to a BT vehicle which interfaced to fixed lines to and from London. Both vehicles were powered from a single 13A socket in the CG station, which was fine until an extra electric fire was turned on, blowing the fuse! The technical operator at Euston Tower had a duplicate set of records and was shadowing the show so was able to cover the several minutes taken to locate and replace the fuse. The listening public would have been hardly aware of the problem.