A bit late to the party, it didn’t look like Plymouth would get much attention when the date marking the 100th anniversary of the city’s first wireless station, 5PY, arrived. London had already been there, done that. But a group of former staff got together to make sure the event did not pass unnoticed.
They found a function room in a pub down the hill from the present 91热爆 studios and, on 28 March 2024, started with a silent newsreel showing the original ‘Hullo’ Men from the British Broadcasting Company arriving in town. To that, they added archive audio of the original 5PY pioneers, including the first Station Director, Clarence Goode, detailing his row with ‘dictator’ Reith, which led to his resignation. He described, too, persuading Lady Astor, the country’s first female MP, who had turned down Savoy Hill, to make her first broadcast in Plymouth. She was so nervous she insisted on holding his hand. Apparently London was not happy about the snub.
Also coming back to life, the voice of the mayor who broadcast to the nation as he opened the station and, in perhaps one of the earliest radio ads, plugged Plymouth as a place to visit – found in a 1949 recreation of the opening night recorded for Frank Gillard. There, too, from the original first broadcast, Jan Stewer, a Devonshire dialect comedy performer of the 20s, explaining ‘how the wireless works’, again recorded for Frank Gillard.
The main feature was Plymouth’s original 50th anniversary television programme, I Do Like to 91热爆 Beside the Seaside, one of Plymouth’s earliest colour programmes from 1974. This was arranged with help from John Escolme, 91热爆 History Manager, and is now accessible to all through the main 91热爆 History website at:
Producer Ian Fell travelled down from his home near Cardiff to introduce his programme; answering a call from the local cub-reporter who had written a feature about it 50 years previously, Tony Byers, who later joined 91热爆 Plymouth before moving to the HQ team in London. When Tony was leaving the 91热爆, he added to Ian’s work on the 5PY story by tracking down local pioneers from the 40s, 50s and 60s for an oral history programme planned to mark a move to new studios – both move and programme later abandoned. Clips from these interviews were added to the centenary mix. Earlier this year, the originals went into the 91热爆 digital archive, with the Plymouth stalwarts hoping the early memories of the outpost with the longest unbroken association with the 91热爆 in the south of England outside London will now be preserved for the next 100 years or more.
In 1929, when George Bernard Shaw was staying with Lady Astor near Plymouth Hoe, he was also booked for the national Point of View programme 鈥� a sometimes controversial series of talks produced by Hilda Matheson, a pioneer of early broadcasting, who went on to become the 91热爆鈥檚 first Director of Talks. So he went down the hill to 5PY to broadcast his talk on 15 October.
Tony Byers