Appreciation by Ron Mitchell

Nick Bailey took us on a tour, several tours in fact: of the world from one end to the other; of the history of British commercial radio; and of his own life in broadcasting.

His first radio job was in at the deep end, so to speak, on board the first pirate station, Radio Caroline. Caroline was set up by Georgie Fame's manager Ronan O'Rahilly, who was frustrated because he could not get any airtime on the BBC for Georgie and his other artistes. O'Rahilly bought an old Danish ferry, put a radio transmitter on it, and anchored it off Felixstowe just outside British territorial waters (three miles offshore in those days; it's now twelve). 19-year-old Nick got a job on Caroline as a newsreader through a theatre friend.

What an adventure this must have been for a teenager! Nick rubbed shoulders (and played Scrabble) with names that later became famous, including Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Simon Dee, and Emperor Rosko. It wasn't as glamorous as the girls who wrote fan letters might have imagined: women were not allowed on board, and the sea could be rough. When the tender boat came to ferry them back to land, embarkation was by means of jumping from deck to a rope ladder on the other ship.

Nick showed us a short home movie he had made of life aboard ship. It looked idyllic, sunbathing on deck in the summer.

Caroline's two ships were able to cover most of England from Cornwall and the Scilly isles to Lancashire and Yorkshire, and also Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. But the dream came to an end with the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in 1967, and the station lost money as advertising dried up.

In 2009 Richard Curtis made a comedy film loosely based on Radio Caroline called 'The Boat That Rocked', and Nick played us the trailer. It received mixed reviews, but Nick said he liked the film despite its exaggerations: 'we weren't allowed women on board and we didn't have a lesbian cook'. Here's a YouTube compilation of clips. Mark Kermode's review is just as entertaining.

After Caroline, Nick set off on his travels, emigrating to Australia, where he developed his talents as a music broadcaster as well as a news-reader -- and regained his Australian accent, though not too much; 'they don't want you sounding ocker', he said.

Having heard that commercial radio was about to begin in the UK Nick left Oz in 1973 and set off on a slow trip home. Stopping in Hong Kong he got a job in Hong Kong Radio for four months, where for the first time he presented a lot of classical music. Another stop in India only offered a job which would not pay any money.

Back in the UK auditions for Capital Radio and Radio Clyde came to naught so he applied to be a trainee with the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS). He was sent to Gibraltar to begin with, and Nick played a live broadcast he made climbing the Rock. Relieved on reaching the top, his instructor companion made the cheery remark that abseiling down would be more dangerous. 'Thanks very much' replied Nick.

BFBS took him to Cologne, and we heard the voice of Jean Challis greeting him at the start of his first Two-Way Family Favourites. And then to Berlin and the story of a woman calling herself 'Heidi' who would phone his secretary from different phone boxes in the Soviet-controlled sector. Nick was warned that she might be a security risk but was delighted to meet his fan 35 years later after German unification.

BFBS also took Nick back to Hong Kong to set up the English service, but then, feeling that he was being pushed into management, he resigned from BFBS and took a job in Hong Kong Radio presenting current affairs. Nick played us a recording of him talking to a reporter in Tiananmen Square the day of the massacre in 1989, a day he broadcast for nine hours.

He returned to the UK in 1992, just at the point where the first national commercial radio was being put out to tender, twenty years after local commercial radio had started in 1973. Recapping the story he had told us in his first visit in 2024, we heard Nick utter the very first words broadcast on Classic FM, welcoming listeners to Britain's first national commercial radio station and playing Handel's Zadok the Priest. And there he stayed for 25 years, presenting everything from the breakfast show to the evening concert and an overnight programme, which had a smaller but intensely loyal audience, many tuning in from overseas.

It would be an understatement to describe Nick's taste in music as catholic. The only genre he admitted to at one time disliking was country music, but he even got to like that when the Australian station in Moree twisted his arm to do a country programme called Blazing Saddles. Although he's never presented it, he is a big fan of World Music', in particular African music, Portuguese Fado and the music of the Faroe Islands.

Nick attributed the success of Classic FM to energetic founder Michael Bukht's insight that there was a potentially large audience for the classical music that people know from TV advertisements. In 1992 there was also the memory of Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma as background to the 1990 World Cup. But people are frightened of Radio 3. Bukht didn't want to hire people with music degrees who know a lot about a little; he wanted people who knew a little about a lot. Sam Jackson, the present Controller of Radio 3, spent 15 years at Classic FM and became its Managing Editor.

Nick himself doesn't much like going to classical music concerts. He believes they could benefit from taking a leaf out of Classic FM. Why are the house lights left up during the performance, killing the atmosphere?

It was fascinating to hear the story of Nick's life in broadcasting, music and travel, and I confessed to a feeling of envy as I listened. Good for us, too, to hear about such a broad love of music. Perhaps we in the Society—certainly I myself—tend to have prejudices about certain kinds of music which we might do well to question. Some in the audience would have liked to hear a bit more of the music itself, but I didn't mind that. I came away with a much better understanding of the history of music radio both in the UK and in the wider world, having had a very entertaining evening.