The initial idea was sound. The Isle of Man would set up its own commercial station to rival Radio Luxembourg.
Independent commercial radio was bound to appear to challenge BBC Radio just as ITV had already done with BBC TV. So in June 1964, a decade before the UK, Manx Radio was born.
Now we call it the ‘national’ station and given the amount of airtime Allan Bell and Co get every week you can be in no doubt that the government has a big stake in it. However, the original idea was a commercial station like Luxembourg and you didn’t exactly hear the ‘goings on the parliament in Luxembourg’ being blasted out by RL.
MR fell at the first hurdle when the Manx government asked the UK for a licence. The UK obliged but set the station the strength of a light bulb.
The Manx government should have called their bluff then but later in the decade, with UK commercial radio set to launch, the Manx government toyed once again with the idea of a viable money-making station the UK acted and legislated over the Manx government’s head. Constitutionally the Isle of Man was put firmly in its place!
So we had Manx Radio costing money instead of making money. We couldn’t turn it off because that would have made the government of the day look foolish. So we turned it into ‘the Nation’s Station’.
I don’t remember much of Manx Radio in the early 70s. I don’t think people bothered with it much. There were far more exciting stations pumping out pop music and colour TV had arrived!
In my view if there was one thing that turned around the fortunes of Manx Radio for a time it was its news and current affairs. The ‘two-man band’ of Charles Guard and David Callister – Mandate became a ‘must hear’. Guard and Callister were voracious in their quest for news and adept at grilling those foolish enough to offer a news release. I know because often I left Manx Radio feeling decidedly ‘toasted’. Callister also took over the Mannin Line and transformed its fortunes.
In tandem with this was a keen news team always anxious to pip the print media. They tracked you down, they got the story. The whole thing seemed to be run on a shoestring and the news room was just that, a herd of ‘journos’ chasing stories with ‘a cupboard’ at one end where the news was pushed out. It was so unsophisticated that if you were in the newsroom you had to keep your voice down when they were reading the news.
Often you would be asked to do an interview live – no chance to dodge the questions. I can say with some knowledge that governments of the day were wary if not sometimes hostile to Manx Radio. MR took no prisoners.
I can’t track the point at which the station started its transition to the bland. Charles Guard moved on fairly early on but Callister remained to keep Mandate interesting for several more years. The ‘Moan-in Line’ limped on but was eventually culled down to its once weekly outing. Replaced in the week by ‘Talking Heads’, which tries to be passably provocative, but lacking the unregulated anarchy the ‘Moan in’ had.
The news team also moved on with, in some instances, a move to the print media.
The old MR building is revamped. You don’t have to hush your voice these days in the news room while the news reader does their stint.
Comparatively recently you have specialist programmes. But is the recent ‘Women Today’ starting decades after the BBC’s Woman’s Hour thinking outside the box? Then there’s ‘Countryside’ a ‘lite’ audio version of the BBC ‘Countryfile’, with those two guys with the T. E. Brown accents!
The station has reverted back to those unloved days with a government that hates spending money on it but knowing they can’t get rid of it. Local alternatives Energy and 3FM compete in ‘popular’ output while struggling to stay alive in the real commercial radio sector.
Meanwhile in the artificial commercial world on Douglas Head government money flows in – and the voices of Allan Bell and his acolytes flow out! The Nation’s Station indeed?