Radio Birmingham: new name, new look 

23 November 2024 tbs.pm/82172

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From Radio Month for November 1981

On 23 November BBC Radio Birmingham changes its name to BBC Radio WM.

On the same day the station also changes its medium wave transmitter, gets a second medium frequency and a second transmitter to go with it, and launches a publicity campaign to win more listeners as the latest of the BBC’s older stations to go “county-wide.”

The snag is that the county in question is that amorphous and artificial creation of local government reorganisation, the West Midlands – a largely urban area which includes Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and the towns of the Black Country. To the outsider, it is not always easy to distinguish one town from another, or deduce where one ends and the next begins. But to the three million local inhabitants, Dudley, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Birmingham are all very definitely separate places, which take less than kindly to being treated as just part of the same urban sprawl.

This may help to explain why the area’s local radio stations show wide variations in their popularity. Mercia Sound in Coventry has a large audience, quickly established when the station went on air 18 months ago: but then Coventry is demonstrably separate from the rest of the West Midlands, and had previously had only Radio Birmingham or BRMB to listen to for any sort of local coverage.

BRMB itself has a lowish weekly reach – perhaps affected by the size and relative sophistication of Birmingham’s population.

Beacon Radio, serving Wolverhampton and the Black Country, has over a million potential listeners but a reach even lower than BRMB – and that perhaps is because it is based in Wolverhampton, and the Black Country’s inhabitants dislike the idea of their local radio service coming from somewhere other than Dudley, Walsall or West Bromwich.

As for Radio Birmingham itself, manager John Pickles admits that the audience figures for his Pebble Mill-based station have been “poor for the last ten years” – and in the city of Birmingham itself, where they might reasonably be expected to be rather higher, any difficulties are compounded by reception problems which the station’s new transmitters are designed to circumvent.

Left: BBC Radio Birmingham’s coverage area in 1978; right: BBC Radio WM’s coverage area in 1984. Solid line is VHF-FM, dotted line is daytime medium wave AM.

Until now, Birmingham’s medium wave transmissions have come from Sutton Coldfield. But the BBC discovered early on that Radio Birmingham’s signals interfered with the BBC 2 transmissions from the same site, and the transmission engineers accordingly altered the direction of the signal. Result: no interference with BBC 2; rotten reception in Birmingham itself (the transmitter now pointed directly at Walsall, so the Black Country got a splendid signal).

The problem is now solved. Radio Birmingham will broadcast to Birmingham city on the same frequency as previously (1458 kHz/206m) from the IBA’s transmitter at Langley Mill (which currently carries BRMB). A second frequency (828 kHz/362m) will carry transmissions from the IBA mast at Sedgley near Dudley (which currently carries Beacon Radio as well).

The change of name and the additional frequency will not however be reflected in any major changes in programming. Those have already taken place.

18 months ago, Jack Johnson, Radio Birmingham’s manager since its inception, died, and his programme organiser Bryan Harris moved to Radio Cleveland as station manager. John Pickles, previously head of Radio Scotland, took over from Johnson, and brought in as his programme organiser Radio Bristol’s senior producer, Jeremy Robinson.

Six months later, Robinson and Pickles revamped the station’s programming, reducing the schedules to four main sequences each weekday.

The programme schedule which Pickles and Robinson inherited was, says Pickles, one which “lacked a core.” There were a great many special interest programmes. Community interest material like consumer advice tended to be given its own programme, rather than being integrated into a sequence.

Now, says Robinson, the four remaining sequences have much of importance that was previously programmed separately incorporated within them, rather than being “tucked away and labelled for devotees.” have been brought into recent effect, with others contemplated. The station now broadcasts for an extra hour each evening, until 7 pm. Its programme for Asian listeners, East in West, has been doubled in length.

A programme for black listeners on Sundays is also likely. The station once ran a similar programme, Reggae Reggae, but as Robinson points out: “There’s nothing very local about music alone. The new programme will be strong on speech, with a community flavour.”

At present, Radio Birmingham closes down at lunchtime on Sundays. The new Black programme will enable it to broadcast on into the afternoon, as will a regular documentary slot (there is no such thing in the schedules at present). Another project under consideration is a children’s programme, for which Birmingham’s head of publicity Tim Manning is looking for a new, female voice to co-present with him.

Manning is a peculiar animal in BBC local radio, charged as he is with handling the station’s publicity to the exclusion of most things else. This includes mounting OBs, press relations, conventional promotion, public service announcements and general “marketing” (he also presents the Saturday morning sequence).

Manager John Pickles is very keen on marketing. Like BBC local radio as a whole, he feels his station has a low profile, whilst conceding that a local radio station is many different things to many different people, and consequently not an easy product to sell. People in the BBC have told him recently that they find Radio Birmingham hard to distinguish from a commercial station, and he takes that as a compliment. “We don’t want to ape the commercial stations,” he says, “we must be a real alternative. But if you’re trying to build an audience you’ve got to take it from somewhere else. I think there are a lot of people who listen to commercial radio who are dissatisfied, and who would really like to listen to us.”

In particular, he feels, Radio Birmingham now has a music policy which would attract many who, as one of the station’s publicity leaflets puts it, feel that what is presently defined as middle of the road is still “too near the kerb.” Pickles selects the music himself, but is not, he says, trying to do a Radio London and fill the ‘light music gap’ as a kind of Radio 2½. He has plumped for what he and his staff call alternatively “ill-defined ‘nice music’” or “The Manilow market.” One result is that listeners now pick out the music as a positive reason for tuning in.

The trick now is to persuade listeners who might also positively prefer Birmingham’s music or its programmes to give the station a try.

This is Manning’s job. Apart from the specific task of publicising the station’s new name and frequency, he is concerned to raise its public profile generally. One method he uses is to indulge in plenty of OBs, particularly by the mid-morning 206 Team sequence – a speech and music mix two of whose three producer/presenters have a journalistic background.

Despite the evidence of the BBC’s audience surveys, which as yet show no significant improvement in Birmingham’s audience, Pickles and his staff are confident that the changes over the past year or so, and this latest re shuffle, will bear fruit.

Nonetheless, the station, as Pickles says, has to combat “ten years of public opinion” in seeking a wider audience. Overnight success might perhaps be too much to hope for.