There may have been many problems in the radio industry when Mercury launched, but it became the best radio station by a country mile for many many years until it abandoned it's wide music mix policy. For many years you could hear the widest possible mix of music on the station as well as community programming. A rip roaring success it certainly was!
What is ILR these days?Recently Greatest Hits Radio took over lots (in fact too many)of the original nineteen Independent Local Radio stations. Greatest Hits Radio then broad casts twenty four hours a day in which only four hours is locally based . This is usually the Drivetime Show So for instance where you used to get Radio Aire with total local output you now get output from for example GHR's Manchester studios relaying the same records to all the other "local" GHR stations. In way it is National Local Radio without much of the local. I am very much in the "they should have left well alone" group of listeners. The Original ILR stations had their own individual output and was very much rooted in their local area. They gave up to the minute local news, weather and sports news. They were like a trusted friend with great Disc Jockeys/Presenters becoming local hero's. Bring Back Original ILR I say. It is very much sadly missed.
One ilr station which closed very early in its life was in Leicester at Centre Radio I'm not sure what went wrong but maybe the BBC local station was better.
@@christopherhulse8385 Either that or the parents ruled the roost at home and only allowed all radios in the house to be tuned to the local BBC station, no matter whose radio it was!
A license was eventually given for the “Radio Jackie Area”, not to Jackie but to a bland station that later went bust, whereupon Radio Jackie submitted an application and made a success of it. So much BS spread and repeated against our young and innovative “pirate” radio stations back in those days, stifling the country’s energy yet again. The “piracy” btw was from the authorities’ concept that these stations were “stealing their allocated listeners”. Listeners thereby being regarded as commodities, not free-thinking/living individuals, deserved of consumer democracy. Tuning the frequencies in major US and Canadian cities back then revealed how much better-served the UK could have been back then - no “shortage of frequencies”.
Local commercial radio isn't as it was. What were local stations are now joined up to provide quasi national services such as Heart. All they play is pretty bog standard chart hits and oldies. There's nothing exciting, ground breaking, or challenging in what they do.
Unfortunately Mercury eventually succumbed to Heart and is now the rather bland Heart Southern, which is a pastische of what Mercury was. Don't listen anymore as very bland. GLR, please bring back the Mercury format. It was well loved and is well missed.
@@jimbo6059 ITV is just the same, all the individual stations with not only local news, but other local programming too, were all merged into one national service, just leaving a small opt out for so called local news that isn't always that local. What for example has Banbury, nearer Birmingham than London have in common with the Isle of Wight or Worthing!
