Hospital Radio The Way It Used To Be

Ivan Brackenbury!

For this blog I’d like to talk about my first experience in radio and how I started. When I was 14, and first started taking an interest in DJing at youth clubs, I found out that a friend of mine also ran a “pirate radio station”, now I’m not condoning pirate radio at all but in the 80’s there were a few in the area and his was one of them. I won’t name him as he is still involved in radio but for the purposes of the blog it piqued my interest.

So as a hungry young DJ I wanted to do radio but had no idea how to break in. Reading ‘Jocks’ magazine (there’s a blast from the past) it advised that hospital radio was a good way to cut your teeth and start to learn about radio presenting. Remember this was in the 80’s, nowadays there are courses and tutorials online that you can do but back then it was a case of getting your hands dirty. So I found out which of my local hospitals had radio stations that were willing to take on people.

I owe a man called Carlton J Stocks a great deal of thanks and if I could ever track him down I would buy him a beer as he picked up the phone when I rang Mexborough Montague Hospital Radio and invited me down to the station. Montague was a curious station as it was located 3 miles away from the hospital in an old church house and broadcast down a phone line to the patients and staff. It made getting requests a bit hard compared to other stations but I was an impressionable lad and was still in awe.

I was expecting a plush studio but very quickly found out it was just a small room with a wall full of singles (supplied by the local Woolworths), a pair of turntables, a mixer and a tape deck for adverts. No computers or automated payouts like nowadays. After a short chat I was offered Saturday mornings, just like that! No training, no instruction, just thrown in at the deep end. Did I care? Not one bit, I was on-air!

Regardless that my audience consisted of Lol the cleaner (Lol was a legend at the hospital, he was known for always been there regardless of the time of day, Lol was always working and listening) and that was about it, the number of patients was never known as we weren’t in the hospital but as Carlton said to me in the very first interview “someone is always listening”, that advice has stuck with me throughout my whole DJing career. I was the happiest kid on earth when I did my first, very nervous, link. After all I had made it, I was now on the same level as Robbie Vincent, DLT, Keith Skues et al in that I was a radio presenter.

The station was awful though, needles used to skip because they hadn’t been changed, the station record collection was very limited and I was greener than a family size can of peas, but it provided me with 2 years of experience where I like to think I got a lot better and provided me with an experience I will never forget. The weekend saw a 24 hour broadcast where 5 presenters did a full day and I came straight from working in a club to do the late Saturday night shift into a Sunday morning and then straight out to play football for my local side. I slept well that afternoon!

I even joined in the true spirit of hospital radio by taking part in a week long broadcast after breaking my ankle and broadcasting with my leg in pot.

Strange how memories can come flooding back though. I had a TV repair done last year and when the gentleman turned to do the repair it was one of the DJ ‘originals’ from the station all those years ago.

So in this day where stations can broadcast all day automated with a play list of thousands and all the information you could ever need to present a show is at your fingertips, spare a thought for those of us who used to be in a room in an old church house where one deck was broken or the tape player was jammed and someone had “borrowed” that weeks top 5 because they had a disco that night and “didn’t think anyone would be playing them”. It was fun and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

Mastermix is Europe’s premier DJ music service, offering mixes, remixes, mash ups and DJ friendly compilations on CD from www.mastermixdj.com and on download from www.mastermixdigital.com You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well!

Tagged as: DJ Music, hospital radio, Mastermix, Radio DJ