Radio by the people for the people
If you are lucky enough to live in the Oldham or Tameside areas, you may find a new station on 99.7MHz on the VHF/FM band. Under the name of ‘Oldham Community Radio’, the station was awarded a five year licence to broadcast community orientated radio programming. The station will be launched properly by the summer.
At present, most of the local commercial stations throughout the UK are part of national brands. For example, ‘Piccadilly 1152′ transmogrified into ‘Magic 1152′ with ‘Manchester’ added as a token sign of regionality. As such, there is now little localised output and management. At the other end of the scale are smaller independent stations like Tower FM and Revolution 96.2 which have slightly more regionality.
Further down, we have locally managed community based stations, such as ALL FM (ALL standing for Ardwick, Longsight and Levenshulme) and Oldham Community Radio (the subject of this posting).
For the last week, I have been listening to the latter station, and found a good variety of music from the ’50’s to today’s music. There are good examples of targeted programming, with areas from Asian music to local brass bands. So far, OCR seems to be providing the programmes that the new look BBC Radio Manchester has disposed of (the brass band and the Irish music programming). As the station is in ‘Beta Mode’, OCR are looking at expanding the choice of programmes for its official launch.
From what I’ve been listening to, the station could (at least in the Oldham and Tameside areas) bridge the gap left by Radio Manchester and remind us how radio should be used. Overall, so far, so very good, with a great choice of music and interesting programmes.
You can also listen online. The website address is http://www.oldhamcommunityradio.com.
S.V, 09 May 2007.
