History of Radio Stoke

Do you have any Radio Stoke 'Forgotten Facts' to add to the ones below.? If you do, please add your memories in the Comments Box at the bottom of this page. Thanks!!

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The oddest programme title? That must go to 'John Fox's Fegg Hayes Clarion & Steam Bicycle Review' which was a Saturday programme on air in the eighties. Quite what it was about We have no idea. Do you?

The famous Royal Doulton Band owed its existence partly to Radio Stoke. Programme-makers, concerned that brass-bands were dying out in the area, organised an on-air competition to support the art in the 1970s. A ‘North Staffs Concert Band’ was formed to take part – and the Royal Doulton had its beginnings...

The first journalists on the station used typewriters, with chalky 'tippex' papers to help them erase any mistakes in their typing!
And, although the station now keeps a special generator in the building to sustain it during a power-cut, there is still one typewriter kept in the station’s basement - just in case the generator goes down too…

The Radio Stoke painting

Across the years, Radio Stoke has featured items that would surprise people nowadays - for example: a five minute section each day which was just a list of the day's livestock prices; a weekly programme in the Esperanto language; and even an Obituaries slot.
Do you remember any others?!

The 'Marmalade Club' was for early-bird listeners. When presenter Dave West opened up the Radio Stoke airwaves in the moring in the 1990s (overnight, at this time, Radio Stoke's frequency was used by the BBC World Service) at 6am, he would play records and chat with night-shift workers and early-risers.
Eventually, specially produced marmalade jars were made, just to celebrate this small band of listeners!

Norman Ivision was the station’s religious producer in the late eighties and early nineties.
One of Norman's brightest ideas came in 1989; and was to persuade listeners that they should help pay for some cows to be sent to a poverty-stricken part of Uganda; he thought his big-hearted listeners would support such a venture. Sure enough, they did, and the cows were duly transported.

Radio Stoke was able to broadcast in stereo fairly quickly – which it proceeded to do one fateful Saturday in late 1968.
It was however immediately ordered to stop doing so. Radio Stoke’s engineers had inadvertently embarrassed the BBC. On hearing the news, the BBC’s Director General of the time immediately sent a telex, “Stop it at once – Scotland hasn’t got Radio 3 in stereo yet!”