Split decision | 5 October 2017

Think back to that morning in September 1967 when the Light Programme was split in two, Tony Blackburn launching Radio 1 with a jaunty new jingle announcing it was all ‘Just for Fun’ while staid old Radio 2 went on with the Breakfast Show and told its listeners to ‘Wake Up Easy’. What is so surprising is just how radical the changes at the BBC were. On that unsuspecting morning, as the Pope urged for peace in Vietnam and a cannabis farm was discovered in Bristol, the Beeb’s radio output was completely overhauled.

It was not just that a new station was launched, addressing the problems posed to the BBC’s listener profile by the lurid temptations of the pirates — those radio stations anchored offshore and unbound by the protocols on which Auntie was run. Much more drastically, the Light Programme, Third Programme and Home Service were all done away with and replaced by networks known only by number.