Here’s a clip from BBC Choice’s Liquid News which was filmed on 18 February 2002 and aired the next day.
Phoenix FM was in the middle of its 6th trial broadcast, five years before we started broadcasting under a full time licence. We had a 28 day stint on 87.9FM and we broadcast from a room on the top floor of Hutton Poplars Lodge in Rayleigh Road, Shenfield.
The Liquid News presenter was the late Christopher Price, who sadly passed away a couple of months after this was recorded. Colin Paterson, who is now the entertainment correspondent for BBC Radio 2 and 5 Live, was sent down and spent pretty much the entire evening with us, and despite having to spend all night in a cold studio in an even colder town was remarkably chipper throughout the whole night.
If you remember BBC Choice in the days before it became BBC Three, errors abound. The feature starts off by bizarrely talking about a “birth explosion in Billericay” and then Christopher Price means says Dave Lee when he talks about “snooker on the radio” (which of course, is also wrong) when he meant to say Dave Lee Travis. The voiceover then goes to describe us as “Dartwood’s Phoenix FM” (Dartwood? DARTWOOD?)
Richard Nott is the presenter who appears on film ending his Classic Phoenix show. And of course you see me manning the phones, as the presenter hadn’t noticed someone trying to call in. Good to see some things never change …
The BBC’s story is of course meant to be tongue in cheek (hence the cheesy request to chalk up the record player needle, which Steve duly obliged) and I think we did pretty well out of it – certainly better than Magma, who were introduced as an “unlistenable French prog rock band”. I’m not quite sure who the two guys are who commented at the end of the clip, although if they think that Billericay is in Wales they probably had the same atlas as the one with Dartwood in it.
This was the last time that Steve presented the Interesting Soul Show too, as he moved on to the Interesting Alternative Show the next time we had a trial broadcast in November 2002 – although you might have noticed that his “music you never have known existed” tagline didn’t bite the dust!
