East Anglia's Heart Attack - Part 2: Radio Broadland

Onto the second part of my trawl through the better days of radio in East Anglia and Radio Broadland, the station broadcasting to Norwich and Great Yarmouth and the rest of East Norfolk and North Suffolk.

The station made it's on air debut on the first of October 1984
(the same day as Invicta Sound) and launched with the first of many jingle packages
from David Arnold, this one with the slogan "We're All Yours".

1984 Jingles - David Arnold Music

The station became popular with a presenter line up of Nick Risby, Dave Brown (not the one from Orwell, Invicta, Vibe FM and Solar Radio), Bob Harris who had a brief spell at the station, and Rob Chandler who's still presenting today and survives the rebranding along with co-presenter Chrissie Jackson on breakfast.

The second jingle package also by David Arnold continued in that same style although the station also had a set of resings of classic PAMS jingles that were previously used on the pirate Radio London back in the 1960s and sounded pretty good when resung for the Norwich based station.

1986 Jingles - David Arnold Music

Radio Broadland PAMS Jingles

The jingles progressed onwards with the 1987 package taking a more contemporary angle and in 1990 they became even more classy with the addition of
Dallas vocals from Century 21.

1987 Jingles - David Arnold Music

1990 Demo -David Arnold/Century 21

Around 1992 the station changed it's on air name to Broadland FM 102 and commisioned a composite jingle package from TM Century that I'd love to get hold of, which amongst other packages included resings of "Oldies 94.9" fitting perfectly with the station name.

In 1995 the station split frequencies to provide Amber Radio on 1152 and of FM were resings of the same jingles used by SGR who Radio Broadland had now aqquired to form East Anglian Radio. The Broadland 102 jingles were also complemented by liners voiced by John Wells which can be heard in this selection below.

1995 Jingles - TM Century

1997 saw the addition of liners voiced by Dave Brown giving mentions to just about every town in the broadcast area accompanied by just about every laser effect from Power Shot.

Then in came GWR.

On a more up to date note, the East Anglian stations are currently broadcasting non-stop music ahead of the relaunch at 6am on Monday and the stations went out on a whimper as expected which is a shame considering how long they've been on the air.

Unlike the GWR transformation however, I doubt they'll be too much of a backlash as musically the stations won't be too different to what the One Network has been sounding like recently.