Swinging Radio England - Test and Roger Day

It’s very tempting, given a stack of new jingles and a new station to launch, just to put on your best jock voice and play them all on-air one after the other. That’s just what they did as they launched ‘Swinging Radio England’.

This station joined the plethora of offshore pirates in May 1966 from the ‘MV Olga Patricia’ ship (later the Laissez Faire, for obvious reasons) anchored in the North Sea, just off the Essex coast. It shared its accommodation with the easy listening station ‘Britain Radio’.

The format for Radio England was Top 40, anchored by ‘Boss Jocks’, the powerful voices in the style of US Top 40 radio. More about sound than content. Whilst there were some native Americans, the English fraternity were moulded to fit through influence. This station, maybe ahead of its time for the UK, was to be automated, but became instead a live project.

On this, enjoy the PAMs Jetset jingles, later mutilated as the station quickly changed identity, and a chirpy Roger Day, who was later to surface at Piccadilly in Manchester, a station launched by a team which featured pirate radio management.