Plymouth Sound early swap shop & David Bassett

The old days on commercial radio were just about perfect, so some say. Listening back though, one wonders whether the output of some stations would still have commanded such impressive audiences, had there been anything else decent on FM to choose from.

Judge for yourself, with this delicious unintentionally hilarious extreme example of the daytime phone fare offered by Plymouth Sound in its early days. A lengthy swap shop, from the days when one gave out one’s phone number on air, delivers a list of things to be swapped from desperate callers. Whether any listener ever on any radio station managed to get exactly what they wanted in exchange for something they didn’t want, we shall never know. And I just wonder whether the woman calling ‘Mr (David) Bassett’ for a ‘grumble’ about ‘jumble’ was Margaret Thatcher. Certainly sounded that way.