BCfm marks 10 years of broadcasting

As I enter BCfm, One Love Breakfast is well under way and Ed Rendle is being shut down. “D’you guys wanna hear some facts?” he asks, laptop at the ready. “I think your mic’s broken,” replies Pat Hart, irrepressible station manager and breakfast show host, before cuing a track too quickly for Ed to retort.

News broadcaster Kate watches from the corner as Pat and Ed continue to spar: they are exactly the same off-air as on. Pat proposes a poetry slam between Bristol poet laureate Miles Chambers and co-host Mollie Finn.

It’s a fine introduction to the delightful chaos that is the One Love breakfast show.

The show ends and I’m introduced to Pat, the kind of man who wears multiple lanyards to match his many jobs, and Harriet Robinson – assistant station manager and calm foil to Pat’s bullish zest.

“Harriet’s brilliant,” enthuses Pat. “I manage the direction of the organisation. But my admin is terrible. She’s very organised. She’ll often do the admin.” Not to mention that she’s a trustee, producer and presenter for BCfm, and also works at the BBC and for Made in Bristol TV.

Harriet got her start in the industry at BCfm. “I wanted to get experience in the media. The people that ran it at the time trained me up. Then I went to work on commercial radio but stayed here to get more experience… this place is really good for that. If anyone wants to volunteer we don’t turn anyone away.”

Not only do they not turn anyone away, they rely on people turning up. BCfm is entirely volunteer-run and has to make £25,000 annually to keep going, which it manages through on air advertising, sponsorship and service contracts with local organisations. They’ve become well embedded in many different communities around Bristol, making it an attractive option for organisations trying to reach different groups.

“We make programmes for Up Our Street, a partnership just around the corner [from the station’s home at City Academy in Lawrence Hill],” Pat explains. “They’re trying to meet the community, so they come to us. They can engage with local people. We have listeners in Hartcliffe, Southmead, Lockleaze, not just Easton and Lawrence Hill. The station is an ideal way of reaching communities.”

The numbers back this up: local radio figures are hard to measure, but Pat reckons it peaks at 30,000 across Ujima and BCfm for the breakfast show, and averages about 10,000 listeners during the day.

Pat is not shy pointing out what a good job they’re doing: “We were trying to think the other day if there’s an element of Bristol life we don’t cover,” he says. You can guess the conclusion they came to. Not that diversity takes the place of entertainment: “If you listen to our output you wouldn’t know if you’re listening to a commercial station or not.”

I’m not quite sure how to square this with their open-access ethos, or the fact that the presenters haven’t turned up for the 10am Silver Sound slot, but there’s a reason why they’re still going strong for a decade when so many community radio stations have gone to that dusty old sound studio in the sky. The facts speak for themselves: they’ve won two Sony Gold Radio Academy Awards and many of their team have gone on to do broadcast work for BBC Bristol, ITV and BBC World Service.

The picture Pat and Harriet paint is a station that’s a real force for good in the city. “We’re in a really good position to break stories that wouldn’t get covered by BBC, ITV, SKY, IRN [Independent Radio News, suppliers of most commercial radio],” Pat claims. “Protests are a good example of this. Sometimes you’d see hardly any media about big protests. So we’d send reports out and then BBC Bristol can’t ignore it.”

Pat talks proudly about how they were one of the first channels to break the story that the People’s Bank of China were responsible for various Bristol housing developments built without social housing. In many ways they are helping to set the agenda for local affairs that national media outlets can then follow. They are even credited with helping Bristol elect numerous black councillors and the first black mayor in a European city.

Where BCfm comes into its own is in giving under-represented groups access they couldn’t dream of before. When BBC Points West ran a story about transgender surgery, instead of getting an ‘expert’ as a news guest, Harriet suggested Steffi Barnett, a transgender BCfm presenter. Steffi got some great coverage, the BBC had a properly diverse panel: everyone wins. “They never would have done that before,” says Harriet.

“And now on the BBC you get real live Muslims and Somalis,” jokes Pat, who tells me he made a quip about tasers when hosting a recent police function, so is clearly not afraid of going close to the line.

The BCfm mythology is full of unlikely characters mixing. Pat tells the tale of gay presenter Kevin (“he called himself the camp crusader”) meeting presenter Cyrus, a black activist who had turned to Islam. “I don’t think Cyrus had ever spoken to someone who he knew was a gay man… They ended up going outside for a cigarette and a chat.”

Rizwan now pops by. He is a local Imam who helps with accounts, here along with Perry Guidry – a local musician and historian who presents the second hour of Silver Sounds – and has been with BCfm since before it was BCfm.

It’s time for me to let Pat and Harriet return to masterminding this operation. I ask Pat what the future holds for BCfm. It’s a big year ahead, he says: they’ll be celebrating their tenth anniversary with a series of events across the city, not to mention a major fundraising campaign. “We want to keep going on this trajectory. To tell people more about us. We’re here because the city wants us to be here.”

Listen to BCfm on 93.2FM or online at www.bcfmradio.com

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