This is what you get if you take three production CDs that I used in the Media Network studio from 1995-2000 and fire them off one by one. It turns into 85 minutes of nostalgia with the daft jingles and promos we made to parody international broadcasting in the nineties. Ised the Dalet Workstation to make most of these - because it was the only way to do multirack mixes at Radio Netherlands. Before that we made jingles in the studio using complicated mixes of bit of tapes spliced together using razor blades. Was it efficient? No. Was it fun. Yes.

Radio Netherlands had a broadcast licence to use commercial music, so that made it possible to make these kind of jingles. We weren't trying to make any money out of the montages. We tended to use new music, the idea being that new music would pop up on commercial stations later and that might trigger some people to ask "Where have I heard that before?". My thanks to the voice talents of Jim Cutler, Lou Josephs, Diana Janssen, Dennis Powell, Peter Spinks, George Wood, Gene Reich, Paul Holmes (before he was famous), Spike Milligan (who was trapped in a studio during a news bulletin), Pete Myers, and Kenny Everett (broadcasters prayer). I wrote the scripts. Enjoy. 

On July 12th 2012, the BBC leaves Bush House for the last time, with a world news bulletin at 11 hrs GMT. That iconic building on the Strand has been the home of the World Service since 1941. There have been various tributes in BBC programmes on the network in the last few months. As a World Service listener since 1969, I watched this organisation for the outside looking in.

I was pleased that Newshour honoured the late Pete Myers by including his famous "Goooooood Morning Africa" call in their sign-off piece. I often thought he must have inspired Adrian Cronauer's famous call in Good Morning Vietnam, although,the film was largely fictitious. Pete later came to Radio Netherlands to start Afroscene and Mainstream Asia. I remember him showing me his scrapbook of newspaper cuttings compiled during his days in Ghana and at the BBC African Service. My fear is that these great stories of an intriguing building will get lost and separated in cyberspace as they move down the vast archiving system. It's already happening as BBC World Service moves on to a new life and purpose in New Broadcasting House at the Langham, just by Oxford Circus.

So I've simply combined what I've heard into one compilation in the hope that by putting it together, the context of these stories won't disappear. The photo is of well-known presenter John Tidmarsh, a voice inseperable from BBC World Service in the 70's and 80's.

Just found a couple of CDs with examples of Media Network jingles and montages that were used in the programme between 1985 and 1996. They feature the voice talents of Bill Mitchell, Lou Josephs, Jim Cutler, Gene Reich (ex VoA), Pete Myers, Nevil Gray, Peter Barsby (the presenter of BBC's World Radio Club in the 1980's), Rob Groen and that mysterious lady who worked on Radio Tirana. Let me know if you want to hear more. Boy we were having fun then. Radio Netherlands may be a memory now, but they were strong memories weren't they? Photo of Lou Josephs, Jonathan Marks and Jim Cutler was taken in August 2001. We've all got much younger and wiser since then...