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Moray Firth Radio turns 40 this week, a milestone that might not mean much outside the north of Scotland. But for those from the area that it serves (myself and the editor of this magazine among them), it’s quite a moment. MFR is a case study not just in successful British media innovation but how independent radio serves and even create communities. A project said to be too niche to succeed went on to become one of the most successful local radio stations in the UK. Therein lies a story.

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It’s a story that I was lucky enough to have a ringside seat to watch. MFR was started by passionate amateurs without any money or experience who needed all the volunteer help they could get — including from the nine-year-old me. At first, I was an office gofer. By the age of 14, I was presenting my own show; now, I’m a presenter on LBC. At the time, it was just crazily good fun. Only later did I come to appreciate the techniques and trademarks that made the MFR project so audacious and so incredibly successful. 

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The Moray Firth is the long thin coastal v-shape at the top of northern Britain. By 1980 those living near it had dedicated newspapers but no local radio. Aberdeen, the much larger city, had its own station in 1981 called Northsoundoriginally planned to serve Inverness as well. But that would have been a geographically gigantic and editorially unwieldy chunk of the north.

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So campaigners started making a case for what became Moray Firth Radio — and to their amazement, were granted a radio licence. Frantic fundraising then started, involving donations from Macallan whisky among other patrons. Thomas Prag, MFR’s first chief executive, summed it up:

“On paper, it was disastrous — and not viable. It was still covering a massive area for a local radio station: the medium-wave (AM) signal was at nighttime reaching Wick in the far north to Fraserburgh [five hours apart].

“Nobody believed, really, that this was viable… There had been nothing for people in this area. This wasn't, really, a community. The 'Moray Firth' community, as such, didn’t exist as people were miles apart. We managed to make because we didn’t know it shouldn’t. We didn’t know that this was different and unique and should not have worked.

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Famously, the target area for MFR contained more sheep than humans; an observation made pointedly by many who laughed off the idea that such a small outfit could succeed commercially. Those voices would ultimately be silenced by a radio station that within its first two years was generating the highest listening figures of any independent local radio station in the UK. MFR might have had a smaller number of potential listeners, but its relationship with them was something few other stations could match.

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It launched on 23 February 1982 at 6.30 a.m. with a news bulletin read by Isabel Fraser. Listening to all this at home, I was captivated by the revolutionary idea that the words and sounds emerging from my tiny radio set were coming from just a few miles away from my home (in Nairn). Like many pop-obsessed nine-year-olds, the music I listened to had come from far away: from BBC Radio One or even Luxembourg. Now, it was suddenly much closer than I’d ever imagined possible. So close in fact, that I could physically go to it. So I did.

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One of MFR’s founding presenters, Brian Anderson, let me help him with his morning show by playing tape cartridges on which the commercials were loaded, or pressing the button that made the news happen. I experimented in the spare studio, making little demo programmes that illustrated that I had acquired a reasonable grasp of the technology. I was soon asked to do mini-interviews ('vox pops') on Nairn High Street, asking shoppers what they thought of the new £1 coin. They might reasonably also have had a view on why an 11-year-old kid was shoving a microphone in their face outside Woolworths.

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MFR’s massive popularity was explained not just novelty but immediacy: an unending commitment to the area it served. Listeners would call the station at any time and talk to the presenters like they were friends. The regular 'Tradio' show predated eBay by several decades, allowing callers to swap unwanted items with others. Each Saturday morning, a retired hospital matron known as Aunty Jean would read dedications to couples marrying that day; at its height, it felt as if getting 'a mention from Aunty Jean' was a legal prerequisite to marriage in the Highlands. If a cat went missing in Brora, its distraught owner would call the station and hear a plea for sightings on the air within the hour, and — very often — happy news of its discovery an hour after that.

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The Highland region, by the way, is bigger than Slovenia — we all lived pretty far apart from each other. But MFR seemed to close that gap. The 'radio car' was a common sight right across the patch, broadcasting live from the streets of all its spread-out communities. It was a defiantly bottom-of-the-range Land Rover, with a giant hole artlessly drilled into the roof to accommodate a 60ft telescopic aerial. (A wedge of promotional t-shirts were once taped tightly around the mast to stop the rain getting in.) This was used to bounce the signal back to base in Inverness, but the distances involved were often so great that a successful transmission would literally depend on whether the tide was in or out.

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A much-loved and much-played 'jingle' called ScotSong simply listed all of the towns and villages in the area over a piece of chirpy Scottish music. It lasted a full minute. The idea that places so far apart actually made up an area — a cohesive community — was part of the MFR magic. It made people feel closer to each other. One MFR Sunday afternoon show, Scots On Record, had a reach of 25 per cent — so one in four people living in this vast area spent their Sunday lunchtime listening to that show. It’s very rare for radio of any kind to get numbers like that. It’s a World Cup Final-style audience but achieved every single week.

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When the Kessock Bridge was opened — extending the A9 from Inverness over the Moray Firth to the north — MFR covered the ceremony live. No one else would have. The excitement was palpable: communities are welded together by roads as well as communication. As Prag put it: 'the two things that created the Moray Firth were the Kessock Bridge and Moray Firth Radio. They brought the area together.'

Happily my voice had broken by the time the chance came to present my own show. I didn’t think about whether I was the youngest person to do so; I was too terrified. My fear came not least because I’d been paired with a guy called Gregor who wanted to present a heavy metal show but needed a co-host and (candidly) someone to press the buttons. It made my career choice. I cancelled my place at uni a few weeks before I was supposed to start. I didn’t want to do anything else (and there wasn’t terribly much evidence that I could). I was one of hundreds of young people trained by MFR.

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Even with industry-beating popularity, keeping MFR on air wasn’t cheap or easy. Every town in the area had a local newspaper, filled with adverts for loyal local advertisers. Persuading them of the merits of this new advertising medium took the genius of Rod Webster, perhaps the only person I’ve ever met whose understanding of radio was equal to his knowledge of sales. He sold advert slots to a sceptical garage owner by saying ‘let’s switch on the radios of the second-hand cars you have outside, and see what station they’re tuned to’. Almost all were on MFR.

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MFR remained independent of the big radio groups for many years, but like so many other local stations found itself swallowed up by ever bigger groups. Now, it’s part of German media giant Bauer’s portfolio of UK stations. It’s a thinner, more focused and arguably more professional proposition. It still gets close to half of the north tuning in each week — that’s over 100,000 listeners — a higher figure than any other radio station across the area.

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It’s common to talk about the BBC as ‘public service’ radio as opposed to commercial radio. But a commercial station, even one put together by passionate amateurs, still provides a public service. MFR helped forge a community, not just serve it, bringing local people together more effectively than perhaps any other medium before or since. Here’s to another 40 years.

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A history of MFR, “Making Waves” by Susie Rose, is available to buy here.

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