The Boat that Rocked

I'm not surprised that the critics hated The Boat that Rocked, Richard Curtis's homage to Radio Caroline and the sixties pirate radio stations that led to the creation of Radio 1 and nearly 300 local pop stations. I would normally be with them.

But, instead, as one who had a fleeting involvement with dry land pirate stations in Ireland in the late seventies and early eighties, I preferred to wallow in the great music and enjoy the absurd caricatures developed by Curtis and a pretty good cast - including Bill Nighy as the louche station boss, Kenneth Branagh as a Pythonesque cabinet minister (who bore little resemblance to Tony Benn) and Philip Seymour Hoffmann playing a version of the legendary Emperor Rosko (whose shows later graced the Irish pirates).

True, it didn't go into the reasons why the BBC couldn't play more pop (a Musicians' Union ban) or the ideological objections of the Labour government (who handled the whole thing very badly). And the ending was a bit ridiculous. But if you take it at face value, as an entertaining - if overlong - piece of nostalgic hokum, it is just good fun.

Pirate memories

News that we are approaching the 40th anniversary of the date when pirate radio was made firmly illegal in Britain (though Radio Caroline stayed on air) brought back memories of a later, similar movement in Ireland in the late seventies and early eighties. Irish pirate radio operated out of the back of hotels, rather than from the high seas. As a student in the early eighties, I did some broadcasting on Radio 257, which operated from a grubby room at the old Crofton Airport Hotel and Sunshine Radio, a slicker more professional outfit which had its studios in Portmarnock. The Irish pirates had a similar impact to Radio Caroline, helping create RTE Radio 2 and ultimately a large wave of commercial stations. Many leading Irish broadcasters started their days on the pirates. But, although there were occasional high profile raids, their status was generally rather less precarious. Two Labour MEPs were elected in the four-seater Dublin constituency in the 1979 European elections after blanket advertising on the capital's pirates (a facility not available on RTE), even though Irish Labour had a similar official attitude to the pirates as Tony Benn, postmaster-general in 1967 in England. On one day in 1980 when I was getting ready to read the news on Radio 257, I was slightly startled to see a Garda car pull up outside the studio. The policeman knocked on the door. "I wonder would you mind reading these stolen car numbers out on air, please," he asked. "Good luck to you, now".