I’m looking out for the DVD of “The Boat that Rocked” by Richard Curtiss.

This fictional film is based on the pirate ship “Radio London” and its crew of castaway DJs. It was on this ship that many successful Radio 1 DJ’s learned their skills, Tony Blackburn, Emperor Rosko, Keith Skues, Ed Stewart and Kenny Everett to mention a few. You can read about my visit to Radio London in my book, ‘Radio 1 The Inside Scene’. In fact Radio 1 itself was very much modelled on Radio London and when I started it we modelled the studios on those I had seen and even bought our jingles from the same production company. It will be interesting to see what sort of job Richard Curtiss has made of recreating those fun days. I gather one of the actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman has modelled his character in the film on Emperor Rosko so I look forward to viewing the DVD.

On the FM radio front I have just chaired the 25th Annual meeting of the RDS Forum, a meeting point for those interested in exploiting the best that FM radio can offer. Delegates were interested to see the British Government’s report on “Digital Britain” which among other ideas suggests that the BBC will switch off its National Networks on FM as early as 2015. In practice it’s our view that the people of Europe will not be ready for this big switch over to DAB in such a short time. Cars are still being made without DAB and until 90% of drivers have access to DAB listening the BBC just cannot deprive its listeners of their favourite Radio’s 1,2,3 and 4. The public will never stand for it so we think the future of FM with RDS is quite bright for at least another 10 years. RDS also has a clever card up its sleeve in the shape of Radio Text + which enables the listener to identify any song being played on the radio and order it offline via internet stores. The new generation of smart phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson have all this RDS technology built in and in 2009 one company alone built over 100 million RDS chips largely used for portable devices like phones and PDA’s. So there’s all the proof you need that FM and RDS lives.

Next month I’m off on another cruise on P&O’s Artemis to Estonia, Russia, Sweden, Denmark and Finland where I hope to entertain the passengers with tales of the BBC’s role in World War II, the records that were banned and much more..