A few weeks ago I wrote an article on this Record Press blog, highlighting the launch of Kid Jensen’s “Double Top Twenty Show” on Smooth Radio, as direct competition to Tony Blackburn’s “Pick of the Pops” on Radio Two. Now the “chart from this week in a particular year” radio show format is expanding to a clutch of BBC Local Radio stations, in the south west of the UK.

The Vintage Top 40 Show has been airing on BBC Radio Devon and BBC Radio Jersey but will expand to six further areas from next weekend. It moves from Sundays to Saturdays 6-8pm from 14th May and adds BBC Radio stations in Cornwall, Guernsey, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Somerset to the existing franchise.

As with Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops and Smooth Radio’s Double Top 20, the show features two classic chart countdowns from this week in the past and is hosted by Shaun Tilley. It also has regular guest presenters including the likes of Mike Read, David Hamilton, Ed Stewart, Adrian John, Graham Dene, Pat Sharp and Adrian Juste…..This also fills in the blanks as to the whereabouts of some of the remaining Radio One DJ line up from the 1970s and 1980s – a question we posed in that original article, having accounted for Kid Jensen, Simon Bates and Andy Peebles on Smooth Radio and Johnnie Walker and Tony Blackburn on Radio Two!! Now we know former Radio One breakfast show presenter, Noel Edmonds, spends his afternoons gainfully employed as host of Channel 4’s “Deal or no Deal”. So that just leaves Dave Lee Travis aka DLT, Paul Burnett, Peter Powell, Gary Davies and Mike Smith to be located and accounted for!!

But what is the appeal of the retro chart radio show, harnessed with a retro Radio One DJ? Hearing an old favourite song tends to evoke a single memory. Hearing a chart rundown in it’s entirety from a particular year, creates a context by which we conjure up memories of a whole spring, summer etc. Add the dulcet tones of a DJ / presenter from that era, and the listener is totally transported back to that year. I believe that the key to the growing success of these types of radio show is that he in times of austerity and economic hardship, we tend to romanticise the past, and take refuge in a time which provides us with a sense of well being and comfort. The period that is particularly in vogue currently is the 1970s, but the reality is that the decade was very similar to contemporary times with high unemployment and economic hardship!!

If you recall, nostalgia emanated from the Hovis TV commercials in the 1970s, as a baker’s boy clambered up the cobbled street, pushing his bread loaf laden bicycle, in an unidentified Victorian Yorkshire mill town. In real Victorian England, the baker’s boy was probably a street urchin, who returned to an orphanage after his fourteen hour shift at the bakery!! Victorian England seemed idyllic in comparison to the strike torn 1970s society; in the same way that we romanticise the kitsch 1970s from the perspective of the twenty first century.

But who cares? Retro chart radio shows are great fun, and provide us with an escape for a couple of hours from the trials and tribulations of life in 2011……

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