Expression orale anglais "pirate radio in the sixties"

(First, I’d like to state the definition of power. The power is the ability to exert control over somebody. This power can be exercised by the government, by individuals, even by powerful ideas.)

In the Sixties, the media played an important role in the daily life, especially the radio. First, I’d like to give a small definition of the radio: it’s a system of broadcasting information and programmes that people can listen to, and was widely used by governments to broadcast political ideas.

This document focuses on the pirate radios and their role in the musical revolution of the 60’s.

At this time, broadcasting in the UK was controlled by the British General Post Office, in other word: the government, which had granted exclusive radio broadcasting licences to the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC.  

Furthermore, some activists founded pirate radios to stand against the BBC, who bypassed the law to broadcast American tunes, by broadcasting from ships which were anchored off-coast, in this way they were out of reach of the authorities, like radio Caroline well-known in the UK or radio Veronica a Dutch “free radio”. They were called “pirate radio” because they were the only possibility to fight against the domination of the BBC. The question we may think is: what is in real terms a pirate radio? Pirate radio is the transmission of communications over radio waves by unlicensed amateurs; such broadcasts are illegal because they are not in accordance with legislation. They widely contributed to the musical revolution of the 60’s, because they enabled Britons to discover a new universe, which was flourishing in the US, but banned in the UK.  

This article illustrates the notion of forms and locations of power since it shows to what extent the BBC dominated the airwaves until the mid 60’s, what is more, it depicts how important cultural exchanges were, here between the US and Great Britain. Otherwise, the pirate radios can be regarded as the winner in this conflict between the BBC and the illegal radio stations, because even though they were prohibited by the law, which banned every illegal pop station that broadcast programmes illegally in Great Britain, and were closed one after the other, by the British government, the BBC created a new pop station only one month after the law took effect, in partnership with DJ’s that were broadcasting with pirate radios. So in the end, everything the government decided to do to protect their community against a potential threat from programmes of the US, and to control the moral of the Britons, was all at least meaningless.

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