The moments that made LBC

The Opening of LBC October 8th 1973

David Jessel was the very first voice heard on LBC at six o'clock on a chilly October morning in 1973. There is a rumour that seconds before he had been violently ill into the waste paper basket. Jessel recalls that moment: "You just knew disaster was looming, we went on the air with three hours stretching in front of us with no Producers no Reporters and no stories."

Jessel remembers asking the bosses what should be in the show. "They said just talk about interesting things that have happened that day, I said it is six o'clock in the morning, the day hasn't happened!"

After a few very rocky months, LBC finally found its feet and can proudly claim to have perfected the phone-in radio show. Acerbic hosts like Brian Hayes confronted his audience and goaded them to dare to have a point of view. To the radio audience of the 1970s it was all a breath of fresh air. LBC in its many guises and incarnations and the odd lost licence has continued to breathe fresh air into the listening lungs of its audience and is still as robust and provocative as it ever was.

9/11 Where news comes first

Alan Cappa, LBC's US correspondent in 2001, lived in Battery Park, New York, and a block away from the World Trade Centre. Within moments of him hearing a very large plane fly over and crash into one of the twin towers Cappa was on the phone to LBC.

At first the Producer was reluctant to put him on air but Alan remembers telling him "Put me on the ****ing air right now." As a result LBC listeners were the first to hear the news that the US had come under terrorist attack on its home soil.

The hurricane of 1987

The storm of 1987 proved a testing time for all the staff who managed to get to work on that windy morning. The storm blacked out most of London including the studios of LBC at Gough Square. But no fear the trusty generator which had sat in the corner since 1973 spluttered into life and kept the station on the air for at least five minutes before it let out a wheeze and a bang and conked out plunging the building back into darkness.

To make things a bit more complicated, LBC also provided the rest of the commercial radio network with news bulletins every hour and the six o'clock news was looming. Stalwart Douglas Cameron was due to read the news and read the news he did, sitting on the floor in the racks room armed with a torch, hand typed scripts and a battery cassette machine and microphone plugged directly into the lines. If you listen to that bulletin you would never know anything was wrong.

The Falklands War 1982

1982 the year that LBC came of age. With reporters in Argentina and on the very battle front at Port Stanley, LBC provided superlative reporting that outshone the BBC in the depth and complexity of its coverage.

News As It Happens

In a time when on mainstream TV and radio, news bulletins only appeared a few times a day, the television news for instance relied on 'film' reports that had to be developed and edited before being shown, a process that could take half a day to complete. News in the 1970s didn't exactly appear at the speed of sound.

LBC radio dramatically changed that landscape by being the first radio station to make use of portable telephones for reporting. Staying with a story and broadcasting events as they happen, something that we now take for granted in the broadband multi-platform 21st century.