Tim Lyons
Tim was the station’s Chief Engineer and joined from CBC in Cardiff where he had done some presentation work. In early 1983, on Monday evenings at 7:30 p.m. as part of the “speech block”, West introduced the programme “Datarama”, initially presented by Tim and Joe Tozer (“Zorte”) and later by Tim and “The General” (Martin Schimmer, later Chief Engineer at Invicta) which was aimed at the growing army of home computer users. Every week, geeks like myself would tape the Sinclair Spectrum programmes transmitted over the air as audio files (although the picture shows a BBC micro, of course!) and then attempt to load them into their computers: the first one was a rather nice Radio West logo. These audio files were also transmitted overnight. Datarama was a ground-breaking programme and was mentioned in the IBA Annual Reports. It moved to a weekend slot when the station cut its hours in October 1983 but returned to a weekday evening slot before West closed down. Sadly the programme was not taken on by GWR, due to “failure to attract a sponsor” (Simon Cooper, September 1985) and we were treated to “Freezeframe”, a programme about photography (also unsponsored) instead!
In Tim’s own words: “I was the founding Chief
Engineer (having been the Assistant Chief Engineer at CBC in Cardiff
– now Red Dragon) and I designed and built the studios in Bristol in
1980 with a small team of talented engineers. I was indeed with the
station until it was acquired by Wiltshire Radio to form GWR in
1985. The Datarama theme was recorded in the 16-track recording
studio that was installed as part of the original studio complex
(this had been a cause celebre of the founding Chairman, Professor
Glynn Wickham of Bristol University’s Drama faculty, and was
intended to be used to record original drama productions; in the end
it got used mainly for music recording).
I did previously present Tiger Bay Rock at CBC, and I actually have somewhere the original jingles for that.
Datarama was ground-breaking and the Independent
Broadcasting Authority were very proud of it at the time, since it
showed ILR could innovate. In fact BBC’s Chip Shop computer show
featured Datarama, and we got on national TV. We used the native
sound recording of popular home computers (such as the Spectrum, the
BBC Micro and Commodore, Atari and Amstrad machines, to name a few)
to transmit programme source code, whereas the BBC used what was
called ‘Basicode’ – a common-denominator version of BASIC for their
own data transmissions, when they started doing it. Using native
code let Datarama get to the heart of the graphics and sound
characteristics of target machines, so our programmes were able to
be bright, fast and noisy! And they frequently were.
We did in fact network the programme also to
Wiltshire Radio, Severn Sound, Radio City and a couple of others
around the ILR network, with localised features cut into these. The
Radio West sales team did also manage to sell advertising time into
the programme, and I remember that once we did run an Ad that had
data in it, which was quite an achievement given that they were
typically 45 seconds maximum. Realising the potential for wider
networking, I put together a package to provide a full-network
version and got agreement from about 25 stations, plus Manx Radio,
to run Datarama; we needed some backing as this was to be a
full-time role, but sadly could not get any finance. So Datarama
bit the dust.
Around that time, with GWR about to be formed as a joint venture, they did not need two chief engineers, so I was made redundant. I went from there into software development and marketing, leaving ILR behind.”
A web site about Datarama (Unable to credit the host!)