BBC Regional Programme

The BBC Regional Programme was a UK radio broadcasting service which was on the air from 9 March 1930 – when it replaced a number of earlier BBC local stations – until 1 September 1939, when it was subsumed into the BBC Home Service, two days before the outbreak of World War II.

When the British Broadcasting Company first began transmissions on 14 November 1922 from the station 2LO in the Strand, Westminster, which it had inherited from the Marconi Company (one of the six commercial companies which created the BBC), the technology did not exist either for national coverage or for joint programming between transmitters. Whilst it was possible to combine large numbers of trunk telephone lines to link transmitters for individual programmes, the process was expensive and not encouraged by the General Post Office as it tied up large parts of the telephone network. The stations that followed the establishment of 2LO in London were therefore autonomously programmed using local talent and facilities.

By May 1923, simultaneous broadcasting was technically possible, at least between main transmitters and relay stations, but the quality was not felt to be high enough to provide a national service or regular simultaneous broadcasts.

In 1924, it was felt that technical standards had improved enough for London to start to provide the majority of the output, cutting the local stations back to providing items of local interest.

Each of these stations broadcast at approximately 1 kW.

Each of these stations broadcast at approximately 120 W

On 21 August 1927, the BBC opened a high-power mediumwave transmitter, 5GB, at its Daventry site, to replace the existing local stations in the English Midlands. That allowed the experimental longwave transmitter 5XX to provide a service – which eventually came to be called the BBC National Programme – programmed from London and available to the majority of the population.

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