York's oldest radio station is back home after an eight-month refurbishment. MATT CLARK went to see the changes.

ADAM Tomlinson doesn’t do early mornings; or rather, he didn’t until he landed the flagship Breakfast show on BBC Radio York.

And it’s just as well he lives in Tadcaster or he’d have been getting up even earlier for the past few months, because the station’s programmes have been broadcast from Leeds while the Bootham studio underwent a much-needed revamp.

You see, the equipment was very nearly 30 years old and due an overhaul a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, it often crashed, leaving Adam and his co-presenters the thankless task of filling in the gaps.

“You just had to work round it,” he says. “Sometimes it would pack up, sometimes it wouldn’t and at times that became frustrating, but you ride your luck, kick in and cover.

“You can’t do anything about it, so you always keep something up your sleeve. And the engineers did a fantastic job holding it all together with gaffer tape and rubber bands.

“It was a bit like a swan really, graceful on the surface but frantic under water.”

And in summer when the server room got too hot, pressing a button often meant nothing happened. No pre-recorded news report, sometimes no record.

It was high was time to do something about it.

Now the £1.5 million transformation is complete and Adam will broadcast the first programme from the revamped studios at 6.30am tomorrow.

The original estimate for the work was 18 months, but the contractors have come in almost a year early and that, says managing editor Sarah Drummond, is great news.

“It means we will be back home for some of the year’s most important events, such as Easter, the royal wedding and its street parties as well as the local elections,” she says. “I’m really relieved to be back.”

Because of the building’s layout, staff couldn’t work there while the equipment was replaced.

So presenters, newsreaders and producers had to trek over to Leeds, but roving reporters stayed put to record stories in North Yorkshire.

Anyone who knew the studio before will be in for a shock. The foyer has been opened up and is now it’s a riot of sleek chrome, stark white and splashes of vivid crimson.

The studios have been fitted with the latest equipment and it’s a pretty safe bet that BBC Radio York is now the most up to date in Britain.

“We’ve never made a big deal of having to broadcast from a different city,” she says. “And when we go live on Wednesday, I don’t think anyone will notice a difference. I hope they don’t.”

For Adam, the biggest improvement is being able to see his producer, and more importantly his guests. With the old system, banks of screens left him with just a vertical letterbox to peer through, and the producer was behind him.

“The transformation is fantastic,” he says. “Having worked in Leeds for the best part of a year and using virtually the same system has been a bit like an eight-month training programme.

“The biggest thing to get used to was the faders; they work in the opposite direction to the ones we had here.”

But now he can preset his own settings and the faders will do whatever he wants them to.

It’s all a far cry from the days of filling in when the computer crashed in the searing heat of an August morning.


A brief history

BBC Radio York was launched at 6.30am on July 4, 1983. According to mediauk research, the audience data for July to December 2010 was 92,000 listeners a week, who tuned in for an average of nine and a half hours a week.