Gaydar Radio

Infobox Radio station


name = Gaydar Radio
frequency = DAB:
11B DRg London
11B NOW Sussex Coast
Sky Digital: 0158
area = United Kingdom
format = House, dance and pop music; gay-oriented news and entertainment
owner = QSoft Consulting
website = [http://www.gaydarradio.com/ www.gaydarradio.com] portalpar|LGBT|Portal LGBT.svg

Gaydar Radio is a British digital radio station for gay men, lesbians and gay friendly people. It is available on DAB multiplexes in London and Brighton, across the UK on Sky Digital Channel 0158, and also online. It broadcasts 24 hours a day, with live programming from 4am to midnight.

Format

The station plays a mix of dance and mainstream pop music, interspersed with chat and news, with frequent bulletins devoted to news about the gay community.

The music becomes more club-orientated during the late evenings and also at the weekend when "Club Nation" presents some of the best DJs mixing the best feel good music. This music policy also gets the station a huge following from the straight community.Fact|date=January 2008

The station encourages interaction between presenters and listeners via the Gaydar website's chatrooms. It has a reach of 339,400 (Ipsos/Rajar July 2007) listeners a week in the UK, plus another 2.1 million listening online around the world. [Based on figures from [http://www.qsoft.co.uk/content/about_faq.aspx www.qsoft.co.uk] ] However, the station currently broadcasts few commercials.

Gaydar Radio is based in Twickenham in South West London, in a building called Queen's House, a name that provides a frequent source of amusement for the presenters.

In October 2007 the station relaunched it's website as part of GaydarNation and the following month launched GaydarRadio Jukebox offering music downloads of its most popular tracks and exclusive mixes.

*Breakfast, co-presented by Neil Sexton and Debbie Ryan, it features the daily competition with The West End Wendies and The Coming Out Story. Also regular correspondents share the latest news and events from their corner of Gay UK, with US entertainment reporter John Kennedy O'Connor guesting on Tuesdays. Two other popular features of the show are the weekly breakfast cereal, "Tales from Gaydar Towers", — a little bit of fact and a great deal of fiction about the day to day life behind the scenes at Gaydar Towers.

*Mid-morning, former Blue Peter presenter Stuart Miles hosts a three hour daily request show.
*Afternoon, Simon Le Vans presents "Your Choice" a three hour request show from 2pm every weekday.
*Drivetime, Phil Marriot hosts the drivetime show which broadcasts live from Profile Bar in Soho each weekday from 5pm.

History

The first proposals for an audio stream on the Gaydar website came from broadcaster Mark Ovenden and radio engineer Quentin Nield. Ovenden was at the time working at the Ministry of Sound radio station and set up a meeting in Spring 2000 between the owners of Gaydar and his boss James Bethel. Bethel proposed to provide the service to Gaydar for £100,000 annually which was clearly way too high for a fledging concept.

Instead Gaydar Radio was started in 2001 as an internet-only station, being an audio offshoot of the dating website and completely independent of outside assistance. According to the first station director Jamie Crick, the entire station was originally played off a single PC on a table propped up with a gay clubbing directory.

Following its success, it moved onto the Sky Digital platform in 2002. Meanwhile another gay radio station called Purple Radio had begun broadcasting as part of a bouquet of services provided by the Digital Radio Group (then part of the GWR group). Purple was run from the Hanover Grand nightclub and tried a number of pioneering nightly broadcasts from gay bars and clubs but this proved far too costly and the station was forced to shut down when the club itself closed in 2003. Gaydar Radio put in a successful submission to the Radio Authority to take over Purples' frequency and it gained a DAB outlet on the London 3 Digital multiplex in 2004.

In 2003 while Bethel was working at Capital Radio group, Gaydar Radio was part of a successful application to be on the Sussex Coast DAB multiplex - part of this deal was an unrealised provisional agreement for the Capital group to find space to add the Gaydar service to it's bouquet available on the Greater Manchester multiplex.

In 2006 the station won Best Radio Station at the BT Digital Music Awards.

At the 2007 Sony Radio Academy Awards (the UK Broadcasting "Oscars"), Gaydar Radio went on to win Digital Terrestrial Station of the Year. [cite web|url=http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-4264.html|title=GaydarRadio wins a Sony award|publisher=Pink News|date=2007-05-01] It also collected the same award at the 2007 and 2008 Commercial Radio 'Arqiva' Awards.

Presenters

*Neil Sexton
*Gary H
*Simon Le Vans
*Alex Duffy
*Debbie Ryan
*Paul Heron
*Faye Lanson
*Stuart Miles
*Phil Marriott
*Alex Baker
*Maria Peters Jon Manning + many more stinkers

Ex presenters

*Hugh Stevenson
*Yannick Lawry
*Jason Rosam
*Sam Vangeen
*Adrian Clarkson
*Lawrie Jordan
*Baylen Leonard
*Rich B
*Kris Di Angelis
*Cliff Joannou
*Richard Newman
*Lea Walker

Footnotes

ee also

*Gaydar (website)