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Part 2:
Italy Calling The Cote d'Azur
In the mid 1970s, the French state
maintained a monopoly on broadcasting and held a majority stake in the powerful
commercial stations beaming into France from Monaco, Andorra, Luxembourg and
Germany. In Italy a broadcasting revolution had begun. The Supreme Court ruled
private radio a constitutional right and thousands of stations sprung up.
When Holland’s offshore radio
stations were closed down, the Swiss owners of Radio
Northsea International planned to operate as Radio Nova International in
the Bay of Genoa. Instead they sold their ship to Libya. Some of RNI’s Dutch
& Belgian DJs
decided to exploit Italy’s new freedoms. They set up an FM transmitter in a
villa in Camporosso, Italy. Radio
Nova took to the air in 1979 beaming a mix of Euro Pop and tourist
information in English, Dutch and German to the French Riviera.
When these pioneering DJs ran out of
money, Nova became the property of the villa’s Dutch owner, Martin
Groenendijk. A string of partners attempted to make his station viable. The
most successful in audience terms was a consortium of British businessmen from Monaco. In 1983 they established a
full service English language schedule including a daily serial and weekly
drama purchased from the BBC.
This talk-based format was a big hit
with Anglophone residents in the days before satellite TV & radio. Apart
from BBC on short wave, the only other Anglophone media was several hours of TV
programmes Sunday nights on TeleMonteCarlo. The Universal Broadcasting Company
run by local resident David Hayter hired airtime from TMC. Advertising revenue
for these ambitious projects proved insufficient. UBCTV closed down and RNI was
sold in 1985 to Hawaiian owners who transformed it into an easy listening
station called Radio Relax.
Pictured left: Radio Nova's high
gain antennae in Seborga, Italy pumped an effective radiated power of 160,000
watts towards the French Riviera.
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