Mailing List

Schedule changes, remotes and event news

The station has historically kept a mailing list to tell listeners about the things that do not fit into a broadcast: schedule changes, live remotes announced at short notice, new shows joining the grid, and the occasional appeal when a licence bill came due.

What the list was used for

• Schedule changes. A remote displaces the grid, and people following a particular show want to know before they tune in.
• New programmes. When a host joined and a slot changed hands.
• Event round-ups. Festival dates and major dances, gathered rather than announced one at a time.
• Station news. Outages, technical changes, and the occasional request for support.

Why the sign-up form has been removed

The form that used to sit on this page asked for a name, an email address, a mobile number and a full home address, all marked required. That was a normal thing to ask in the era it was built, and it is not a reasonable thing to ask now — a mailing list needs an email address and nothing else, and collecting home addresses and phone numbers for a newsletter creates a liability with no matching benefit.

Rather than leave a form on the page that collects more than it needs and submits to a service that no longer exists, the form has been taken down. Nothing was ever transmitted anywhere from the version of the site you are reading.

Keeping up without a list

The programming grid is the authoritative schedule and is the first thing updated when times move. Live broadcasts carry announcements as they happen, and the events page covers dances and festivals.

What a small station actually needs to tell you

Most of what a mailing list carried is now on the site itself and does not need pushing to an inbox. The schedule is on one page, the events are on another, and the live broadcasts announce changes as they happen. The genuinely time-sensitive category — a remote announced two days ahead, an outage — is also the category a weekly newsletter was always too slow to serve.

What a list was good for was the slower news: a host stepping down after ten years, a new programme joining the grid, a band the station had championed calling it a day. Those are worth writing up properly rather than mentioning between records, and they belong on the site where they can be read later.