My former colleague and friend Michael Barton, who has died aged 94, was the first – and only – controller of BBC Local Radio. Starting at the helm of BBC Radio Sheffield in 1967, he helped to build a network of stations across England.
Radio Sheffield was the second of eight stations to open in the BBC’s early local radio experiment, shortly after Radio Leicester. There was no programming template for the station. It was up to Michael to decide how to reflect the community and involve local people in participating in and making the programmes, and he did this through encouraging them to pursue their enthusiasms, be it for fishing or brass bands, on the radio. In those early years Michael also introduced phone-ins, live magazine shows and ethnic-minority programming, such as Hindi-Urdu and Bengali language programmes to help immigrant communities navigate life in Sheffield.
