Unless you spent your summers packing Jaffa Cakes into boxes in the 70s, you are unlikely to have heard of the United Biscuits Network (UBN). It was a radio station for biscuit-makers, broadcasting around the clock to factories in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. One part industrial psychology, another part community radio, UBN was intended to make factory life more bearable, but over its nine-year lifespan, it emerged as one of the most daring, anarchic and pioneering stations to hit the UK airwaves.
Music has long been a point of contention in the workplace. Prof Marek Korczynski, who co-authored Rhythms of Labour (2013), describes the history of British working life as “a battle over soundscapes”. Bosses first wanted silent factories, but during the second world war, Korczynski says, “industrial psychologists – the forerunners to HR departments – started looking at playing cheerful music in factories, at the times of day when productivity would dip”. After the war, as Britain rebuilt itself, this strategy was maintained with muzak: inoffensive background tunes, played to lighten the monotony of factory work.
There was one issue, according to Korczynski: “Workers grew to hate muzak.” As jobs on the production line were deskilled and made ever more monotonous, muzak’s effectiveness weakened and staff turnover soared. For Sir Hector Laing, the chairman of United Biscuits in the 1960s, stemming the flow – and its cost – was desperately necessary. Drawing on the success of commercial pirate stations such as Radio Caroline, Laing put adverts in Melody Maker, bought state-of-the-art broadcasting equipment and set up his very own station from UB’s headquarters in Osterley, west London (where Sky’s HQ sits today).
From the off, UBN offered a unique opportunity for fledgling DJs. It was a 24-hour operation (a British first), well-stocked, and it wasn’t the BBC. As such, it became the perfect stepping stone from the pub, club and hospital DJing circuit to radio’s big leagues. Graham Dene, who was on air on the opening day on 1 September 1970, could not believe his luck. “It was like a radio university. We had the best kit, the proper studios. We even had jingles re-recorded from the pirate ship Radio London. It was like seventh heaven: a proper station of our own.”
Laing hired an old veteran of the pirate ships, Neil Spence, to direct his crew of upstarts as they learned their trade. Giles Squire, who was just 16 when he started at UBN, remembers how quickly you had to adapt to the new kit. “We had a saying,” he says, “‘Three seconds of silence gets you fired!’ Any longer than that, the microphones started searching for noise, and the whole factory would hear static!”
The shows were tight and music-oriented, with hosts allowed a free hand provided they didn’t take liberties. Another upstart DJ, Nicky Horne, found this out five weeks into his tenure on the graveyard shift. “Every five songs or so,” he says, “we had to play a Hindi track for the Indian workers, and I thought: ‘Sod it, it’s 3am, I’ll put on Led Zeppelin instead.’ Almost immediately, Spence called me up on air to put me in my place!”
Hindi tracks were in constant rotation at all hours of the day, but this brought its own challenges, as Pete Reeves – UBN’s first man on the air – found out. “We’d play vinyls straight from Bollywood soundtracks, leaving in the chatter thinking it was part of the song. After a while, someone on the shopfloor pointed out that we’d actually been playing adverts for soap powder that came with the vinyl.”
Growing pains aside, UBN was a riotous success, expanding from the company’s Osterley and Harlesden factories to its bases in northern England and Scotland. “When we joined,” says Squire, “we were told that if we could take 20% off staff turnover, we’d more than pay for ourselves. Within the first year, we’d taken 40% off.”
Despite being a national station of sorts, UBN played the role of local radio, too, having factory-specific shows that played different music (more country and western in Liverpool, for example) and let staff know about blood-donation drives in their area. Its constant presence made mini-celebrities out of the DJs, who would regularly tour the factories and interview staff to fill those regional hours. Tony Gillham, who joined UBN in 1975, had his first trip to the Manchester factory while chaperoned by another of the station’s on-air talents, Dale Winton. “We were having dinner in our hotel in the centre of the city when, all of a sudden, a throng of young women – all from the factory – spotted us and rushed to the window. Dale said: ‘They must be for you!’”
The DJs felt part of a separate entity, but also made friends on the shopfloor, played in charity football tournaments, and even hosted Miss United Biscuits contests. There were not many directives from the bosses, but the station was asked to do safety commercials, something they took to with aplomb.
Every week, each host would record a new safety sketch, with total freedom to take it wherever they wanted. Some took the form of parody songs, such as Winton’s cover of Shame, Shame, Shame by Shirley & Company, the chorus of which became: “Shoes, shoes, shoes / Safety shoes”. Others were more surreal, such as a 1973 sketch where a Macbethian Scottish father whips his daughter’s hands for not cleaning them thoroughly enough. “That was our tone,” says Geoff Allen, who worked at UBN from 1973 to 1975. “We were suggestive and playful, without going overboard. Although we probably couldn’t get away with it today!”
By the time UBN went off-air, on 16 December 1979, the worlds of broadcasting and industry had changed immeasurably. Operating a station was no longer deemed necessary with the explosion of independent local radio across Britain; an explosion that, ironically enough, was driven by a surfeit of former UBNers, from Graham Dene and Nicky Horne at Capital Radio, to Giles Squire at Metro Radio. Andrew Ellinas, who broadcast on UBN’s very last hour, is emphatic about the station’s impact. “UBN was the beginning of the golden age of radio,” says Ellinas. “Its legacy lies in every commercial station in the UK.”
With the loss of UBN, life on the United Biscuits factory floor changed, too. “Those shop-floor communities were broken up,” says Korczynski. “People would bring in ghetto blasters and play what they wanted, when they wanted, for their little section or just for themselves.” This atomisation is part of why UBN could not be replicated today; another reason, as Dene notes, is that factories are emptier, quieter places nowadays. “I went again for one of UB’s anniversaries a few years back, and I couldn’t believe it: there was nobody there!”
Fifty years on, UBN inspires a special kind of fondness from its old staff. Even with people who worked at the station at different times, and met one another further down the line, a mention of the old biscuit factories is like a secret handshake. Some of its alumni have lobbied the Radio Academy to recognise just how pioneering UBN was. “If you’d given us an aerial, we would’ve given Radio 1 a run for its money,” says Dene. “It was that good.”