Fresh Air (Edinburgh) - History

History

In the autumn of 1990, Edinburgh University student Robert Barrow conducted a survey to gauge support for a student radio station within the university. In the course of the survey Barrow met fellow student Eric Wilkinson, and soon partnered with him to form the Edinburgh Student Radio society, with the initial aim to set up a permanent radio station. By the beginning of the following academic year, they realized that this was perhaps overly ambitious as a starting point, and instead focused on the idea of a short term broadcast, taking advantage of the Radio Authority's new Restricted Service Licence scheme.

With support from the Edinburgh Enterprise Centre, ESR recruited prospective presenters and ran a training course with the help of John Gray, formerly of BBC Scotland. The team also identified a site from which the broadcast could be run and, eventually, a name for the station: Fresh Air FM (other suggestions included Outburst Radio, UFM and plain old Edinburgh Student Radio). The final hurdle, finance, was cleared by the procurement of a grant from the Edinburgh University Development Trust to supplement advertising income: together this represented sufficient funding to cover the costs of a two-week RSL broadcast.

Fresh Air FM was launched on October 3, 1992. As one of the first wave of student Restricted Service Licence stations in the UK, the initial broadcast generated a lot of media interest, not all positive: numerous incidents involving the use of bad language on the air drew criticism from both the media and the Radio Authority. This initial broadcast was followed by a shorter one in December of that year to coincide with the European summit. The first broadcast to make full use of the time restriction imposed by the station's RSL - 24 hours a day, for 28 consecutive days - occurred in October 1994, and Fresh Air FM successfully conducted biannual 28-day broadcasts thereafter, typically in the months of October and May.