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Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1919–1939

programming, sponsor new music and even provide original drama. From the mid1980s, the pressure from government and the industry to break with this model accelerated. The Heathrow conference was the ‘occasion when independent radio started to shift into commercial radio’ (p. 144). Thereafter, the drift was towards more music-based radio with far less emphasis on engagement with speech, news and local communities. For any historian wanting to know about the regulators and the main companies, this book is invaluable. Where the book is weak is in its engagement with wider issues. The origins of commercial radio lie not only in the history of the continental and offshore pirates, but also in wider debates about the role of radio and broadcasting in society. These were epitomised by the debates about monopoly in broadcasting that surfaced during the Beveridge Commission (1949–1951). They found a focus in the application of neo-liberal thinking to broadcasting by R.H. Coase in the 1950s, and surfaced again in the debates around the Tory Party in the 1950s and 1960s. The changes in regulation in the 1980s were expressions of the way these early debates had shifted from the margins to the centre of politics. They get touched on, but hardly explored. Indeed, although there are occasional paragraphs sketching the ‘background’ to particular periods, these stand at some distance from the main body of the book. Thus, the treatment of ideas, which was at the very core of debates about radio, is handled with less dexterity and detail than that of the relations between regulators and companies. There has also been no detailed research into government archives, research which would have added depth to the book’s account of political motivations and influences. Nor has Stoller researched the complex history of the campaigns for community radio in the 1970s and 1980s and is too ready to see Marxist influences at work, when they were, in the case of organisations with which this reviewer was involved, but one element in a heady mix of motivations and perspectives. So, as a book which moves beyond the confines of the world of regulators and companies, this study leaves much to be desired. But for any historian of the twentieth century wanting to think carefully about the role of commercial radio in the history of the UK, it is indispensable.