[London Lite]

And once the increased speech commitments were dropped… boy do I remember how amazing some stations sounded. It was like we finally got radio like other countries.

The ILRs in the 80s were not fit for purpose.

Agreed, it's one of the reasons why Steve Wright brought the zoo format to the UK after he visited New York and heard how fresh those stations sounded over there.

In the 70s, most major US markets had various genre stations and tight CHR stations, but the UK was doing features like cookery and book segments between songs, plus needletime meant they couldn't play as much copyrighted music as they may have wanted which meant even if a ILR was on 24/7, they'd fill up airtime with pre-recorded speech even at 2.30am.

It was relaxed by by the late 80s when the IBA decided they wanted more choice from the stations which meant they split the FM/AM frequencies or lose them.