Radio Luxembourg - 1955 - 1959.

The following four paragraphs are taken from the Ultimate Pop Culture Wiki and provide a reasonable,  if only partial summary of Radio Luxembourg during the latter part of the 1950's.

Following the merger of the English-language service of Radio Luxembourg I with the new English-language service of Radio Luxembourg II on 208 metres medium wave, the station came to be known as Radio Luxembourg. A British company, Radio Luxembourg (London) Ltd, controlled the programme content and sold the advertising time.

The station sign-on time at dusk varied between summer and winter to allow maximum benefit to be gained from a skywave propagation at night that covered the British Isles, although reception was stronger in northern England. By restricting the service to night-time, the sales representatives were able to sell most of the available airtime both for spot commercials and for sponsored programmes. One spot commercial that became burned into the minds of every Radio Luxembourg listener was for Horace Batchelor's "Infra-Draw Method" of winning money on football pools, turning the previously obscure Bristol suburb of "Keynsham, spelt K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M" into a household name throughout the country.

Programmes were partly live disc-jockey presentations by the team of "resident announcers" from the studios in Luxembourg City, partly shows pre-recorded in the company's UK studios at 38 Hertford Street, London W1. This was not made clear to listeners, who were allowed to form the incorrect impression that all the presenters were sitting in the Grand Duchy or, alternatively, that they were indeed in London but performing live via a hypothetical landline to Luxembourg – a landline which in reality the British government was never prepared to permit until well into the 1980s.

A strange conspiracy of silence operated throughout this period between sworn enemies Radio Luxembourg and the BBC, each of which never mentioned the existence of the other, although many famous names appeared on both, often almost simultaneously. - https://ultimatepopculture.fandom.com/wiki/Radio_Luxembourg_(English)?action=edit&section=14Edit

As I said only partial summary. Radio Luxembourg's all time peak of daily listeners was in 1955 with an average of 8.9 million. However things were already changing as the arrival of ITV was beginning to seriously impact on Luxembourg's advertising revenue and some of their most popular presenters were beginning to jump ship for lucrative television roles. When ITV went off the air at 11pm Luxembourg really missed a trick, instead of ramping up as a serious alternative they presented the likes of Billy Graham and other US based religious broadcasters, which saw their audience drop by 75% rather than grow by competing with ITV. That said they exited the 1950's with what by today's standards would be an excellent average evening audience of 3 million people.

The late fifties saw their programming begin to shift away from the likes of Hughie Greens Opportunity Knocks and other family orientated shows which increasingly became better suited to commercial television. It was the beginning of Radio Luxembourg as a pop music station. However there has always been the myth spread by Ronan O'Rahilly that all of this was carved up by the likes of Decca and E.M.I. We have already looked at how Joe Meek made a nonsense of some of this, and in the next Radio Luxembourg article I will look more closely at the early sixties and demonstrate how any music plugger could have (and did) get new artists and music played outside of the London based pre-recorded record label programmes.   

---