IN the modern media landscape, with a massive range of platforms constantly updating their output, it is difficult to convey the scale of the impact made by Downtown Radio when it began operating simply as a medium wave station 50 years ago this month.

It was based in slightly less than glamorous surroundings in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Newtownards in Co Down, but, right from the start, the ratings in the greater Belfast area and beyond, in the days of old-fashioned and crackly transistor sets, were off the scale.

The winning formula involved different types of music, plenty of light-hearted chat and, crucially, the first hourly news bulletins in Ireland, north or south, going out from 6am to 1am and aimed at an audience hungry to hear the latest developments, mainly linked to the appalling violence of the period.

While it may not sound very sophisticated, it immediately attracted a strong following in all demographic sectors, and radio broadcasting in a region previously dominated by the sober and often sombre BBC, with a patchy RTÉ signal in many areas, was never quite the same again.

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It launched back in March 1976, and a later expansion widened its reach and........

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