User:Wiki Munkee/Sandbox

Wiki Munkee's Sandbox
'The Golden Hour' is a long-standing feature/segment on UK radio station BBC Radio 1 in the, where records are played that all were hits in a certain year and listeners are invited to guess the year.

History
In June 1973, Noel Edmonds took over presenting the breakfast slot on BBC Radio 1 and Tony Blackburn moved to present the mid-morning slot (from 09:00 - 12:00). One of the features he started on this show was the Golden Hour. This was originally an hour of records that had all charted in a specified year, with Tony using a different year each weekday.

Tony Blackburn continued this feature until he vacated the weekday mid-morning slot in Autumn 1977 with a move to weekday afternoons. He was replaced by Simon Bates, who would continue the feature at the top of the show between 09:00 and 10:00.

Bates amended the format however, turning it into a guessing game for the audience to participate in. Records were played, sometimes interspersed with clues, so listeners can 'play along at home' and guess what the year was. The year would be revealed by Simon near the end of the hour. Later on, Simon split this into two half-hour segments, playing songs from two different years.

Clips of Simon doing the Golden Hour can be found on the Radio Rewind site

At the start of 1994, when new controller Matthew Bannister took over and reorganised both the shows and presenters, Simon Mayo moved from breakfast to mid-morning, taking the 'Classic Years' as they were then called with him. Between May 1994 and April 1995, Sunday lunchtimes also gained the Classic Years (on from 12 - 2pm), also presented by Mayo. Simon continued the feature on the weekday shows, later re-branding it 'The Mystery Years', before it finally ended on 16 Feb 2001 when Simon's run finished and he left Radio 1.

Reinvention
On 30th Sept 2007, to commemorate the station's 40th anniversary, current breakfast show host Chris Moyles co-hosted his show with Tony Blackburn and between 9am and 10am they bought back the Golden Hour in the form of two half-hour years. In 2008, Moyles made the Golden Hour a permanent feature every Friday, playing half an hour of songs from a year and getting the listeners (as well as friends of the show) to text in their guess before revealing it ahead of the 9:30 news.