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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

real life on the North Sea

Pirate Radio, the US version of the Richard Curtis movie, has opened in the US. It differs from the European version mainly by changing more of the facts to appeal to North American audiences. Even the European version isn’t factually accurate on many levels.

But there are a few people in the US who know what it was really like to work on offshore radio in the 1960s. Tom Lodge, who now lives in Santa Cruz County, was the first programme director of Radio Caroline. He tells the Santa Cruz Sentinel that the movie misses the import of the real story. “They made it a lot of fun with sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” he said. “But that’s not really what it was about then. It was about a transition in popular music. We changed the world.”

Tom Lodge said he sent his book and a screenplay based on it to writer/director Curtis but was told that the filmmaker was not interested in working with him. He hopes that the forthcoming publication of the book might one day spark another film to tell the “real” story of Radio Caroline

Complete article http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_13777887
(R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)