This is the definitive jingle collection recorded for BRBS over several years. An initial set was commissioned in 1975 and first used in February 1976. A few were created separately and used first at the same time. One or two came about as moments of inspiration to people over a few years, and then an extra set of nine were recorded in and used in 1986.
The order as presented here is essentially random, as they came out of their box. Some are really dreadful, many of them sound like the truth of students experimenting with a tape recorder, and just a few are rather good.
Radio stations with money to spend used to invest in high-grade cartridge machines to play their jingles, and every presenter would have a labelled rack in front of them out of which to grab a cartridge, push in a slot and play. BRBS had no such luxury. A set of cheap cassettes were bought and refitted with a minute of high quality cassette tape, and used very short leader tape onto the spools. This gave a cassette that could be slammed into a deck, rewound until the tape stopped, and immediately it was cued and ready to play. It gave a workable and affordable solution for how quickly to cue up jingles and was surprisingly robust. And if the tape broke or wore out, as happened, it was possible with a bit of patience to recreate a new one.
Why use jingles? They give a station a sense of identity to both listeners and presenters. They give an easy way to repeat a station name along with a music segment, a noise, or other speech, and eventually the name becomes an earworm. You can never unhear it....