I was there...
I used to work on the BBC Wales off-shoot of the Micro Show in the early 80s. (I still have a Jupiter Ace and Oric Atmos that was sent into the show for review all those years ago).
One of the tasks at the end of the show was to hang around in the transmission continuity for Radio Wales and Radio Cymru and wait until the end of the normal schedule of programmes, which was normally around midnight. I would then load up a ¼ inch tape machine with the tape containing a BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum listing (being the BBC we had to be fair to both sets of enthusiasts and alternate every week). Then turn off the normal transmitter signal processing (an early form of Optimod) and press the play button.
Hopefully, someone was at home listening and loading the game off-air. The only problems we faced was that the system was very fussy about the tape head azimuth and quite often some pass band filtering improved the chances of success. However, we did get quite a few letters from Norway claiming it got that far.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
