But an authority on recent U.K. history says Universal Pictures’ “Pirate Radio,” starring Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, is unlikely to live up to the stranger-than-fiction exploits of the actual renegade broadcasters who taunted authorities from their ships and abandoned military platforms in the North Sea.
“I think the real story is much crazier and more interesting than what they'll have in the movie,” says Chad Martin, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history at the University of Indianapolis who has written about the phenomenon.
In one incident, for example, armed men representing a pirate broadcaster tried to take over a rival station.
“The strangest story is that one of the pirates on an abandoned fort declared itself a sovereign nation,” Martin says. “The owner declared himself ‘king,’ and he and his family lived there for years.”
Top British groups including the Beatles and the Who expressed support for the illegal stations. In response to their popularity, the BBC launched its own rock and pop channel, Radio One, and even though the pirates eventually were shut down, their legacy continued.
“It created a movement to end the BBC monopoly on radio, and that’s what happened less than 10 years later,” Martin says. “As a result, they still have the BBC, but they have lots of commercial radio stations as well.”
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