if you are listening outside the normal transmission time of a show (for instance from another nation) and our chatroom is not in use (or the chat is / show is simulcasted to livestream) you can still get in touch with our DJ’s and PV radio crew:

call or text

01449 797553 in the UK
00 44 1449 797553 from anywhere else
(or +44 1449 797553 if your international access code is different, replace the + with it)

Texts and voicemails are sent direct to our radio crew. if you want them read out or posted bear in mind a few things..

[1] voicemails in particular should be intelligible and something approaching English (but don’t worry if it is not your first language) and you should be OK with them being broadcast..

Content goes through the UK telephone network and is subject to our countries laws, as well as our broadcasts (so we can’t have excessive swearing at certain times). The number comes from a respectable small business in the UK who have also have to answer to Ofcom (our national communications ministry) for how the circuits are used. So if you take the piss, even if I might not dob you in, I can’t speak for what this company as well as Ofcom and GCHQ might do and they can get past things like withheld caller ID.

I’d rather not lock it down yet to valid caller ID – some countries / circuits do not correctly send it anyway but are problems might do this. Caller data is handled according to UK privacy laws, it is held on a server only I have access to – I’m not going to sell it or do anything bad with it anyway.

[2] Texts can be in EN, NL, FR, DE, DK or NO and should contain the DJ name and show so we can get them to the right folk. (we might take longer to process ones not in English as not all the crew speak every one of these languages, and its most likely to get translated if addressed to any particular show as our DJ’s broadcast in English)

[3] This is deliberately a bog standard UK fixed line number and not a mobile or anything else like a 08x/09x number, so it costs you the least to call or text. neither me nor anyone else at PV is using this number to recover revenue (like some banks and other call centres do). it might even be within your free minutes and these days its usually just a few cents to call the UK from foreign nations

BTW for those who are curious, the choice of a Stowmarket area code is because the late John Peel had his studio there in his house, and smart chap that he was, often broadcast live from it rather than travel to London (over a two hour journey and not pleasant at rush hour). But the sound still needs to get to London and engineers at Auntie need to contact him at real time (this is called talkback) so his ISDN circuit(s) (this is halfway between a telephone line and todays broadband and still often used for sending audio) would have been on a 01449 area code 😉

Below is a recreation of it (BTW to anyone from thespace, apologies for picking apart the site and swiping the image but it was the only way to get at a decent copy of it – I couldn’t find how to zoom further in and with online broadcasting becoming more common, some of us are as interested in how he built his studio as the excellent record collection as he also basically pioneered online live broadcasting..

John Peel’s Record Archive