The Golden Hour is a long-standing feature/segment on UK radio station BBC Radio 1, where records are played that all charted in the UK Top 40 in a certain year and listeners are invited to guess the year.
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In June 1973, Noel Edmonds took over presenting the breakfast slot on BBC Radio 1 and Tony Blackburn moved to present the mid-morning slot (9–12 am). One of the features he started on this show was the Golden Hour. This was originally an hour of records that had all charted in a specified year, with Tony using a different year each weekday.
Tony Blackburn continued this feature until he vacated the weekday mid-morning slot in Autumn 1977 with a move to weekday afternoons. He was replaced by Simon Bates, who would continue the feature at the top of the show between 9 and 10 am.
Bates amended the format however, turning it into a guessing game for the audience to participate in. Records were played, sometimes interspersed with clues, so listeners can 'play along at home' and guess what the year was. The year would be revealed by Simon near the end of the hour. Later on, Simon split this into two half-hour segments, playing songs from two different years. There was also a feature which ran between 1996 and 1999 called "Golden Hour Jukebox", then "The Jukebox", then "Greatest Hits Jukebox," where listeners could ring in and suggest tracks instead of the normal format.
Towards the end of 1993, when new controller Matthew Bannister took over and reorganised both the shows and presenters, Simon Mayo moved from breakfast to mid-morning, taking over the feature from Simon Bates. The Golden Hour, or 'Classic Years' as they were now sometimes referred to lasted until 1996, when they were replaced with an hour of music from a number of years including the current one. Between May 1994 and April 1995, Sunday lunchtimes also gained the Classic Years (12–2 pm), also presented by Mayo.
The 9–10 weekday slot was eventually named "Radio 1's Greatest Hits", becoming the somewhat unwieldy "Radio 1's Greatest Hits: The Mystery Years" in 1999. Listeners were challenged to answer a question on a piece of archive footage from the relevant year.
Simon continued 'The Mystery Years' until he left the station on 16 February 2001.
On 30 September 2007, to commemorate the station's 40th anniversary, current breakfast show host Chris Moyles co-hosted his show with Tony Blackburn and between 9 and 10 am they brought back the Golden Hour in the form of two half-hour years. At the start of 2008, The Chris Moyles Show gained the Golden Hour as permanent feature, although only once a week rather than every day as in previous years. Moyles plays this every Friday, starting at 9 am with half an hour of songs from a year and getting the listeners (as well as friends of the show) to text in their guess before revealing it ahead of the 9:30 news. From 9:30 to 10 am he tends to play 'older' records, usually one selected by each member of the team. Moyles plays old Golden Hour jingles from the initial Golden Hour in his Friday slot.
Simon Bates revived the Golden Hour for commercial radio after joining Smooth Radio in January 2011. The feature appears as before, on weekdays between 9 and 10 am on Bates' breakfast show, and sees listeners invited to guess the year that a number of songs charted. There are usually two featured years.
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