The Sound of Sunday is expanding – for 2 months from 31 January the show will continue until 5pm every Sunday, before handing over to the new series of The Sunday Social with Richard Smith.

The extra hour from 4 – 5 will be on the air in the weeks when Residents’ Requests is not and will be filled with favourites such as Myths and Legends, The A to Z of pop Trivia Challenge, That’s Life and more episodes of Superman 1940s Style plus of course some great music.

And there’ll be another chance to hear some of the best of the guests from the last 30 years of the show as part of our anniversary celebrations.

At 5pm, Richard Smith and his team will take over with the second series of The Sunday Social live from Lancashire and across the UK.  The new series will be heard on HRB slightly delayed as it will be on live on hospital radio around the UK from 1 – 3pm, but there will still be the opportunity to hear requests and there will be the usual array of features, chat and entertainment.

So join us for Extra Time from 4pm every Sunday from 31 January.

It’s the show that will be remembered for at least the rest of the year – which will only be a few hours as you can hear it on New Year’s Eve.

An “earworm” is defined as music that when you hear it, it will stay in your head for hours and hours. For two years, The Sound of Sunday ended each show with a song taken from the list of top 100 earworms. This one-hour compilation plays some of those songs.

From Baltimora to Carly Rae Jepson, there’s lots of well-known hits on the list plus a few surprises and tunes you may not have heard for a while.

Hear the show on New Year’s Eve at 10am and prepare to remember it for at least the rest of the year!

As proved by the recent BBC FOUR series, the TV theme is something to be celebrated, even though we usually only hear less than a minute of it. From sporting events to great drama, this special plays some of those themes, in full, which will no doubt provoke memories of our TV past.

From sporting events such as London 2012 to drama and children’s TV, the TV theme has played a part in all our memories, perhaps more than we may think.

Hear some of our great TV themes, some of which have already been played as part of our Memory Makers or Random TV features in our hour-long special.

Sunday 27 December 3pm

The Sound of Sunday Big Christmas Show is back for 2020 with over 4 hours of entertainment launching Christmas on HRB on Sunday afternoon.

The show will sound a bit different this year as there are no ward visits so no pulling of crackers around the wards, and there is no panto to for the staff to win tickets to see, but there is plenty else promised, and there will still be plenty of cracker pulling.

Former HRB member Martin Parsons will be talking about his new Doctor Who DVD that is out this Christmas.

HRB’s Vernon Pearce will be talking about his Christmas Day Postcard from Spain.

Richard Smith will be talking about the plans for this year’s New Year’s Eve Big Broadcast.

Michele Monro, daughter of Matt Monro will be talking about the brand new 4 part documentary about her father that can be heard on HRB this Christmas to mark what would have been his 90th birthday.

And finally, there will be crackers – The Great Christmas Cracker Dash this year will be with the residents and staff of St Thomas Care Home in Basingstoke who will be pulling crackers, telling the jokes and then hearing their requests.

Finally, the 112,000th request to be played on HRB will be revealed.

It’s not quite the same as usual but it will still be four and a half hours of fast moving Christmas entertainment.

Sunday 13 December 1pm on HRB.

A regular feature on the show over the last few years has been the Milestone Request Replay – where we take one of HRB’s milestone requests and play it again, sometimes including the original clip of it being played the first time round or the person who originally played it coming back to introduce it again.

We thought we would put them together into a Bank Holiday Special, so you can join us on August Bank Holiday at 1pm for our Milestone Request Replay Special.

We’ll start with request number 1 and go all the way up to request number 111,000 which was played a few weeks ago.  You can hear HRB presenters including Dave Leonard, Steve Fox, Paul Streeter, Neale Adams, Sarah Beattie and Andy K introducing those requests and we’ll finish with Richard Smith introducing the latest as part of The Sunday Social.

The Sound of Sunday Milestone Request Replay Special, 1pm Monday 31 August 

We will once again bring listeners all the action and drama of the last day of the Premier League season.

All 10 final games will kick off at 4pm on Sunday 26 July and even though the title has already been won by Liverpool, there are European places up for grabs and the relegation battle will also go down to the final round of matches.

It will all be covered during our annual last day special which will start at 3.30.  There will be previews of all the matches and we’ll tell the story of the afternoon as things unfold.

As the programme is being broadcast from our remote studio, there won’t be reports from every game but we’ll do our best to tell the story of the afternoon and highlight all the action.

Neil Ogden’s Sound of Sunday: Last Day of the Premier League Sunday 26 July from 3.30pm

This weekend sees the end of the first run of our Extra season of shows.  We started on Friday afternoons and then added Saturdays with an extra hour of Sound of Sunday features during the lockdown period, all produced from our remote studios.

The show in all its 3 editions has changed over the summer, but will gradually be returning to a more normal production in the coming weeks although still being produced live from our remote studio.  Listeners will still be at the heart of what we  do each week, but as of this weekend we’ll be bringing back features such as Milestone Request Replay and Soap Update and replaying some ofthe Random Vinyl choices from previous months.

Series 29 of the show will come to an end in August and we’ll be taking our annual summer break, although it may be unlikely that we’ll be able to produce our regular summer special shows from local events as there quite possibly won’t be any local events.

When we return for series 30, hopefully we’ll be back in the studio and we can start looking forward to another year of shows that will include our 30th anniversary next March.  There are still uncertainties though.  What will our Christmas Show look like this year for example.

In the meantime join us for our final Extra shows of the series on Friday and Saturday and then live on Sunday from 1.30 including, on the day that he would have been in Basingstoke, another chance to hear Johnny Ball when he was on the show last year.

A huge number of events are being cancelled or postponed in 2020 and one of those is the annual Alton Lions Party in the Park, a regular fund raising event for Treloar College and other local charities that usually takes place in the Public Gardens in Alton.  It would be happening this weekend but instead, we’ll be broadcasting a revised repeat of our Summer Special from 2019 that was there last year.

So you can relive all the fun of the 2019 Wild West themed party on Saturday 6 June at 4pm.