First broadcast on BBC Radio in 1973 during Tony Blackburn's mid-morning show, the Golden Hour segment was continued for many years on BBC Radio 1 by Simon Bates, Simon Mayo, and Chris Moyles, with Bates currently presenting the feature as a programme on Universal Music's range of Now Music television channels.
Towards the end of 1993, when new controller Matthew Bannister took over and reorganised the station's shows and presenters, Simon Mayo moved from breakfast to mid-morning, taking over the feature from Bates.
Chris Moyles ran a one-off edition of the Golden Hour on 22 July 2005 on the BBC Radio 1 breakfast show, during an outside broadcast on a canal boat to Oxford.
[4] On 30 September, Moyles co-hosted a programme with Tony Blackburn, the former breakfast show host, and between 9 and 10 am they featured the Golden Hour in the form of two half-hour years.
Moyles played 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.
The feature appeared as before, on weekdays between 9 and 10 am on Bates' breakfast show,[6] and saw listeners invited to guess the year that a number of songs charted.
Simon Bates joined BBC Radio Devon on 12 January 2015, where he relaunched The Golden Hour with new jingles, with the years ranging from 1956 to 2004.