Fifty years ago today, the Radio 1 roadshow was broadcast live for the very first time.

It was a remarkable beast and one which toured the nation during July and August from 1973 to 1999. It was a British summer staple along with downpours and Punch and Judy.

And Kent was a regular stop-off, hosting more than 30 shows from the roadshow's very first year through to 1996.

Margate saw the lion's share of the action, rarely being left off the calendar, with thousands of music fans flocking to see the action which also made calls to the likes of Ramsgate, Folkestone, Deal and Maidstone.

Tony Miles - better known to listeners during his 22 years running the roadshows as Smiley Miley - reflects fondly on a national institution he was involved with from its very first show in Newquay on July 23, 1973.

He went from creating and driving the first roadshow truck and selling Radio 1 merchandise (he and his brother held the exclusive rights to all those mugs and t-shirts up until 1995) to being an on-stage regular, often grabbing the headlines with his various stunts at the expense of the DJs.

"The crowds were phenomenal," the 76-year-old told KentOnline. "Whatever the weather, thousands would turn up. We'd perform on Margate beach and there were people for as far as you could see.

"From February every year we'd have phone calls asking where the roadshow would be in certain weeks. People wanted to plan their holidays around it so they could come.

"People would travel North to South just to see the DJs they wanted or follow us and stay in caravans. That was the magic of the roadshow.

"All they'd come to see was a guy putting records on and him and me mucking around on stage while holding up placards asking us to say hello to their mum during the show.”

Its popularity peaked when, in 1992, a crowd of 100,000 attended one of the events in Birmingham.

For today's youngsters, Radio 1 was a different animal during the 1970s and 80s. In an era before the proliferation of digital channels catering for every form of music, Radio 1 was the only show in town with a pop playlist which spanned the generations.

Not only would the DJs command big audiences, but as the regular hosts of weekly BBC1 chart rundown Top of the Pops they were major celebrities.

And Kent saw its fair share of big names over the years. During the 1970s the likes of radio legends Alan 'Fluff' Freeman and 'Diddy' David Hamilton appeared, as well as Dave Lee Travis and Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, the man who also presented BBC children's TV show Crackerjack.

During the 1980s, Peter Powell, Mike Smith, Tony Blackburn, Steve Wright, Bruno Brookes and even a young Phillip Schofield took turns behind the microphone to whip the crowds into an excitable frenzy.

The 1990s, meanwhile, saw Mike Read, Mark Goodier, Jackie Brambles and, comfortably sitting in the 'not household name' category, Clive Warren and Mark Tonderai.

Explains Tony 'Smiley Miley' Miles: "The DJs were big back in the 70s and 80s.

"They'd be away on the roadshow, but their management and agents would see the opportunities and book them into some clubs along the route," he adds. "So they were doing a roadshow with a captive audience and then doing appearances at clubs. They were making big money."

The vast majority, remembers Tony, enjoyed the experience. Although not so much, apparently, the bespectacled Simon Bates – the man responsible for Our Tune, his daily tear-jerking story of unmitigated tragedy. He was, Tony says, more of a "proper broadcaster" than many of his contemporaries. Which probably translates into not buying into the larking-about spirit of the shows.

The genesis of the idea came after Radio 1 executive Johnny Beerling went on a camping holiday to Nice in the South of France. He saw a trailer opening up to present entertainment. Thinking it would work as a great promotional device to get the then-young radio station (it launched in 1967) a decent bit of publicity, he got the ball rolling on his return.

Not that his fellow execs shared his view - expecting it to be a short-lived flop.

But from its humble beginnings (DJs playing tracks from the back of a van), it grew to see the shows roll into town in a £250,000 articulated lorry complete with a satellite truck.

Not that there weren’t plenty of hiccups along the way - with Tony remembering on one occasion in the 1970s when, while driving the truck onto Margate beach, it slipped off one of the tracks laid down to prevent it getting stuck in the sand and required digging out.

Arriving the night before in the town they were due to broadcast from, the crew were a close-knit team.

Adds Tony: "We'd go to the beach to play rounders or go on the dodgems. I often used to host a barbeque on the beach three times a week for the crew rather than all just sit in a hotel.

"I was always keen to keep the roadshow 'family' together and we kept that all the way through. The DJs would join us. We'd eat together, drink together, work together and play together."

And it would prove a big boost to the local economy as it pulled in the punters.

"If it was still going today," he reflects, "councils would be throwing money at you to come to their town".

After being hosted between 5-7pm in its earliest incarnation - a time slot which proved potentially troublesome as the crowd would often have spent the day on the beach drinking - in 1976 it switched to the time slot in which most will remember it.

Warm-up entertainment for the broadcast would start at 10am and the show went live at 11am for 90 minutes of music and hijinks.

While in the early days it was just the DJ entertaining the audience, by the 1990s there was an increasing number of emerging artists keen to capitalise on the big crowds and even bigger radio audience.

The Manic Street Preachers performed live during a 1993 July roadshow on Margate's Main Sands, while Grange Hill and EastEnders star Sean Maguire appeared in the same town in 1995 in a bid to spark his brief pop career.

Elsewhere in the country, acts such as the Spice Girls and Take That appeared before becoming huge.

There were also regular games played on the stage – and by the millions listening along. The likes of Bits and Pieces – where you had to guess the songs from a string of snippets – and Smiley Miley's Mileage Game where you had to guess how many miles he'd driven since leaving the last destination. They were simpler times.

But by the early 1990s, a new broom was sweeping through the corridors of power in the form of Radio 1's new controller, Matthew Bannister.

Determined to rid the station of its Smashie and Nicey image, he set about dumping some of the station's best-known names. His sights were also set on the roadshow.

Explains Tony: “He thought the roadshow was a bucket-and-spade routine at the end of the pier. He didn't like it.

"I didn't renew our contract in 1995. I don't think we would have fitted in anymore with what they wanted to do."

The catch-all generations playlist was dumped, the personalities of the DJs reined in and when the roadshow parked up after the 1999 summer season it was all over for the annual knees-up.

Instead, the radio station opted for a number of big, star-studded single events called One Big Sunday which, in turn, morphed into the annual Big Weekend - more festival than roadshow.

In 2008, the Big Weekend famously came to Maidstone and was headlined by Madonna.

"People thought it would never work when it was first proposed," says Tony today. "But they were proved wrong.

"The phrase 'roadshow' didn't exist until Radio 1 started using it. Now it's everywhere. I still believe the roadshow was the biggest radio outside broadcast success story anywhere in the world."

Not ‘arf, as Fluff would have said.