Very soon the advantage of this switch - which meant the music carried on, even while the presenter was on air, became apparent: it became known as the PITS or "Party in the Studio" Switch. URE celebrated its 18th birthday in 1989. Many Alumni were invited back to make programmes. By 1989 there was a waiting list of over 20 new presenters, and the Christmas "all-nighters" presentation had become a fixture. A criticism of this period was that there was always a drive to encourage new presenters to sign up - and maintain the music output, to keep the station on air all the time, at an expense of complex talk programmes. To counter this then programme controller introduced a once a week talk programme called "Tower to Tower"; the name was a direct copy of University Radio Falmer's "Slope to Slope", although the format was new: with three minutes of the news of university that week, six minutes of UK news, a five-minute what's on guide, an interview with a sabbatical officer, a five-minute package of an event effecting students, a band review, film review, and the headlines again, it was the quickest way to teach a junior news team the basics of news, and maintain an entertaining programme. The format was in turn copied by UKC Radio's "College to College" and even Wired! at Goldsmiths "Tower to College", as one of the longest living speech formats on UK Student Radio. It was nominated for awards by the Student Radio Association (SRA) in 1996. Derivations of the format still exist on air today. In 1989 URE started taking Capital Radio as its overnight "sustaining" service, when it couldn't provide output. This has been reported to be an innovative piece of programming. At the time Capital was by far the most dominant ILR station in the UK, with highly innovative programming. However, in North Essex, Capital was out of range except for people with a very expensive directional aerial. URE possessed this - and relayed Capital overnight, and for early breakfast until 8am: this considerably drove its listenership, although it took a knock in 1990 when URE's main competition, BBC Radio 1, started broadcasting in FM - previously BBC Radio 1 had been at 1053 & 1089 kHz AM, and for some students switching from FM to AM and back was too complicated, as other Medium Wave stations later also found. Ironically, to celebrate the launch of Radio 1 in FM, Radio 1 toured East Anglia by Helicopter and touched down at the Wivenhoe Park campus: alas, they did so in the middle of the Easter Holidays, and the only people to greet them were members of URE.