Ahoy & hooray. Former CHLO DJ, former Radio Caroline DJ, founding presence with the Fanshawe MIA program, Tom Lodge is finally receiving his cinematic overdue.

Lodge’s Radio Caroline memoir The Ship That Rocked the World about his experiences as a “pirate radio” off the British coast is getting the full film treatment, Lodge reports from California where he has lived for many years. JNBLog has hoped passionately for this & here is the good news via e-mail:

Dear James,Now all is moving forward with the Radio Caroline story. Speakeasy Films L.L.C. has bought the rights to my book and has proceeded with filming. They were here last weekend with the whole Hollywood crew and lots of equipment.  They interviewed me and went deep into the story.  I was most impressed with their understanding and their clear feeling and enthusiasm for this important piece of music history.The producers are Joe Mundo and Jamie Talbot and the director is Hans Fjellestad.  They just finished making a film about the music that came out of “Sunset Strip”. Now they are heading off to England to interview, the rock stars, the deejays and all those who were involved with Radio Caroline.  Also they will be using a lot of the news footage from that time. I trust that you are well, All the best, Tom Lodge

This is great news, of course, & those who have kept faith with Tom over the years in the London region, including his sons, must be thrilled.

In closing, JBNBlog will revisit the closing of a My London column about The Ship That Rocked the World from a My London column 13 months ago. My London is The Free Press weekly cousin to JBNBlog and that column was a celebration of the book’s arrival in its definitive form following earlier & abbreviated editions. Here is what I wrote then:

The first versions of the book were dedicated to Radio Caroline’s admiral, visionary and Lodge’s boss and mentor Ronan O’Rahilly. He is still a major figure in 2010′s edition.

But this time, the dedication is to the memory of a Londoner, the late Christopher C. Peterson, who died in 2009.

Peterson, a London rocker, was “a close friend who has been very involved in the unfolding of this important story,” Lodge writes in the acknowledgments.

Peterson believed in Lodge and his story for decades $- and worked on the project tirelessly. Late in his life, he was pulling in support for Lodge’s ship of rock.

Chris knew it was a terrific read and would eventually get out there. Chris was right.

Tom Lodge, the former Londoner who had been a real-life “Pirate Radio” DJ off Britain in the 1960s, has died in California.

Lodge had been battling cancer. He died on Sunday at the age of 75, his wife Delphi Lodge said Monday. That was 46 years to the day after he was whisked off the Radio Caroline boat to interview the Beatles in an exclusive session at London, England. Lodge was born in Britain on April 16, 1936.

Family and friends were mourning Lodge and celebrating his remarkable life on Facebook and other social media on Monday.

Lodge published several versions of his “pirate radio” days when the music was based on ships broadcasting from off-shore and British government radio kept rock to a minimum. The Free Press critic said The Ship That Rocked The World, the 2010 edition is the one of those books to get.

On the jacket are raves for Lodge and Radio Caroline, the off-shore 1960s’ “pirate” radio ship that broke so many hit records, from such British Invasion heroes as Peter Townshend, Ray Davies and Paul McCartney.

The British-born Lodge first came to Canada in the early 1950s, settling in Hay River, Northwest Territories, where he worked as a commercial fisherman on Great Slave Lake until he and a friend got caught on a ice floe. His friend died, but Lodge was rescued and he wrote his first book about the tragedy.

Lodge then moved to Yellowknife where he worked in a gold mine before joining the CBC Radio as an announcer, became a station manager, then returned to England as a correspondent. He took a job as a disc jockey and program director on Radio Caroline, the radio station built on a ship that sailed off the coast of Britain to dodge the BBC’s monopoly.

Radio Caroline, on which the movie Pirate Radio is loosely based, was soon outlawed and Lodge came back to Canada to work as a DJ at CHLO-AM in St. Thomas. He continued to break hit records there.

While there, Lodge met senior Fanshawe College officials and agreed to open a Creative Electronics program in 1970. When college budgets tightened, Lodge convinced the province the program would feed the music industry, changing the name to Music Industry Arts in 1972.

In the mid-1970s, Lodge moved to California where he began practising Zen. He had an ashram in the mountains near Santa Cruz, California, and took the name Umi, given to him by his Zen master.

Family members and friends held a benefit concert to help raise money for his battle with colon cancer at the London Music Club in October.