Radio Stuff
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Back To The Future
This week I picked up a brilliantly funny email from the inbox at work. A listener who’d been interviewed on the radio wanted to know if we could help him with a copy of the broadcast. In April. 1993. Now I’m used to this type of request, often from contributors who’ve appeared last week, or…
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Devon Sent – A Cornish Nasty?
At the beginning of my career I was lucky enough to work in the South West. Gemini Radio, serving Exeter, East Devon and Torbay was a dream station to work at. Live and local (apart from an automated overnight show), Gemini excelled at what was everything good about Independent Radio. We had a daily…
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English (and Scottish) Heritage
It’s the silly season, when many people with “normal” jobs are away on holiday, and most of the movers and shakers at Westminster are enjoying a few weeks of respite from the close scrutiny of those pesky journalists. We all accept it. August is a time when there is no news, apart from the huge success…
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The Joy Of Text
Don’t get me wrong. I love our listeners. I really do. And, in the main, they love their radio station. The latest audience figures may show some fluctuations across the country, but in the main, radio ratings are healthy. But there’s an awkward moment when, after putting hours of work into a programme, you receive what…
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The All England Club
If you’re a radio presenter or a production company and somebody offered you the chance to develop a brand new national show, with pretty much a blank canvas, you might jump at the chance. But I reckon the reality is there’ll be relatively few people queuing at the door to pitch for the new BBC…
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Trenty Twelve
“It’s Len Groat – radio like it used to be!” sings the retro jingle into another hour of seventies music. When I was growing up, Len was one the voices on what I considered to be the mutt’s nuts of broadcasting. You see, in the Seventies, Radio Trent was still fresh. It was breaking new…
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BBC Dorset – A Hardy Perennial
It boasts the Jurassic Coast, a sizeable urban population and, in just a few weeks, the attention of the world on Weymouth by way of the Olympics. Yet Dorset doesn’t have its own BBC Local Radio Station. This anomaly is part of a historic dilemma for the BBC which has come to the fore…
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David Takes On Goliath
After last week’s collective sigh of relief over the BBC Trust’s decision to significantly scale back on cuts to Local Radio, plenty of dust has settled. One Managing Editor recently told me “we’ll look back on DQF in a few years and wonder what all the fuss was about.” But there’s little sense of…
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Chris’ll Fix It
After months of uncertainty, the BBC Trust has finally published its conclusions on proposed cuts to Local Radio. And – on the surface of it, it’s good news for hundreds of staff who were wondering if they were going to lose their jobs. It’s also broadly good news for the audience, with plans to share…
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Lost For Words?
It’s good to talk, as BT spent several years telling us. Yet when it comes to radio in the UK, the commercial radio sector really seems to struggle to survive. So perhaps it’s time to turn the conversation towards whether there really is a market for speech radio beyond the BBC. For the past couple…
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