The BBC doesn’t want me to listen to the radio. I now know this for a fact. I’m too old. It’s been going on for decades. Now, with the impending demise of Radio 4 Extra, I’m left with next to nothing I can listen to. I more or less abandoned Radio 4 during Covid, driven away by the endless parade of depressing news bulletins: as Bunyan said in Pilgrim’s Progress: ‛who so best him round with dismal stories’. I was already a regular listener to 4 Extra, which now became my default station. I’d leave it on even if I wasn’t listening to a specific broadcast, and thus managed to stumble across programmes I’d otherwise never have got to hear.
Now, with 4 Extra on the way out, I’m facing a world without radio. Commercial stations are out. There are plenty of music stations now where the playlist is narrowly focused on ‛greatest hits’, which in practice boils down to a couple of hundred tracks you’ve heard a million times before by artists who don’t even need the royalties. For a while, I had a go at listening to the likes of Boom Radio and GHR, if only to catch the Ken Bruce show on the latter. But the commercials… to say they’re irritating is an under statement. They’re usually shrill, repetitive, unfunny and deeply uncreative. Enough of that! Radio 3 is fine if you don’t mind a background of mostly dull classical music. I don’t mind some classical music now and then, but as an all day long background, it’s a bit too much. And I don’t like ‛modern’ classical music, for which read atonal squawks and burps with no semblance of melody or harmony.
For a while, I listened to BBC 6 Music, but there would always be some awful track that forced me to turn off, and as time wore on I found I preferred speech to music.
This slow migration away from BBC radio has, for me, been going on since the 1990s. There was a time when my default choice of ‛background listening’ was Radio 1. As late as the mid 90s, the daytime schedule was still occupied by old codgers like Simon Bates and ‛Ooh’ Gary Davies, and Steve Wright was unmovable from his afternoon slot. In the evening, you got the likes of Mark and Lard, and even John Peel, who by this time was moonlighting on Radio 4 on Saturday mornings. But the landscape was slowly shifting.
One dull morning in 1993, I decided I’d had enough of whoever was on Radio 1 and, with some trepidation, retuned to Radio 2. To me, this was still the ‛easy listening’ station that kept the old Light Programme flag flying, with presenters like Richard Baker and daily soaps like Waggoner’s Walk (although the latter had ended in 1980). My perception was of a station with an upper-middle-aged-to-elderly demographic, and I was only thirty-two. Never mind, I thought I’d give it a go. Now, where to find it on the dial? (This was still the age of manual tuning). After some twiddling, I found some music, followed by the voice of whoever was presenting the mid morning show.
‛I know this voice,’ I thought. ‛Didn’t he used to do Come Dancing on the television?’ I was wrong, of course: I was thinking of Ray Moore, who also had a show on Radio 2, and a very similar voice. But this was Ken Bruce. Whoever he might be. Never mind, the music wasn’t bad, and there was a half decent quiz you could play along with. I was in the middle of retiling the kitchen and by the time I’d finished the job, I was all but converted to Ken Bruce. His programme ended… and guess whose dulcet tones issued forth from the speaker? Only Jimmy Young! Yes, the old J.Y. Prog was still going, albeit nearing the end of its tenure (it ran until 30 December 2002). Now, Jimmy Young was still a bit old school radio for me… I remembered listening to him back in the 60s, the era of ‛Raymondo’ and his ‛what’s the recipe today, Jim.’ In a way, it felt warmly nostalgic. But what the hell…
Gradually, I began to transition to listening to Radio 2. It wasn’t good all day long, but the music was more acceptable than the ‛modern toss’ served up on Radio 1. Not that I was entirely finished with ‛wonderful Radio One’. Far from it. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, from November 1993, you got Danny Baker, whose taste in music closely followed my own, and whose show included amusing nonsense like ‛turmoil’ wherein his producer or co-presenter (I forget which) would write said word in biro across the foreheads of celebrities with their pictures in the paper, sending Baker into hysterics… maybe you had to be there.
Radio 1 itself was in turmoil at this time, going through a round of sackings that culminated with Dave Lee Travis resigning on air. Baker took over his mid morning show, but his tenure at Radio 1 was fairly brief. Before long, Jonathan Ross had annexed the Saturday morning slot, and made a decent job of it, remaining at the network until 2010.
But aside from these occasional Saturday mornings, I was spending less and less time with Radio 1. Former presenters were slowly migrating to Radio 2. Mark Radcliffe, whose show with Marc Riley had kept me tuned to Radio 1 on late evenings during the 90s, was now an evening staple on Radio 2, paired up with Stuart Maconie, who was also presenting ‛The Critical List’ on Saturday evenings, a must-listen show that put me in the way of a lot of good music I’d missed out on. Ken Bruce remained firmly embedded in his morning slot, seemingly as permanent as the Rock of Gibraltar. But times change…
By the time it was announced that Ken Bruce would be leaving Radio 2 – of his own accord – I was about done with the station. There was next to nothing left for me to listen to. Only Liza Tarbuck’s Saturday teatime show kept me on the dial, and an excellent show it proved to be, with one of the most original and eclectic playlists on any radio network. Her presenting style was amiably daft, although she rather spoiled an old favourite of mine – Percy Faith’s ‛Theme From a Summer Place’ – by using it as the backdrop to her regular ‛ice skating’ piece of silliness. But now Liza has gone too, leaving Radio 2 a listening desert, the audio equivalent of a high street full of vape shops. I don’t know who anybody is any more. There was a time when I could just about take Jeremy Vine… but his mannered delivery began to grate. You know, that way he has of talkingveryquickly, then s l o w i n g down and EMPHASISING certain WORDS. (Funny thing is, Robert PESTON does the same thing on ITV, but I don’t mind him…)
With Radio 2 a no-go area, I was left with only one choice of music radio: BBC 6 Music. But even here, the schedule had been shaken up, to the disadvantage of the only presenters I really listened to – namely, Marc Riley and Gideon Coe, whose programmes were conflated into one a couple of years back. Radio 3 has a decent jazz programme for an hour on Sunday afternoons, but it’s a mixed bag. Not long ago, they played a Stan Tracey cut where the saxophonist sounded like Colonel Hall doing his barnyard imitations in a classic Bilko episode…
What are you trying to tell me, BBC Radio? Turn off and go elsewhere? It’s happening… on Saturday and Sunday mornings I tune in to the internet station Serenade Radio, a shamelessly easy listening enterprise, which has even resurrected the old ‛Sing Something Simple’ programmes from vintage Radio 2. It must be doing all right, as it’s been going for over a decade, supported by voluntary donations from listeners, and presenters who give their time for nothing.
Perhaps this is the future for 4 Extra? It wouldn’t be easy, though: archive speech radio has to be licensed, which is why nobody else does it. Music radio is, by comparison, a piece of cake: all it takes is a blanket license from the Performing Rights Society, and you’re covered for royalty payments on all commercially released recordings. If you ever wondered why there are so many music radio stations, and not much else, that’s the reason.
The chances of Radio 4 Extra getting a reprieve dwindle with every passing day. A petition of over 17,500 signatures was presented to BBC management and rejected. The guy in charge of BBC Sounds appeared on Radio 4’s Feedback programme, sounding not unlike Anthony Powell’s character Kenneth Widmerpool with his endless statistical abstracts. He promised listeners that he was handing them ‛the key to a treasure house’ of archive content on BBC Sounds. A few minutes later he confirmed that the BBC will not continue to pay for the rights to make 4 Extra content available… ensuring that the ‛treasure house’ will be more than half empty by the time the station closes down.
Once Radio 4 Extra is done and dusted, there will still be four (count them, four) variations of Radio 1 still broadcasting, and four iterations of Radio 5 Live. Even Radio 3 has a pointless alter ego, ‛Radio 3 Unwind’. The corporation is also wasting money creating visual content to accompany radio programmes making them suitable for uploading on YouTube. It's clear that the end of so-called 'linear' radio broadcasting is fast approaching. In the not too distant future, everything will be streamed. And that will be the end of radio as we know it.
What does all this tell us about BBC Radio and its attitude to listeners? Simple: we listen to them, but they don’t listen to us...
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