Radio 2 has misjudged its audience

BBC Radio 2 is one of the many modern cultural enterprises which seems to have as its primary aim alienating the people who love it. The shabbily executed departure of Ken Bruce from his long-established and still wildly popular mid-morning show feels like a final door being slammed shut.

Bruce is to be replaced by Vernon Kay, a live wire television presenter. Like the breakfast show’s Zoe Ball, Kay is one of those people who is very excited about something the rest of us have not been let in on. They both retain a prepubescent bounce that is frankly odd in those around the age of 50. Is this tartrazine level of enthusiasm really necessary for the Radio 2 audience? Young people sleep like bears. They need to be blasted awake. Old people do not. We were up anyway.

There was something incredibly reassuring about what I called The Trinity – the line-up of Sarah Kennedy, Terry Wogan and Ken Bruce that I listened to every weekday morning for many years. (There was always a vault across the room to switch the radio over or off at 12:30 when Jeremy Vine appeared, shouting about whether we should ban X or Y.) The eccentric Kennedy, given to tears, ramblings and solecisms of a startling kind (check out the controversies section of her Wikipedia page); Wogan with his loyal TOGs – Terry’s Old Geezers – and an increasingly arcane body of lore involving characters such as Chuffer Dandridge and Janet and John; Ken with his incredible patience during the Popmaster quiz – ‘I like a bit of everything, Ken’ – and possessor of the most soothing dad voice you can imagine, like a Glaswegian Solomon. I can’t adequately express to younger people how cosy it felt when understated people like this were the older generation; not awful Gen X airheads who want to be your friend.

The very American selection of the playlists on these shows means that my early life on a suburban British housing estate is indelibly imprinted with a mixed soundtrack of Manhattan sophistication – ‘Uptown Uptempo Woman’ or Rita Coolidge’s ‘You’ – and the blue bayou of good ol’ fashioned country hand-clappin’ songs by Billie Jo Spears or Hoyt Axton.

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As I grew older I never considered switching to a funkier station. Morning Radio 2 in its heyday induced an emotional condition that we might call Brucian Zen. (Even the news seemed less awful in this context.) This open hearted, frequently naff, understated, slightly naughty world felt like the bedrock of society, the still centre that could be relied upon to stay the same no matter what the rest of the culture was doing. That sense of continuity is a precious thing. It’s the reason why for many of us the death of Wogan felt like the cracking of the seventh seal. Negligent tampering with something so core as Ken Bruce’s contract is a sure sign that the BBC is in a very dark place.

The employment of sparkly, sparky DJs like Ball and Kay misses the essential lotus-eating nature of the enterprise. Despite being 52 and 48 respectively, they feel too young. Wogan was a mere 34 when he took over the breakfast show, but a 34-year-old in 1972 is a very different proposition to the permanent adolescent screech of the twenty-first century presenter.

In a way though, the BBC is stymied here by wider social changes. There are no ‘old’ old people any longer. Middle-aged people are no longer permitted to be sexless, silly, bemused and befuddled. Radio 2 itself (Jo Whiley in particular) is forever trying to corral us into tuning in for ‘sessions’ by new bands in its Live Lounge or Piano Room as if we were 15 and reading the NME. One of the great consolations of age was no longer having to pay attention to such stuff, to escape from the modern world, from new things, just in a little corner. Can’t we be left even that?

The Radio 2 playlists are also now routinely taking 1990 as their earliest point for ‘oldies’. This is skewing ridiculously too young, and millions of listeners have unsurprisingly switched to Boom or Ken Bruce’s new home Greatest Hits Radio.

I’ve been experimenting with Boom (rather unkindly nicknamed Radio Dignitas by a friend) and I’m glad to report that in one hour I heard Frank Ifield, Smokie and David Soul. The most daringly up to date artist on the playlist was Simply Red. And with presenters like Judi Spiers (69), Jenny Hanley (75) and Diddy David Hamilton (84) I can still feel positively juvenile. Hook me up to that sweet stuff.