You can see how difficult it must be for the powers behind BBC Radio. On the one hand, the Corporation is still pumping out programmes that we could have heard 60 years ago. The list is endless but try The Archers and Desert Island Discs for starters, brought together on Sunday (Radio 4) when June Spencer, who plays Peggy Woolley, was Kirsty Young’s guest. (She’s been in the series since the very first episode 60 years ago, when the broadcasts were live and the scripts changing even while they were on air, the producer tiptoeing up to the microphone, seizing the script and cutting lines with a pencil.) Can you imagine the outcry if either of these stalwarts were bumped off the airwaves? On the other hand, the Beeb’s desperately trying to stay ahead of the digital game, and to ensure that it keeps hold of its market dominance.
I confess I’ve never felt the need to tune in to 6 Music, currently threatened with closure in the new proposals for streamlining the BBC. Couldn’t the money be better spent on tempting the young to get the listening habit? 6 Music has been building an audience, to 650,000 listeners, not so very far short of Radio 3, but only by doing what’s already available elsewhere on Radio 2 and the commercial stations. Where there’s still a real gap is in the Corporation’s commitment to children’s radio. Radio 4 has virtually abandoned anyone under about 25, arguing that BBC7 is covering the gap. On Sunday nights, for instance, there’s a really confusing ragbag of programmes on Radio 4, one minute giving us heavy-duty analysis of American politics with Matt Frei and company, and the next the distinctly retro world of those naughty schoolboys Jennings and Darbishire in a reading of the book by Anthony Buckeridge which seems to have been going on for weeks. If this is meant to be Book at Bedtime for eight-year-olds, it needs to be a regular, everyday slot, not an occasional 15 minutes once a week, and given a bit of lead-in so we know that it’s coming, rather than being stuck in the middle of some very grown-up programmes.
Fifteen minutes later and the mood changes abruptly yet again as we’re thrust into the fiery chambers of Feedback, currently fuelled by the raging dispute about Neil MacGregor’s brilliant series on world history. Why do so many listeners love complaining, insisting quite oddly that we must see the objects that the director of the British Museum is talking about and that the series should have been made for TV? I love the challenge of conjuring them in my mind. After all, isn’t this the magic of radio?
But how do you cater for everyone without diminishing your core values? It’s all about focus. Being sure of what your mission is. Not being sidetracked by opinion. Which is very difficult in Britain today, when society has changed so radically from the days when the licence fee was established to fund the fledgling BBC and it was easy to believe that between them the Light Programme, the Third Programme and the Home Service could cater for everyone.
On Radio 2 on Tuesday night we were taken back to 1984/5 and the 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike, and to an old-style radio programme that could have been made in the 1950s (and none the worse for that). Ballads and interviews were interlinked, almost like reportage, reminding us of what happened when the government decided to take on the miners’ union without fully understanding the opposition they might meet. Strangely, given what I remember at the time, in Ballad of the Miners’ Strike we heard very little from Arthur Scargill but a lot about the women who supported their husbands, surviving on just £11.95 a week for the year-long strike. ‘God, there were some clever women,’ we were told. It was great to hear their side of the story. One of them explained how afterwards they were taken on a tour of Russia and given the red-carpet treatment for their opposition to Margaret Thatcher. Not something we knew about at the time.
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