Survival tactics

You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode of The Archers ever recorded’ at 11 p.m. on Thursday?) What surprises me is not so much that radio has survived the onslaught of TV — there’s an aural quality to the experience of listening to a play, a documentary, even a news bulletin that TV can never satisfy — but that it’s survived despite changing so little about itself. So OK the BBC did begin broadcasting non-stop pop, outdoing the pirates by cheekily poaching the best DJs and creating a less commercial playlist. It broadened its appeal by giving more space to ‘light’ music and chat, with the great Jimmy Young, whose deceptive manner as a blazer-jacketed smoothie got more out of Margaret Thatcher than anyone else (he interviewed her on 14 occasions), and John Dunn (best Budget coverage on air). It encouraged Three to be more adventurous (we’ve been given Scott Joplin as this week’s composer as well as music from Vietnam and the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir), and Four less stuffy than the Home Service. But, as a quick flip through Radio Times shows, the output of the BBC’s radio stations reflects mostly a UK that in reality is now only to be found in the wilder recesses of Gloucestershire and Surrey.

Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s great falling-out with Radio Four, the network has been seen by many, and especially by recalcitrant politicians, as a bastion of the liberal Left (or as Jeffrey Archer once so cogently put it, ‘a bunch of leftie communists’).