The BBC’s music man

To Radio 2 to meet Bob Shennan, controller of the BBC’s most popular radio station (the station attracts one third of all listening hours) and now also head of the newish monolith that is BBC Music. Why corral all of the Corporation’s music output on radio and TV into one enormous sub-division (on a par with BBC News, BBC Drama and BBC Sport)? Isn’t this just another cost-cutting compromise, a way of saving money by smoothing out the BBC’s output (its first production was that weird mish-mash of God Only Knows by a constellation of stars)? How will specialist stations like Radio 3 and BBC4 survive if swallowed up in what is essentially a bureaucratic creative exercise, victims of corporate branding?

Shennan is, I suspect, a man you would not want to cross in an argument, but his passion for all things radio is mightily reassuring. He has, after all, masterminded the current Radio 2 surge to more than 15 million listeners, as well as ensuring not just the survival of 6 Music but also its astonishing audience increase to two million listeners (from 695,000 in 2010 when it was threatened with closure).