Radio but perhaps not as we know it

I love radio. I always did and perhaps as I grow older I realise that I probably prefer radio to television.

Of course I probably have memories of programmes that I listened to as a child but does any particular programme stand out, I'm not sure, I think that because I listened to so many different types of radio I view the medium as a whole.

A place that informed and could entertain me.

I have dabbled in commercial radio listening but generally I am a BBC radio person. As far as I know the "Pirate" radio stations on board ships were very difficult to hear in the North East of England in the 60's and the only one that I remember was the short lived Radio 270 off the coast of Scarborough, N. Yorks. When proper commercial radio was given the go ahead on land I was a big supporter of Metro Radio based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, even though officially I should've been served by Radio Tees(later renamed TFM)I long since stopped listening to either as they sound similar and like just about any such station across the the UK.

Commercial radio bleats about BBC Radio having an advantage over them because of the licence fee. But if they were any good, advertisers would pump money into the commercial stations, listeners would be...listening. Perhaps a commercial station would like to be bold and do something different such as speech radio(apart from Oneword that mainly broadcasts audio books)and something like LBC FM(a kind of version of the defunct Talk Radio)and LBC AM(News)and grudgingly to some extent Talk Sport(which was born out of the original Talk Radio after it was taken over)how exciting is commercial radio in the UK? I may be about to dip my toe into digital radio because the only way I can hear LBC FM is via a satellite system but officially from September 1st 2006 it is available across most of the UK via digital radio and as frequencies are freed up eventually everywhere. Test transmissions as I speak. Most of Wales, Midlands, North of England will hear it for definate. In a way its a bit like getting Talk Radio back years after it closed and some of the presenters from there are on LBC FM including Anna Raeburn and Nick Abbot.

One presenter who is known in London and has had a show on LBC for almost 30 years is Steve Allen, its all tongue in cheek and everyone gets a tongue lashing from celebs to people from the North of England, Wales and wherever and where most who have listened to him in London know what to expect though he says he has no intention of changing, people who listen now across the country and do not understand the humour may very well start to complain to the broadcasting regulators and that would be a pity. He may still get away with it only in the fact that he is tucked away at the early hour of 5am-7am weekdays.

Anywhere in the world for that matter. It is suggested that for various reasons, listeners in the country(USA)that was the blueprint of commercial radio are tired of it hence the growth in radio delivered by satellite which offers channels of a certain genre and a monthly fee paid to listen(a bit like going back to a radio license idea)

In a way commercial radio has copied America more than perhaps we realise.

In the 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's it offered drama, music, comedy, sport, news and so on. High quality material on the whole. Once television came in and performers and the public switched to the new medium rightly or wrongly radio decided to leave television to it and it was then easier to play records, read a news bulletin and perhaps do a phone-in. Just maybe, had some had the foresight to continue to offer more than just spinning records, it could've worked alongside television and still offered more than playing the Top40 over and over again.

But like so many countries they gave up and now allowing for a few exceptions(usually on public radio or the nearest to that model that exists in Canada, Australia or America...)it is all but dead except for good old Auntie Beeb. Secretly I think many regret giving up on speech radio. Ocassionally, some broadcasters do attempt to produce radio drama again or issue radio style material on CD for the public to purchase.

I have meant to write something on this for months but was prompted by the fact that the Daily Mail printed an article earlier today...I cannot decide if its an extract from a book written by a popular broadcaster or she wrote it for the paper but the credit goes to Radio: A True Love Story by Libby Purves (Hodder & Stoughton)

I quote from the piece:

"In Britain we have been lucky. An accident of history meant that broadcasting, at whose heart lies radio, grew up as a public service rather than a commercial venture. This enabled it to flourish and experiment, fed by ideals that went beyond profit or propaganda.

Music and chat stations all over the globe are often pleasant listening, but Britain's networks are replicated nowhere else and could never be reinvented from scratch on a self-funding basis."

That point I agree with.

She also says:

"BBC Radio has its faults — it can be smug, and recently parts of it have abandoned some of the demanding values of taste and intelligence it once set itself. But basically it keeps up its standards well, on amazingly low budgets."

Of course there is quality and with access now to some BBC stations that I once could not hear unless I lived in Scotland, N.Ireland and Wales I could not access as easily and the fact that the World Service is also available to a domestic audience, I have to agree again. On the whole when BBC Radio does a sporting event, a drama, a documentary the quality of the production is there for all to hear.

But as it is doing things that commercial radio avoids and because BBC television gets the lion's share of the license fee perhaps we should question that if radio is as important to the public and we want it to remain so and if it can be done with so little revenue...radio should be given a little more to either bring it back to the standard it once was known for or be given an increase in finances that could make it even better.

As for standards being lowered criticism of Radio 5 by many on the messageboards is justified, it is classed as a news and sports station and I have no real problem with it mentioning light and dark, trivia and heavy but I do want presenters that are of a high enough standard fronting the programmes and often those chosen seem to have been picked because they open their mouth and talk but that does not always mean that they are saying anything interesting.

We have lots of television channels now where you phone in and try and win money and the presenter basically just keeps talking for two or three hours to camera and all they are doing is repeating the same script over and over again. But I am not sure that makes them a great broadcaster. One I watched the other night even had a series of expressions that were obviously false and not natural, it was as if she was a trained animal.

Using Radio 5 as an example they do have capable broadcasters on their rota and many that even those who complain about certain presenters admit that they would like or could accept but often we get left with the worst examples.

Perhaps someone could show me statistics to prove otherwise but I do believe that there is less drama, comedy and such programmes being produced and broadcast than before. A lot of what radio does more than ever is people sitting in a studio talking a lot in the style of a dinner party.

Therefore, though its a digital station it is interesting that BBC7 is the most popular of the new stations and is playing programmes that survived being erased and were hidden in the BBC archive probably thought of as to never be heard again. Perhaps, as digital radio increases in popularity BBC7's remit could change and it could be allowed to be a station that plays archive material and commissions new comedies and drama's plus also plays re-runs of newer material from Radio 4 and other BBC outlets.

Then BBC Radio 4 could maybe deal with news and feature/information material, Radio 5 seems unable to decide whether sport is news, rarely does news take over a sports programme but often sport takes up more and more of the time allotted to the news output and so even though sport has its own phone-in's often a sports story takes up too much time on what is a news or magazine type programme. It may be that the Government has to change the remit of a BBC station but if digital radio is taking off, I would like to see Radio 5's main station be mainly news and its sister station Five Live Extra used more for total sport output or a place to put sports talk when the station is often not used because there are no sporting events taking place.

But I appreciate that when sports events clash Radio 5 has to give way and both are used.
Dixons, the country's largest electrical chain, sells more radios today than it did in 1985 — but they are now nearly all digital. The fact that it sells 30 times more of them than it does analogue models has resulted in its recent decision to stop selling analogue radios altogether.

But just as we have been told that there is a lack of frequencies hence television going digital(let us not forget that the spectrum that analogue television used is to be sold off to other commercial companies)probably raising millions for the treasury and in time the same may be true if/when AM/Fm is ditched though so far I have never seen a time frame for when that will happen. But as good as digital radio seems to be to many because of the extra choice it offers and perhaps the improvement in parts of the country where radio listening is still a problem even digital radio is not always as good as what it is said to be in all the advertising material.

Quite often some stations available in stereo on FM are reduced in quality because another station has to borrow some of the available bandwidth, or to enable more stations to broadcast sometimes the threshold of another stations bitrate is reduced. Some stations that are available on an alternative platform to digital radio such as BBC7 and Radio 5 are in stereo if heard on digital satellite but on digital radio are only available in mono. And if listened to on freeview again sometimes bits of the spectrum are borrowed so quality can vary.

Also, portable digital radio is not necessarily available because if the signal is affected, it can cut out or click and pop whereas am/fm can manage to give some kind of signal even if the signal is weak.

Many people find that a digital radio may work in one room but not in another and some have even had to invest in connection to a new aerial.

So the brave new world of digital has created as many problems as it has tried to cure. I did read that some countries have held back on introducing digital radio, some have stopped after actually starting to use the medium and there are already alternatives being talked about to the present system adopted in the UK so things are still to be worked out.