The BBC’s flagship radio station, Radio1, has dropped below the 10 million listeners barrier for the first time in its history, as reported in today’s Grauniad.
In a related piece, in today’s Torygraph, Neil McCormick questions the way records are selected for Radio1’s main play-list. Apparently, it’s done in exactly the same way that commercial radio stations do it.
Which begs the immediate questions; what then is the purpose of Radio1? And why are we tax-plebs forced to contribute so much towards it, via the BBC licence fee? In the commercial arena its listeners could easily pay for it via the advertising market they would generate.
I hope the funding, which goes into Radio1, isn’t being used to support an otherwise large and unnecessary layer of grateful lefties, in palatial BBC comfort, to stop them having to work for a living.
And in return for such largesse, I hope these lefties aren’t then broadcasting the continuous message, to all of Radio1’s impressionable younger listeners, that the state is wonderful, in all of its great and holy facets.
I should coco.
And, more relevantly, when will they get rid of Sara bleeding idiot Cox from the breakfast show. I like having radio 1 on – their morning news breaks are quick and sensibly spaced, and I get to hear the occassional new music I like. But in return I have to put up with filth in a silly voice. Mon dieu, Evans was better….
The only plus is when she’s away. X hundred thousand pounds of license fee thrown away…
Yes, Sarah Cox is easy on the eyes but hard on the ears.
Is that why she’s on radio? It must be an egalitarian conspiracy by the BBC to thwart her natural talents.
I’m a bit baffled where all the socialist intellectuals are supposed to be employed at Radio 1.
Radio 1 the flagship? I always thought Radio 4 had that acolade?
I find, to my distress, Radio 2 more closely matches my music tastes.
If I have to listen to Madonna’s ‘Hollywood’ one more frikkin time…
I pay my taxes for this?
I have to say, whether or not you agree with the general BBC remit, radio 1 has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Why bother, when you have freedom from the demands of advertisers, to stick so closely to ‘what the commercial stations would play, plus the occasional new band’?
Perhaps they have to have a certain size of audience in order to justify their existance, but perversely they then end up as carbon-copies (minus the ads) of commercial stations, negating any point! There are a few specialist shows at night which are worthwhile, & wouldn’t be found anywhere else, but there should be a hell of a lot more. Bring back the days when John Peel was on daily, & you could hear painful noise music at 8PM!
The rest of the BBC stations seem to fulful their remit quite well, presenting a range of things you wouldn’t otherwise hear (well, unless the airwaves genuinely got liberalized… grr!).
‘Couleur 3’ in Switzerland (another state-run radio station, catering for youth market) used to strike me in the 80s as how it should be done; very listenable, but veering away from the charts… 1/2 the time even when they played a charty record, it’d be an album track that someone at the station happened to like, rather than whatever single the record label were trying to push at the time. Sadly, these days seem to be gone; their playlists seem a lot more conventional, although it reverts to form on weekends/evenings.
I’m embarrassed to say though, radio 2 & 3 seem to have been far more to my taste recently, ‘specially with the “listen again” online feature allowing late-night radio listening during the day! 🙂
Radio 1 does give you John Peel (one of my multi-media highlights was being name-checked on his show (kinda…)). There’s stuff on there you don’t get on commercial radio, and if they didn’t burn cash on DJs I might think it worth it to avoid the irritating ads on local commercial stuff. Not very libertarian, but given the high penetration in my age-group, it’s effectively subscription radio…
So: day times seems to serve no public service purpose, and could only really be justified by “stretching” the musical range a little.
At night, they have a lot of variety that doesn’t get served on individual stations (though in London, or on Digital, you could get it over many stations).