Prior to working in television I worked in radio for some years - both at BBC local and national commercial radio which was tremendously enjoyable to say the least. The buzz I got out of working on a live event - especially a big derby like Everton v Liverpool - was unparalleled. Back in the days (circa 1992) I started of working on a live Sunday sports programme across the North West airwaves. The audience was huge, the content was awesome, and the presenters and reporters now working at the likes of Sky Sports, ESPN, and the BBC.
To give you an example of the team who I was either working with, or who had worked at the radio station previously, the list reads like a who's who of sports broadcasting:
Ray Stubbs (ESPN), Marcus Buckland (Sky Sports), Rob Palmer (Sky Sports), Rob McCaffrey (Showtime Arabia), Eddie Hemmings (Sky Sports), Graham Beecroft (Talk Sport), Alan Parry (ESPN), Jonathan Legard (BBC Radio 5 Live), John Gwynne (Sky Sports), Ray French (BBC), Tim Caple (Eurosport), Kevin Keetings (IMG Media - world feed of the FA Premier League).
And THAT was just the station I worked for! On the commercial rival they also had Richard Keys (Sky Sports) and Clive Tyldesley (ITV Sport) - so as you can see it was a real hot-bed of talent and an unrivaled place to start a career in the broadcast industry.
Back when I started (aged 16!) I used to produce highlights packages for the Premier League games as well as for Rugby League - which was actually much more popular when you started to move out towards Lancashire. I did this by having three massive tape machines next to each other. Now anyone who has been working in radio for the past 10 years will never have seen or used these machines so to give you and idea this is what they look like: http://tinyurl.com/ydw3qyu
As you can see these are huge machines and I had the live feed, or feed from the stadium, on one machine. Then as soon as a goal was scored I switched over to using the second machine to record whilst using the third machine to compile my edit. It sounds complex but it wasn't once you got the hang of it. However in a computer-led world now the editing was painfully done through marking the edit point with a chinagraph pencil, and using razor-blades and tape to do the work. The amount of cuts on my fingers was huge and would have been a Health and Safety Executive's field day! But that was simply how it was done. Grafting long hours to produce a piece of audio which was listened to by hundreds of thousands. Literally.
OK, now what is the point to all this history and reminiscing, Ed? Well firstly it shows how much I love, and miss, the immediacy of live radio. The buzz to breaking stories whilst they happened, having CNN calling you up for the news so they can update the world, the big talking points of the day taking place on the show you were working on, and generally mucking in doing whatever needed to be done to get the show bigger audiences and deliver better content. So that's the background set - I love making and hearing great radio.
Nowadays, with the exception of the BBC locals, radio needs reshaping pretty badly. With the commercial stations providing less original content than ever before there are some real worries about the future of the medium. Take the London marketplace where I live and work where the main commercial radio stations (in no particular order) are Capital FM, Magic 105.4, Heart 106.2, and Smooth Radio. Now each of these radio stations offer a very tightly formatted format each with a relatively small playlist, lots of 'speed-links' and substantially less content than was catered for in previous years. The audiences are pretty stable and the top three tend to swap places every year so it's fairly safe to say that the audience pretty much like what they are given right now and have no complaints. So what's the problem Ed? They have a lot of radio with a small amount of songs, plenty of adverts, and the lack of local content means they could be anywhere in the UK - or even the world. So what? They keep listening so why shall we change? The old phrase "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" should apply, should it not Ed? I think we should look carefully at radio as a matter of real importance or I believe we will create huge damage to the heritage brand's as well as hemorrhaging huge number of their audience.
What I have personally witnessed from working in large offices is how the way people get their entertainment to get through their working day has changed. Years ago it was commonplace to have a radio in the office which in turn migrated to CD's being played in their desktop computers. Then came the killer ingredient to keep them going - iTunes. I have seen how personal iTunes collections have been put onto shared networks creating huge music libraries at their disposal. So where local radio has turned Heart not becoming a quasi-national brand in the past year alone with a playlist of a four to five hundred songs we now have the situation where the listener can choose their favourite music all day long by importing their own iTunes libraries onto their work PC's. Why put up with hearing Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol for the 10th time in a day when you can instead hear your new Manu Chao CD which never gets radio airplay anywhere in the UK. And this exact scenario is what I have witnessed take place. And the latest way to keep your workers happy comes courtesy of Spotify - a website which streams entire albums in superb quality with a 30" commercial inserted after every three tracks. It's like your ultimate radio station playing the music you want - albeit devoid of news, jingles, and pointless waffle.
Now I understand why a radio station will have a playlist of a tiny percentage of songs from the era - it's all down to the targetting and research but it's the lack of killer content that will be the downfall of the brands. The quality content coming out of both BBC Radio 1 and 2 is perhaps the only justification to publically fund the networks. But I wouldn't change a thing in the slightest - until there is are radio stations producing quality content on the same level of quality as the BBC let's keep funding them in this way. And I personally disagree with the very notion of a licence fee for our TV and radio stations.
I know there are a few commercial radio stations with quality content - LBC in London is a great example - but in the main it is the music-based stations which are the real offenders. So unless the commercial stations shape up their acts and work on the value of their brands their audience will slowly migrate over to iTunes and Spotify. And we all know how hard it is to regain trust in a tarnished brand too. In this online world we are fully immersed in I wonder whether commercial radio will last the next decade? Don't be silly...I doth jest here. I actually meant five years...which is a real shame.
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