Witch Hunt?

I have a confession to make.

In 1992, whilst doing the evening show on Christmas Eve on Radio City in Liverpool, I put a caller to air claiming it was Santa Claus. It wasn't. It was my Brother in Law... Phil, doing a rather bad impression of an old man with a white beard, carrying lots of presents.

If I was at the BBC right now, I might well have a taxi on its way to take me home... forever!

The "fake callers" scandal goes on.. and on... and on! Today, another incident has come to light! According to the BBC...

"A pre-recorded section of Radio 1's Jo Whiley Show on April 20, 2006 featured a phone competition in which a member of BBC staff posed as a caller from the audience. The incident came to light following the recent publication of further editorial breaches. A number of staff members have been disciplined. We would like to make clear that Jo Whiley was unaware that the caller was not a genuine member of the public. The BBC Trust's Editorial Standards Committee has been informed of this today."

Oh dear. How many more of these are going to rear their heads? I'm sure there are quite a few producers / production assistants who are having sleepless nights at the moment. Fess up and do the right thing, and you might get the "Leona McCambridge" treatment!

She was the unfortunate producer who was at the centre of one of the original "fake caller" scandal on BBC 6Music, having admitted to using production staff to pose as a caller. 6Music Director of Programmes, Ric Blaxill, fell on his sword shortly after Leona was given her marching orders.

So where does this leave us? Is the relationship between a radio station and a listener irrevocably damaged... regardless of station? Does it affect the whole industry in the UK?

One of the real issues is the fine line between creating "radio theatre" and conning the audience. It's probably OK to say "I'm opening the golden envelope now..." when you haven't got an envelope in the studio, let alone a gold one! But asking people to call in without a hope in hell of getting on the air, coz the show's pre-recorded is probably pushing it.

So where is the line?

If you record a session on a Friday, and go on the air on Saturday morning and say... "we've got Band X live in the studio to play us some songs" and present them 'as live'... is that conning the audience? Having the band there live is infinitely more preferable than saying "we recorded this yesterday". But is it conning the audience?

But where does this end? If you record a call and edit it a bit before putting it on air.... is that also unfair?

Personally, I think a degree of theatre is OK. When you're actively involved in deception (i.e. call now to win) knowing that the audience are being taken for a ride, then you probably need to ask yourself 'why?'.

It's fair to say that these "smoke and mirror" tactics have been going on for as long as radio itself, not only in the BBC, but in commercial radio too. Because of the BBC's status and responsibility, it's having to air it's dirty laundry in public... but I'm sure the editorial guidelines within most commercial groups are being tightened up as we speak.

I bumped into Jenny Abramsky (BBC Audio and Music supremo) at a radio conference in Oslo recently and we talked about the current spate of BBC confessions. I admit to feeling rather bad for her at the moment, as she's no doubt going to face some awkward questions about the editorial integrity of the networks, and it's not really her fault!

So what's the solution? I believe this current witch-hunt within the BBC is counter productive. It continues to undermine the trust between listener and broadcaster. We know that quite a but of this stuff has gone on... do we need every instance to be trawled over? I think enough is enough. Let's call time on this. You can be sure that the BBC is having to be 'whiter than white' from now on and I'm certain lessons have been learnt.

And the commercial sector can be glad that the spotlight has not shone in its direction with the same ferocity.

Most radio stations, BBC or commercial, have probably not been involved seriously dodgy practises... but you can bet that any producer will think twice about calling a mate to help out on a pre-record now!

"Radio 1 - Established 1967"

Every now and again, a bit of programming comes along that makes you as a radio professional (well - professional most of the time!), appreciate the time and effort that has gone into the planning and production.

This month BBC Radio 1 celebrate 40 years of broadcasting, and it would practically against British law to ignore such a milestone in radio. So, the rather smart people at the BBC got together and worked out how they were going to celebrate this. The key challenge was for them to ensure that when they looked back over their shoulder, they didn't descend into a "retro mush-fest". Things were very different in the world of radio in 1997, let alone 1967 (when I of course wasn't born... but I've heard the tapes!)

"Radio 1... Established 1967" is the sub-brand that has been created to house all things referring to the last 40 years, and instantly they're onto a winner. The "Established - insert year here" idea has worked for lots of brands... jeans, whisky, trainers, pizza restaurants!! It has a certain cool about it, without reminding us of the Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper every time we hear it.

The on-air idents really print well and the sense of heritage around the station cuts through, particularly with the use of the old jingles etc... More importantly, the sub-brand it gives the station permission to do lots of things that provide programming and musical surprises across the output.

There are a couple of gems. The 9pm 'Legends' show, where a music star picks some of their favourite songs from the last 40 years has already delivered some great radio... with Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl... and we've got loads more to go! Hearing Macca play Fred Astaire followed by The Sex Pistols was certainly extreme variety, but worked because of the "wrapping" around it.

The decision to revisit the "Golden Hour" - that classic 'guess the year' format, has meant Chris Moyles has been enjoying himself rather too much every morning, particularly when he gets to play Nik Kershaw and Duran Duran! And don't even start on all the old jingles he gets to play. He's having a the closest you can get to a "radio hard on" every morning!! But - hey... it sounds good, so why not!

And the 40 artists recording 40 cover versions from the last 40 years is brilliant. 'Toxic' done by Hard Fi, 'Teenage Dirtbag' done by Girls Aloud etc etc. I could go on!

What Radio 1 have done in creating their "Established 1967" series of programmes and features is a demonstration of a strong concept being planned really well in advance with great production values and great branding, plus the whole station getting behind it in a big way. (Of course having a budget of over £17 Million pounds a year means you can throw a decent amount of resource at it... so you'd hope the output was of high quality!! But let's not go there...)

The point is that any station can plan well in advance and create stand out programming given the right excuse. If your station is only 5 years old, you could celebrate that. If you want to create the most exciting Christmas schedule ever, you can do that. If you want the New Year to be all about live music, you can do that.

The key is planning.

Plan ahead as much as you can and see how far you can take your creativity.

But, at the risk of sounding sycophantic, well done Radio 1. A good bit of radio.

"To Network or not To Network... that is the question"

There's been a flurry of activity in the networking world of late. Maybe it's the season for it.

First, Guardian Media Group announced that they are networking Mark Goodier's show across the majority of their 'Smooth Radio' stations. Then GCap Media trumpeted the arrival of Ryan Seacrest to the One Network with the promise of an entertainment show like no other on a Sunday morning.

For programmers, the options to "import" programming from elsewhere has always been there. I remember the exciting task of having to be the T/O for "Rick Dees Weekly Top 40" on Radio City in Liverpool on a Sunday evening... loading up the 1/4 inch tapes... and hoping I was playing them in the right order. Invariably listeners got to hear the Top 10 during the first hour and numbers 25 - 40 during the last hour, but no-one seemed to mind that much. The point was that there was "An American on the radio in Liverpool... WOW!"

Does having a big name on you radio station do anything for listeners? What do they think of these networked shows? Do they care that it's not local?

Essentially we're dealing with 2 different things here. The 'networking' of live shows, and syndicated programmes, but both have a commonality.

The debate about networking seems to have died down a little of late. The harsh economic factors and the economies of scale that networking brings seems to have won the argument... for the time being. Many GCap and EMAP stations both have networked shows across evenings and countless smaller groups send out programming from a central hub. Kiss do it across certain daytime programmes and now Smooth. I've no doubt that adding Mark Goodier to a line-up of a local station is a smart idea. His show is really starting to sound good of late, and I'm sure the listeners will appreciate having him on their 'local' station. Do they care he's not sitting in their town or city? Probably not.

And what about getting a big American star to spurt forth inconsequential entertainment froth on a Sunday morning? Will it be better than what was on there in the first place? Probably... yes.

Listeners understand a global perspective more than ever. They don't really care that their local show, broadcast 10 miles down the road, is followed by a show that was made 10,000 miles away. As long as it's relevant to them and engaging to listen to. The internet has made the world a much smaller place and their is no longer a 'Wow' factor with 'Americans on the radio' or programming that has been sourced elsewhere. People are accoustomed to media from all sorts of sources. It's part of their media-scape now.

However, with every silver lining, there is a cloud.

Evening shows in UK local radio used to be the breeding ground for lots of great talent, who were able to try out their zany style of radio to an audience of 15 year olds, who inevitably would be the morning radio consumers of tomorrow. Too much networking lessens the chance of some of these guys getting exposure.

"Yes - but there are far more stations for them to work on now" I hear you cry! Sure, but it's much harder to get a break doing the evening show on Radio Scrot in Bollockshire than it was to get a break doing the evening show on a station like Radio City in the 90's.

I hope we find a balance in the UK between enough local programming and good quality, well produced 'imported' shows. I'm confident we will.

And I look forward to tuning in to Mark Goodier's networked offering just to remind myself that "... he' the man who's got the best music... Mark Goodier... Mark Goodier... wha-ooo..." etc etc...

The Heroes of RAJAR - Qtr 2 2007

As the dust settles on another batch of RAJAR press releases and UK radio stations draw up the list of people to promote... or fire, it's time to pick out the villains and heroes... and no, not the flying senator, or indestructible cheerleader types.

There were a few main stories that are worthy of mention.

Kiss overtake Capital
Congratulations to the guys at Kiss, who have finally caught up with Capital. We've certainly discussed the possibility of them catching Capital before on this blog, and now it's happened. With Kiss at a 4.5% reach and Capital dropping to 4.1% and the reach neck and neck at 1.51 Million, there were probably two very different meetings taking place at the respective stations on RAJAR evening last week.

Kiss's offering continues to sound fresh and connected to young London and the new morning show with Rickie and Melvin is starting to take root. For me, Capital's issue is not with the execution of the format. They've gone young and the product sounds fine. No, it's the strategy that I find difficult to understand. Capital seem to have left Heart and Magic to slug it out at the top, while settling for trying to pick up Radio 1, Kiss and Xfm listeners along the way. The move is bold... but I can't help thinking it won't get you to Number 1 in London again. The team in Leicester Square have a real battle on and I hope Steve Orchard's words of August 2006 where he the "believed the station had hit rock bottom", don't get rolled out too much over the next few weeks. The city certainly gave GCap a good kicking, with quotes like "GCap has marketed Capital in this quarter, so there can be no excuses for these results!" Ouch!

The Jazz... Nice!
Debuting with 334,000 listeners is a pretty nice job! Taking a listen to the station, the formula is the same as has been applied to Classic FM; take a specialist music genre, and make it as accessible to as many people as possible. Classic FM took the fear out of listening to classical music... and The Jazz will do the same for Jazz.

More for Moyles
If I was sitting in GCap Towers... or even EMAP towers for that reason, I'd find the biggest pot of money I could lay my hands on and send it all to Chris Moyles on the condition that he came to a daily show for the network I was running. (Believe me... it's been thought of!) His show goes from strength to strength and is testament to hard work, good production and 'letting the talent get on with it'. With 7.26 Million listeners a week, he can play his "Saviour of Radio 1" jingle as much as he wants now!

The Future is... Digital
More people are listening to radio and more are using digital technologies to do this. 2 Million 15-24's listen on mobile phones and almost 13% of total listening by all adults is now done on either DAB, DTV or the internet. Let's compare this figure in 12 months time to see the continued growth, and then factor in the Channel 4 effect too!

So, as ever... always something interesting to mull over. Now if only we knew someone who could paint the radio future... Hmmm... I wonder...

Forgive Me Father...

"Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been 28 days since my last blog."

The combination of summer holidays, extremes of weather, a glut of foreign trips and 2 small children, meant that I quickly developed a back-blog!

There has been so much to write about, instead of long, well thought out articles (some of the time, anyway!) here is a selection of topics from the last 28 days, worthy of greater discussion, but limited to a short comment! In UK news...

RAJAR's here again

More squabbling predicted for tomorrow and a big prize for the best excuse!

GCap fined for phone in competition

There must be a lot of nervous programmers currently hoping that the rather dodgy practises that have blighted commercial radio for many years are not exposed!

The new national UK Gold network is called...

Erm... "Gold". A missed opportunity and lack of creative vision? Hmmm...

And general topics...

Spend time with your jocks

Programme Directors get caught up in all sorts of bollocks! If it means you spend less time with your presetners, try and put a stop to it!!

Don't let the competition change your strategy

If a competitor sharpens up a bit and start to use a few new tricks, don't let this change your focus or even worse, your strategy. If what you're doing works, keep doing it. Sure, tweak at the edges, but don't knee-jerk.

If you commission research, and pay for it... and it looks good... use it!

Don't buy research that you belive in, and then if the results don't quite match up to what you expect, ignore it! Yes, bad research will give you bad results... but if it looks good, resist the temptation to be selective!

Wow. It's a lot easier this way!

There we go. I feel my visit to the 'Blog Confessional' has got a few things off my chest.

Thank you Father.

The Radio Festival - presents "Radio Erectus"

It takes about week to absorb the vast amount of discussion, debate and dissection of radio that the Radio Academy's annual Radio Festival spews out.

So what did we learn?

Well without doing a session by session analysis, (which would be even duller than the 'DAB Audio Quality' session many of us endured) a few key themes seemed to emerge from the mist.

In no particular order...

Channel 4's entry into radio is a good thing
Commercial radio in the UK needs a extra shot of credibility in it's arm, and a broadcaster with 25 years track record of creativity, innovation and risk-taking can only improve the image of the sector and provide the BBC with even more robust competition in some key areas. Channel 4 Radio, E4 Radio and Pure4 all promise to be great stations and the return of Talk Radio to the multiplex, as well as Sky News Radio are welcome additions to UK's radioscape.

Digital Migration is thorny subject
Turing off AM and FM is a divisive issue. Many large broadcasters want it to happen pretty quickly. Smaller broadcasters are concerned they haven't secured carriage on DAB and never will. A 2 tired system of radio is going to create confusion for listeners , but the simulcasting costs for radio stations are prohibitive in the long term. Ofcom have promised to have a look at it! But drawing a roadmap for the future that everyone agrees on looks like being a tricky task. Radio is different to TV, so we can't just follow the Digital TV migration model... but likewise we need to ensure that radio is not the 'white elephant' medium that is outdated, out of touch and out of favour.

Commercial Radio has extended the hand of friendship to the BBC
The rivalry is fierce. The war of words erupts every quarter. The BBC versus the commercial sector? "Why can't we live together...?" asked Timmy Thomas in the rather excellent song from 1974? It seems Andrew Harrison, the new CEO of RadioCentre - commercial radio's trade body, had been listening to this tune for some time prior to penning his speech. The theme was something along the lines of 'working together for the greater good of the medium'. While there are many areas that seemed to make sense, eliminating pirates, looking at Digital Migration together etc... there were a few areas which raised an eyebrow! Collaborating on content is a nice idea... so you get a commercial radio version and BBC version. Somehow, I can't see the BBC giving up exclusivity on a lot of the areas of music they cover! But the spirit of the message was a positive one and hopefully the BBC understands the importance of a healthy commercial sector. The question is "how healthy" does commercial radio want the BBC to be?

'Non-Linear Radio' is important for everyone
There's been a podcasting session at The Radio Festival since the dawn of... well... the pod! This year it felt different. We heard from amateurs using podcasts as marketing. We heard from Danny Baker who does a daily show, which may make him a lot of money in the future! And we heard from practically every corner of the industry of the importance of making radio available to listeners whenever they wanted it. Podcasting is coming of age and stations without a strategy may well be left behind. Listen again, downloading shows and podcasts must now be viewed as core activity, and not as something on the periphery.

Of course, there were plenty of sessions which provided light relief. Russell Brand is a true personality who walks the fine line between genius and madness; Jeremy Vine is about as multi-media as you can get.... Is there anything he can't do well?; And Andy Parfitt has been spending a disproportionate amount of his time with teenagers! (But as he's the Beeb's "Teen Tsar", then that's OK!)

UK radio is at a watershed moment in its evolution. It will either miss the Darwinian boat and return to the primeval media swamp as some sort of lizard like creature which didn't quite manage to make it to dry land. Or, it will adapt to it's new surroundings, learn how to survive in the changing climate and eventually walk upright. 'Radio Erectus' could be on it's way!!

It's Festival Time!

So it's off to Cambridge for the annual gathering of the 'good, bad and very ugly' of UK radio. Yes - it festival time folks!

The word 'Festival' gives the impression of colourful jugglers, fire eaters, vegetable growing contests and a round of Miss Shropshire, but thankfully it's a much more sedate affair. Well... most of it is.

Lots of discussion will inevitably focus on Channel 4 Radio and their new little 'National DAB Multiplex' toy that they'll start to play with soon. Also, what's this Global Radio thing all about and what are their plans and ambitions?

I'm certain the bars of Cambridge will be awash with idle gossip, which of course I'll ignore, and just bring you the facts that matter!

And once the bandwagon rolls out of Cambridge and the expense accounts have taken a battering, I'll digest the words of wisdom and bring you the salient points for us all to debate!