All Talk

It used to be one of the great mysteries of U.K. radio - why can't local talk stations be commercially viable?   The demise of Edinburgh's Talk 107 a year ago and the ever-shifting format of City Talk 105.9 in Liverpool have provided a rather obvious answer to that poser - such services are simply too costly to sustain in view of the number of listeners they attract.

Outside of the capital, there doesn't appear to be a successful business model for an all speech local radio format.   After just over a year on air, City Talk applied for and was granted permission to introduce a 50/50 speech/music split outside of peaktime.   Yet within six months of implementing that change, they were back at the door of the regulator and now even bigger changes are afoot.   The station attracts around 50,000 listeners per week, but its share is a meagre 1% - to justify the cost of its operation, a talk station would probably have to equal or even out-perform the heritage ILR station in the area.   Sadly, it always seemed a big ask.

Whatever the reasons for the difficulties experienced by recent attempts at all-talk formats, the inherent lack of local commercial speech dates back nearly twenty years - in fact to the demise of another station bearing the name City Talk.   When the FM and AM frequencies of the early independent local radio stations began to broadcast separate programmes in the late 1980s, most operators rolled out an oldies service on medium wave.   Radio City, however, bravely went for the more daring option of a speech station - City Talk 1548AM.   Although it broadcast for only twelve hours each weekday, it was a class act and will almost certainly have required levels of investment which would make today's commercial groups balk.   Even with far less competition and so a much higher audience share, the station still didn't pay its way and the early 1990s recession is generally thought to have brought about its demise in 1991.   A valiant effort, nonetheless.

There is a key link between this era of local radio evolution and the fate of local talk stations today.   Radio City Gold, the station which rose out of the ashes of the original City Talk, retained a high level of speech content - full-length news programmes, discussion features within daytime programmes and the usual phone-ins.   Meanwhile, even licencees which hadn't gone down the talk route, still had speech quotas (mostly in terms of extended news bulletins) to adhere to - and these were largely fulfilled on their AM stations.   For a short time in the early 1990s, the U.K. had found its model for commercial speech.   It wasn't all-talk, because maybe that format was never going to be viable on a local level - but it was meaningful and largely popular speech-based local radio.

Unfortunately, the recently-formed Radio Authority soon paved the way for the erosion of this embryonic model before it had time to develop.   Mergers and format changes soon saw speech requirements jettisoned in favour of the quasi-national networks which we know and, according to listening figures, don't really love today.   The regulator rolled over at almost every request.   Meanwhile, unrealistic speech quotas were being forced onto applicants for the new small-scale licences of the late 1990s, which had neither the resources nor the editorial area to justify them.

The opportunity to make speech an integral part of strong local AM stations was missed.     Had it been taken, these stations might today have been a worthwhile competitor to BBC local radio.   They might even have been driving the migration of an important sector of the audience to digital radio - and we almost certainly wouldn't have witnessed two brave, but ultimately aborted attempts at all-talk local radio.         

Head-to-head hype?

The Presidential-style debates which have threatened to cross the Atlantic for so long will finally put in an appearance in the U.K. during next year's General Election campaign.   It was confirmed today that the three main party leaders will all take part in a trio of a ninety-minute shows to be broadcast by the BBC, ITV and Sky.

The general consensus amongst politicians and commentators seems to be that this heralds a victory for democracy.   To some extent, that will undoubtedly be true - but I'm not altogether convinced that such occasions represent the zenith of democratic debate.  

Surely there is an inherent danger that the theatre of the occasion will take over and very little will be revealed in the way of detailed policy.   The inadequacies of the only comparable event - Prime Minister's Questions - will be magnified.   It will be all soundbites and pseudo anger.   Factor into the equation the heightened level of interest in the occasion when compared with the average PMQs and you are soon confronted with another problem.   The leaders will be so hamstrung by the fear of having their words and every nuance of their performance analysed to the nth degree that they will be more reluctant than usual to deal in the currency of candour.

The issue of fairness to nationalist parties was quickly raised and the suggestion is that there might be other debates scheduled in the nations involving the leaders of the parties in the devolved assemblies.   However, that doesn't address a related issue - namely, the fact that three-way debates like this inevitably skew the political debate in favour of the three main parties.   That seems a shame in an election when minority parties might be expected to put in a strong showing - but it was ever thus.

For me, the pre-election coverage in 2005 had the potential to be far more illuminating than anything proposed for next year.   The one-on-one leadership interviews conducted by Paxman for Newsnight and Jonathan Dimbleby for ITV boasted the kind of forensic interrogation of our political leaders that we only really get during an election campaign.   For some reason, this style of political programme seems to have fallen out of favour over the past five years.

The BBC ditched "On The Record" in the early 2000s for a more package-based affair in "The Politics Show."   Meanwhile, ITV turned Jonathan Dimbleby's one hour, one minister discussion into a sofa-based melting pot which did neither the presenter nor the audience any favours.   When Dimbleby left soon after, ITV attempted a return to the highbrow with Andrew Rawnsley fronting "The Sunday Edition", but this was scheduled into oblivion before the channel decided to jettison its national political programming altogether.   An unwise move for many reasons, not least because they don't now have a seasoned political heavyweight to front their version of leaders debate - luckily for them,  Alistair Stewart is more than up to the job.   Channel Four, inexplicably, has not scheduled a regular political programme for more than a decade.

As for next year's debates, I might be pleasantly surprised by the way in which they engage with and mobilise a mass audience.   Yet even if they succeed on that level, will the viewing public be any better informed by the time credits begin to roll?

Chequing out

This week, another once reassuringly familiar aspect of our daily lives has been deemed too outdated to be allowed to encroach too far into the twenty-first century.   The cheque is next up to be written into history.

At the behest of a usually faceless committee going under the moniker the Payments Council, this three centuries' old method of payment will become a relic as of 2018.   I use the term "usually faceless," because, on the day of the announcement, a representative from the organisation hawked himself around various media outlets to tell us all how little we use cheques these days.   Granted, their use has more than halved from a peak in 1990, but something about this method of payment still prompts us to write four million of them a day.

The Payments Council admits there are certain situations in which only a cheque will do - and says an alternative will have to be developed in the next few years.   If, like me, you're asking why we need a safe, easy alternative to the cheque when we have, er, the cheque, then the answer is simple - cost.   It costs our cash-strapped banks £1 to process cheques (in a delightfully quaint process which involves all cheques being gathered and inspected in London),  but only a quarter of that to administer a chip and pin payment.

Self-evidently, debit and, more worryingly, credit cards are a more convenient method of payment in many instances than the cheque.   The days of having to register your intention to use one of these new-fangled plastic cards before you did your weekly shop at the supermarket (and I'm sure I haven't imagined that) are long gone.   So I'm not suggesting we retain expensive clearing apparatus when only a couple of octogenarians in Western Super Mare are still writing them - but why can't the consumer decide if and when they want to abandon the cheque altogether?   Apparently, in these situations, bodies like the Payments Council bear a responsibility to "manage decline."   Is that manage, or hasten?   

Granadaland goes digital

It feels like it's been talked about for years.   Ah, right - it has.

The much-vaunted digital switchover came to Granadaland this morning and sixty years of broadcasting tradition were wiped out at the flick of a switch (probably).   Sadly, but predictably, neither the public-funded BBC nor the once federal ITV saw fit to mark the occasion with any kind of "farewell to analogue" special.   Granted, that sounds horrendously dull, but done well, it could have been an interesting and fitting look back at television's halcyon days.

For those days are now surely gone.   There's always the danger of a rose-tinted view of television from days of yore, but the plethora of choice heralded by digital is in no way proportional to quality.   Remember when television was just about modern enough to be good, but still remained a comforting, genuinely exciting presence in the corner of the living room?   It was probably around the mid-1980s, when we had four whole channels to choose from and the medium was a cohesive, homogenising force - while still being quaint enough not to broadcast for much of the day.   Now, it just feels like everything's been done before - only better.

As for the demise of Ceefax/Teletext, it's an insult that these once innovative (and still undeniably useful and used) services have been replaced by digital text, a set up so woefully inadequate as not to be worthy of the name.   The rectilinear graphics of our youth could have survived into the digital age - but nobody cared enough to save them.

Today, more than usual, I feel like an analogue man in digital times.