It's good to talk

Confessions of a broadcast journalist, number 257 - "I don't listen to enough Radio 4."   

Catching a slice of Today and later dosing off to the brilliantly simple, but (by 11.30pm) sadly soporific Today in Parliament, leaves a lot of undiscovered gems in between.   Scanning the Radio Times and making a mental note to i-Player that strangely enticing documentary which aired on Tuesday morning usually remains nothing more than an aspiration.   

That all says more about my own chaotic media consumption habits than it does about the appeal of Radio 4.   However, demographics dictate that, for many, speech radio is a format they will never explore.   Some of that untapped audience might simply find the concept itself unappealing, but others are undoubtedly put off by perhaps misguided notions about the character of the few outlets which provide the service.   For instance, when my A-Level English Language teacher declared, "Radio 4 makes me weep" [in its quality, I hasten to add], he was met with the bemused faces of a room full of 18-year-olds, not one of whom had ever dabbled in that part of the dial.

So it is both understandable and laudable that one of the stated aims of a new venture called British Public Radio is to bring quality speech radio to a new, younger audience.   By drawing fresh listeners into the concept as a whole, all providers should, in theory, benefit.   Naturally, for a service proposing to attract a younger audience, the founders of BPL are promising to utilise social networks to target listeners' specific interests.   Reassuringly, for the linear luddites amongst us, there is also going to be a traditional slate of scheduled programming.   

Whilst clearly not targeting the core Radio 4 audience, the new service would necessarily provide some direct competition for the BBC network.   BPL is not proposing to aim exclusively for the younger demographic and, if the content is good enough, the station would no doubt hope to attract speech radio aficionados from across the spectrum.   The undoubted benefits of plurality in television news would be brought to full-service speech radio for the first time.

The upbeat nature of the planned service is matched by the positive pitch being made by its founders.   However, the group will have to overcome the problems faced by failed speech radio services at a national and local level.   Channel 4's foray into DAB speech radio was aborted back in 2008 before its official launch and local stations in Liverpool and Edinburgh have either closed or become skeletons of their original grand ambitions.  

As with all launches, there is much optimism about British Public Radio and the initial proposals suggest there is much to be optimistic about.   The group's plan is clearly an ambitious one and that can only be a good thing - because recent radio history demonstrates that delivering talk requires plenty of action. 

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.