PRESS AND RADIO
Local difficulties
BILL GRUNDY
Last Saturday didn't just see the end of the Third Programme. It saw the start of some- thing that one way or another could affect a lot of newspapers. For 4 April was the beginning of the local radio era in this country. Of course we've had half a dozen local radio stations for a year or two now, but they've been very much in the nature of an experiment. The experiment having been hailed as a success—largely, I fear, by those working in it, not by the listeners it was directed at—those geniuses who run the BBC these days have decided that we're going to have another score or more of them inflicted on us, and then more, and still more. Which is why last Saturday, the morning after the regions had died the night before, is the real starting date of local radio.
Unfortunately the planners have omitted to provide the new stations with money. Having myself long endured being told by managements that you don't need money to make good programmes, I am somewhat sceptical about the BBC'S belief that local radio can somehow get by on nowt. A pro- ducer I was talking to this week said he has been told that his chore will be to produce a half-hour magazine programme a day, but that he will be given precisely no money at all with which to pay contributors. People are presumably expected to drop whatever they're doing and rush round to their friendly, neighbourhood radio station at the ring of a telephone. Well, some may do. More may not.
What this no-money lark means, as exist- ing local radio has already shown, is that quality tends to disappear. Interviews are not conducted by good professionals. They're conducted by whoever will do it for the odd guinea, or even less. Interviews are run not for only as long as they are worth, but for as long as can be got out of them, with every cough, spit and blemish left in because that way you get length, and if you're going to produce eight hours of local radio a day, as some stations are doing or hoping to, you need every second you can get out of every item you can get.
Now the relevance of all this to the fate of certain newspapers isn't really far to seek. When people hear just how awful local radio can be (and will be, is what I'm saying), yet another stick will be handed to the com- mercial radio lobby with which to belabour the BBC'S existing monopoly of sound broad- casting. As it is fairly certain that the Tories will attempt to bring in commercial radio as soon as they can after winning a general election, the sheer boring quality of the BBC'S local contributions can only reinforce them in their intention. It could also strengthen them by swinging over the doubt- fuls who, once they have heard what the Corporation is doing, not unnaturally will assume that commercial couldn't be worse and conceivably could be very much better.
All of which means that the likelihood of the introduction of commercial stations is increased and the date of that introduction may be sooner than even optimists like Mr Hughie 'Good people' Green think is at present possible. Which brings us at last to local newspapers. As long ago as the summer of 1968, the then Postmaster-General, Mr Roy Mason, told Mr Roy Roebuck, who is a member of the National Union of Journal-
ists, as well as a member of Parliament, that 'the House will realise that if local commercial radio begins on any scale at all it would knock provincial newspapers side- ways'. It doesn't seem to me that the situa- tion has changed since; indeed, the accuracy of Mr Mason's forecast may be judged by the report that in the Isle of Man the Gas and Electricity boards have withdrawn their advertising from the local paper and have transferred it all to the local radio station, Radio Manx, which is, of course, com- mercial. It's only one straw, I admit, but single straws can suffice to show which way the wind is blowing.
I said a few lines back that the situation doesn't seem to have changed much since Mr Mason's comment in the House. On re- flection it has; for the worse. Because there's another enemy that local papers have got to worry about at the moment—the growth of the give-away sheet. Now in the days when these things were appallingly written on appalling paper, they may have constituted no threat to a well-established local weekly. But give-aways are no longer run like that. These days the printing is good, the paper is better than the newsprint many locals use, they're full of interesting local articles, they use colour, and they give the advertiser a guarantee that they'll go through every letter box in the area they serve. More than that, a lot of them are run by Mr Rupert Mur- doch (whose name, by the way, has not appeared in this column for a month; is that some sort of a record?). His announced intentions in the Liverpool area with the Liverpool Observer, which combines four small give-aways he bought last year, made one or two people start wondering where the way out was.
I have no doubt that the better local papers could hold off the single-handed chal- lenge of the give-aways; for after all they contain, as the give-aways generally don't, that most interesting of all information, news and gossip about what's going on around where you live. But give-aways firing from one flank, and commercial radio attacking from the other! That's a different matter altogether. In military terms I understand it's called a salient, and I am told that it can be very unhealthy indeed. And it could be that the analogy is true enough for me to be able to predict a considerable number of casual- ties in the coming conflict. I hope not. But I fear so.
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