Radio
Out of step
Michael Vestey
C Everybody's waiting for Louise,' said Kirsty Young on her Talk Radio breakfast show last Thursday. 'This morning, we're all waiting to hear Louise Woodward speak.' How many of us were not waiting for Louise, I wondered. The country must be full of people who had more pressing things on their mind; I suspect we might even be in a majority. We could form a society: Not Waiting for Louise, or NWL.
Not for the first time have I found myself completely out of step with what the media wants me to take an interest in. Perhaps the sort of people who regularly listen to Young's show were waiting for the voice of Louise at her press conference at Manch- ester Airport but I doubt it. Young had almost whipped herself into a frenzy for two hours trailing the live news conference. In a few minutes we'll be hearing her, she kept saying, only to find that there was a delay. I was hoping nine o'clock would come and we would miss it but, no, finally we heard Louise after an enjoyably ratty exchange between her MP and an aggres- sive Scottish tabloid reporter.
I was listening to Talk Radio because it's about to change hands, indeed, might well have done by the time this column is pub- lished. Kelvin MacKenzie, the former Sun editor, is in a consortium bidding for the station, and the present management is also interested in a buy-out. When we hear MacKenzie's name an instinctive shudder passes through us but that would not neces- sarily be the correct response. I do not believe he would be foolish enough to take the station down-market because it's already been there and failed. It has been succeeding recently because it has moved closer in tone to BBC Radio's Five Live and is now attracting more lucrative adver- tisements from companies such as Apple, Renault, BT and the Times.
It has a problem with its medium-wave reception. Where I live, Young's show sounds as if it's coming through a wind tun- nel, a problem compounded by the jingles, ads and promotions for its World Cup cov- erage. When they follow each other and the reception suddenly distorts one could be listening to a multiple pile-up on the MI. At the moment, it's almost impossible to form an opinion of Talk Radio because the station seems to be covering every sin- gle World Cup match and its frenzied trail- ers predominate. I have not the slightest interest in football and once again wonder if I am in a majority, a small majority per- haps. However, it might be working for Talk Radio as Radio Five Live listeners are those it wants: people aged between 20 and 45, I believe, with an interest in sport.
These are the listeners that everybody, including Radios Two and Four, seem to want in our youth-obsessed culture. Talk Radio, I notice, veers between the froth of programmes such as Young's and Tommy Boyd's in the afternoon to Scott Chisholm's often quite serious show at nine a.m. When Young's programme ended with Louise finally addressing the nation, I fully expect- ed more wall-to-wall Woodward, but Chisholm actually had something interest- ing to say. He opened his phone-in with an hour-long discussion about the conse- quences of the Asian economic crisis for Western economies. It was rather like entering a cathedral after a riot; some kind of sanity had been restored.
If Talk Radio were not the only indepen- dent speech network in the country none of this would matter. It's important for the commercial speech sector to succeed so that there is genuine choice and diversity. We shouldn't have to rely entirely on the narrow New Statesman tones of Radio Four and Five Live. Broadcasting House, an hour-long news and current affairs pro- gramme on Radio Four on Sunday morn- ings, is an example of the BBC's political correctness. Whenever I have listened to it, it has sounded like a private club for pro- gressives.
Last Sunday it fell into the media trap of elevating the particular to the general. A Scotsman, Edie Mair, the presenter, was discussing the English as a race with an American writer, Bill Buford, and a woman called Yasmin something-or-other who sounded vaguely Asian (I was driving at the time and couldn't make notes). Yasmin wanted more indoctrination of four-year- olds against racism. Personally, I think they should be educated first but that did not appear to be her priority.
The peg for this discussion was the group of English football morons currently terror- ising France. Mair and company seemed to think that this was a reflection of the English as a whole, as if somehow we are all football hooligans at heart, a warlike race bent on beating up Tunisians whenev- er we feel the mood coming on. There was much gloating by Yasmin and Mair over the so-called demoralisation of the English and the usual ignorant confusion between patriotism and nationalism. They quoted George Orwell who wrote about a different age and who died nearly 50 years ago and managed to get him wrong. In fact, it was a mélange of all the familiar progressive plat- itudes and rubbish about nationhood and the English character that are always trot- ted out.
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