Sports overkill
Michael Vestey
Awoman from Radio Five Live publicity telephoned and said with some urgency in her voice, 'Could we have your fax number? It's about Ian Wright.' Who's Ian Wright?' I growled as the call was rather inconvenient. 'The footballer,' she replied, clearly astonished that I didn't know. I had to tell her that football was not my thing. It seems that Wright was joining yet another new football show on a network already drenched by the game and where groin strains and torn hamstrings are beginning to take precedence over world news.
I loathe football though I appreciate that many people like it and if they can't see it on television will listen to commentaries and discussions about it on the radio. I have noticed recently, though, how it has come to dominate Five Live more than ever before. This might be because the network's controller, Bob Shennan, is a former head of sport and wishes to share his obsession with the rest of us. Not only is there coverage of matches but guests with no connection with the game are often asked during interviews which team they support, a maddening contrivance when you want to hear their views about something completely different. When some admit that they don't follow football they do so shamefacedly as if it were considered unthinkable.
Of course, Five Live is meant to be a sports and news network and in the past has largely succeeded in striking a balance between the two but of late there has been an imbalance and some listeners have been complaining to Feedback on Radio Four (Fridays). I hadn't realised that News Extra at 7 o'clock in the evenings had been dropped to make way for more football and other sports until I heard last week's Feedback. I occasionally caught News Extra when a major item of domestic or foreign
news was breaking and useful it was, particularly when in the car.
The Feedback presenter Roger Bolton pointed out to Shennan that many listeners in the south east are driving home at seven in the evening. On the night of the Peter Mandelson sacking all Bolton heard at that time was the two-minute bulletin on Radio Four and an interview with Peter Beardsley, a footballer I presume, previewing a match that wasn't due to start for half an hour. Shennan said that Drive, the early evening news and current affairs programme, had covered the story very well which indeed it had as I had listened to it. But that's not much use to those who'd been unable to hear it.
Shennan denied that he had changed anything in response to competition with talkSPORT, the commercial network that was once Talk Radio and which has switched almost entirely to sport. I don't believe this. The BBC is incapable of resisting this kind of temptation. I daresay Five Live lost some of its football-mad listeners to talkSPORT and since then the two networks have come to resemble each other: more social-affairs content in phone-ins and more football. Five Live is less tabloid in its approach and doesn't take advertising, of course, but it broadcasts irritating talkSPORT-type trails with jingles.
Shennan said that audience research had told him that fewer people listen at 7 o'clock for news than sport. It sounds like the dreaded focus groups again and he is clearly another controller who relies on them instead of his own instincts. On the other hand he might not possess any instincts about his audiences and programmes and might need to have such things explained to him. Seven weeks after it happened, I still receive angry letters and emails from readers about the mysterious ending of Andrew Neil's Five Live programme on Sunday mornings.
Radios Three and Four have made similar misjudgments about their listeners in recent years. There was a time when BBC controllers and producers knew their audiences and wouldn't have dreamt of consulting focus groups had they existed. There used to be a Radio Four programme called Profile which consisted of interviews with well-known people about their lives. As it was only 20 minutes long it was not particularly in-depth though often quite interesting. I think I did three altogether: the late oil mogul Armand Hammer, the only person I've shaken hands with who had once shaken hands with Lenin; Lord Deedes; and Simon Raven.
Then the great Birtian bureaucratisation began in earnest, control of Profile shifted to another department which wouldn't take ideas for programmes from outside and that was the end of that. So my advice to Shennan is to kick the focus groups into touch, stop copying talkSPORT and restore the balance between news and sport.
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