I am pretty sure that I can’t be the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion it is never worth checking your emails at the weekend. Nobody important ever writes to you on Saturday and Sunday, which is why you should send important emails as close to nine o’clock in the morning as possible to ensure that the recipient finds it at the top of the inbox first thing on Monday morning. However, while at the studio yesterday I did that very thing while I was preparing the show as I needed to find a bit of information that I knew was in an email. Waiting for me was an email from BBC Radio Nottingham regarding a pitch that I had made a little while ago.

Some time ago I had an idea for a radio series that due to its nature was best suited for BBC Nottingham, and I emailed the presenter that would best be able to help. Today he replied to my email, and although he thought my idea a good one he pointed out that local BBC stations no longer have room for local content beyond their daytime shows, (you may have noticed that local BBC stations switches over to Radio Five Live at night to save money). This kind of thinking is absolutely disastrous to local radio, and indeed radio in general because radio needs innovators, it needs ideas, and it needs people to invent. Late night local radio used to be where you could find the phone in programmes, and where there’s phone in programmes there are nutters with ill-informed opinions. There are also people like myself who used to ring these programmes pretending to be a nutter to see how far I could push the poor presenter. In fact I once was so prolific a prank caller that my phone number (this was in the days before mobiles) was blocked by one station.

If you’ve ever been in a taxi you’ll know that Capital FM and Smooth Radio are the cabbie’s choice of station, and that these stations only own a small handful of CDs. There is nothing creative about local commercial radio and the presenters only have to turn up. When Capital Radio was a proper local station for London it was a place for creativity; Kenny Everett is the best example of a true radio innovator who quite simply would not be able to find a mainstream radio station to accommodate him these days, so he would have to either make podcasts (which let’s face it would be works of art) or go to Internet radio where he would be allowed to get on with it. Alexei Sayle is another one, his Capital show Alexei Sayle and The Fish People from 1981 wouldn’t get commissioned by a commercial radio station today, yet it remains an underground favourite with the odd clip on YouTube and various corners of the Internet.  

You could of course argue that local radio isn’t as relevant today as it once was. Back when Kenny Everett and Alexei Sayle were working on Capital you could only hear it in London, and someone on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester might have been treated like a superstar when walking through the city centre but would be just another face in the crowd in Liverpool where everyone was too busy spotting the Radio City DJ popping into the newsagents for a packet of fags. I was lucky enough to be living in Southend On Sea when Ricky Gervais was doing his Saturday afternoon show on XFM (back when XFM was a decent station). XFM was a London station that could reach to the Essex coast, but there wasn’t another way. Digital radio was just starting up, as was the availability of listening on the Internet, but way back in 2000 they weren’t that common (just as any programme on Sky during the first couple of years of broadcast will have only played to about ten people). The concept of local radio has eroded a little due to the fact that all FM stations are online fighting for attention from Internet radio. We presenters on Internet radio are lucky compared to our FM counterparts, as more of us are able to dictate what we play on our shows. Neither NottinghamLIVE nor The Sunday Alternative get any interference from management telling us what we can and can’t play which in turn makes our shows rather important. We get interference from management, but nothing to do with the music.

I happen to think that local media is important, which is why it is a crying shame that regional identity is eroding away in favour of big organisations. Capital Radio’s switch to national bland radio station Capital FM is a perfect example of what happens when you let the big guys trample through. It’s the same thing that is happening on the high street in a way; customer service and knowledgeable staff has been replaced by supermarkets staffed by idiots and bakeries have been replaced by Greggs, where everything is baked in a warehouse and warmed up in the shop.

With very little local brand identity in radio, local newspapers turning into pamphlets, and local television regions becoming bigger (Central Television and BBC East Midlands covering Leicester and Derby in addition to Nottingham for example), local media is gradually turning into a media version of Greggs; everything baked in a warehouse and warmed up in the shop.

NB: The radio pitch will now go ahead as a podcast.

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