"Set radio free" begs radio person

People who listen to a lot of FM radio in Britain may think - those of them who have synapses which works - that the commercial sector has basically been left alone to do what it wants, chasing ratings and attempting to push just one boundary - that of how low the lowest common denominator can be.

Apparently, it's not like that at all. It's totally over-regulated, and caught in a straight-jacket of strict formats and promises of performance. So reckons Andrew Harrison, who leads a commercial radio trade group, RadioCentre.

So, he's not entirely impartial when he suggests that Ofcom should be told to instruct radio companies to stick to the promises they made when they were handed lucrative, limited-in-supply, licenses to broadcast to our homes and businesses and cars. But he must know what he's talking about, right? He'll be someone who's spent his life working in radio, yes?

Erm... no; he used to be a marketing bloke with Nestle (not, we should stress, directly involved with Nestle's 'try powdered milk' marketing campaigns in the developing world). So he knows more about the advertising world than radio.

"What we need is for Ofcom to set a liberal environment so licence holders can thrive and make money. That is in the listeners' interests."

Why, exactly, is it "in the listener's interests" that licence holders "make money"? Obviously, it's important for a commercial station to be able to stay afloat, but if your passion is for, say, talking books, or punk, or garage, you might feel your interests were better served by a company which broke even and played readings, or punk, or hip-hop, rather than one which made loads of money and stuck to the Top 40.

Oddly, from the point of view of listeners who enjoy plurality ahead of supernormal profitability, the impression of Ofcom, the Radio Authority, and the IBA has been an environment of increasingly light touch while the radio dials themselves have become increasingly packed with sameish sludge. It's not clear how commercial radio could become any less regulated right now, unless breakfast shows were to be allowed to call themselves "the cuntfuck flaps hour", Lily Allen is called in to chant "Sugar Puffs are the best" over and over, and stations were free to decide what frequency they go with. We'd like to see the managent of Juice and City having a fight over who's going out on 100FM today.

Of course, there is a segment of British radio where regulation doesn't reach, and those are the pirate stations. Perhaps Andrew Harrison wants the radio industry to use them as their model: "This is Horizon FM broadcasting from a towerblock roof..."

What's curious is what happened to pirates when they went legitimate: look at the cases of Kiss and XFM. Regulation didn't stop them changing their playlists until much of what they do would be found elsewhere on more long-term mainstream stations; what it did do was turn the focus of the efforts from love of the programming to making money. Maybe Harrison was too busy selling Smarties and Milo to notice.

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