No Rock And Roll Fun

TUNE IN TO DEREGULATION: The Observer is reporting that heads of Britain's radio companies are going to hold a "crisis" meeting with Tessa Jowell to moan and moan at the attempts of the Communications Bill to ensure that British Radio at least keeps some sort of inventiveness. Their main whine is that the Bill insists that each area in the country should have at least three distinct radio operators (not, as the paper suggests, services). Capital Radio's David Mansfield reports: "It's completely crazy. You've a situation where you have draft legislation that says the London market - which makes up 30 per cent of the national market - needs only one commercial TV licence but must have at least three commercial radio stations."
David, how long have you worked in broadcasting? Surely you realise that the reason there's only one commercial, local TV service on terrestrial television in the capital is because, by the time you make room for the BBC, Channel 4 and squeeze Channel 5 in, there's no space for an extra channel. Plus, of course, making TV is pretty expensive, whereas quality, diverse radio output can be made for a fraction of the cost. The broadcasters are caught pleading that they get "ony" six per cent of total advertising spend on their media, which makes us wonder why they've been trumpeting the onward rise of this figure to their shareholders for the last decade - headlines such as "Commercial Radio continues to grow ahead of the market" may have given the impression that the current, pluralistic situation was doing rather well. Indeed, for example, David Mansfield's name appears on the press release trumpeting "In line with our expectations, we anticipate that our like for like radio revenues for the six months ending 30 September 2002 will increase by 2% against the same period in the prior year." - not bad when the advertising world is caught in rictus, we'd think.
Trouble is, the proposals in the Bill don't work very much in favour of the listener, either - it would be better, in all seriousness, to have one owner forced to maintain three distinct services than three owners pumping out largely the same musical choice - it's possibly true that, in Liverpool, Magic 1548 and Juice are different services, but Magic plays a lot also played by Century; Century and City have a lot of common ground; and City and Juice are virtually interchangable. What we'd really like to see the Bill do is stop behaving like the current radio groups and seeing the wireless as a way of shifting money from person to till, and start to protect its position as a vital cheerleader for our culture.
When Chrysalis and Capital start to pretend they're promoting diversity, we have to pretend we're choking on our coffee.