Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Retuning to the Global name massacre

We've had an email from James P which adds some further commentary to the renaming of most Global stations as Heart:

After dropping local daytime presenters, Global have decided to rename 29 of the local stations they bought. In a move which I believe is known as 'Breaking out the turd-polish', the stations will all be given the 'Heart' brand. This includes Chiltern Radio, which itself had only just been rebranded a few months ago (it was 'Chiltern FM' before that 'Haven't You Heard' campaign was rolled out and every station's logo was redesigned to look like a German alcopop). I remember when Channel 5 came along and a team of engineers toured certain regions, retuning people's TV sets. Presumably a similar team will soon be on hand to replace car-stickers and fuzzy bugs in the areas affected.

The article also mentions "The new Heart network of stations will retain their own breakfast and drivetime shows, but much of the rest of the content will be syndicated" - What it doesn't mention is that in some cases (including my local station's), the 'Drivetime' show has now been stretched to fill five long hours from 2-7pm. It's making for disturbing listening, with the young chap presenting clearly struggling to find enough to say. The other day I tuned in to hear him giving a running commentary of his eating of a Twix. I tuned back out on hearing the line "Ooh, there's a bit of chocolate stuck to the roof of my mouth..."

My favourite part of the [MediaGuardian] article is the bit that refers to 'the two-strong Xfm network'. I suppose technically it's a network...


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