Lord Birt, the former Director General of the BBC, and now a “blue skies thinker” for the government has been reported as saying that Radio 4 is a “national treasure”, “but would benefit from the challenge of a strong rival”.
I have a couple of problems with this. First, I can’t find the exact quote in his speech. I’m sure he said something of the sort, but I can’t find it in his speech.
The other problem I have is that I don’t know what world Birt is living in, but how does he honestly expect commercial radio to produce such an expensive service. According to the BBC’s annual results, Radio 4 cost &pound71 in 2005. In the last set of figures available, Classic FM, the largest commercial station in the country, and quite probably the most upmarket one, generated £28m revenue.
That’s quite a shortfall, and doesn’t take into account the fact that a commercial company has to return a significant profit to shareholders.
I’m sure that Lord Birt is aware of all this, so how does he honestly forsee a commercial competitor finding a place on the nation’s dials? Where’s the bandwidth, aside from in the digital arena, where Oneword has not been successful to date?
Frankly, even in television, where Artsworld has just become a basic channel on Sky, and the free-to-air More4 is due to launch soon, there’s not a truly upmarket commercial competitor.