A very interesting piece on BBC Radio Five Live by Tim Luckhurst in this weekend’s Independent on Sunday. He was an assistant editor of the station when it launched in 1994.
I’m not sure that I altogether agree with everything Luckhurst has to say about the station. The basic tenet of his argument is that Five Live has morphed from a proper 24 hour news station into something more of an entertainment station, and that it’s now encroaching on the turf of “commercial chat” stations such as Talksport.
I have some sympathy for what he’s saying. I think a case in point might be the recent Celebrity Big Brother final, to which Five Live went live, covering Davina’s announcement as news (I’d be curious to know the logistics of that, since C4 was reportedly on a delay). The racism row notwithstanding, I don’t think the finale of a gameshow is ever worth covering live. Do we need to hear the X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing winners live? No.
And I’m truly disappointed to learn that Brief Lives is having its own obituary written in April, along with Euro News. The former is an especially good programme, and it’s sad to see it going – is it really only being broadcast very early on Sunday mornings now? I suppose that the argument for junking it is that Matthew Bannister now presents essentially the same programme – Last Word – over on Radio Four.
But I will defend Five Live a lot. I think the aforementioned Bannister, who usually presents the weekday morning phone-in show is a consummate broadcaster. And Simon Mayo presents one of the best shows on the whole station.
It’s also worth noting that Five Live was predated for several years by Radio 5, featuring Danny Baker at breakfast playing music. It became more of a news station in 1994 after Radio 4 had become a rolling news service during the 1991 Gulf War. There was friction at the time with most regular Radio 4 daytime programming being “relegated” to LW. So in 1994, Five Live was born as a rolling news and sports channel.
Undoubtedly the station isn’t as “newsy” as it once was, but a big and breaking story always gets priority treatment, and you only have to watch Sky News or BBC News 24 regurgitating the same old reheated stuff all day long when there isn’t a big breaking news story to realise how quickly listeners would tire of it.
It’s notable that only one third of Five Live’s audience ever listen to Radio 4 (Source: RAJAR Q4 2006), so the majority of Five Live listeners are getting their news and information from the station. And I’d suggest that the relative success of Sky News and BBC News 24 has probably made the thinking behind the shift away from continuous news easier to do.
Quite what the impact of Five Live to Salford will be is hard to say. It won’t make any difference to sport, which effectively comes from grounds for the most part anyway. But will all the broadcasters currently working across the day – Nicky Campbell, Shelagh Fogarty, Matthew Bannister, Simon Mayo, Peter Allen and Jane Garvey – all move up north? If they don’t will their programmes come from London? Or will they leave the station?
I’d question their key news programmes moving anyway, since currently guests often appear across both Radio 4 and Five Live when they’re in London (albeit that 4 and Five are in different parts of London). But a shift north will simply mean a lot more remote interviews, which involve a producer in London sitting a guest in the studio, while the interview is harder to carry out as there’s no chance to see body language. A conversation in person is always easier than a conversation down the phone. When was the last time you got a job after a phone interview?
I think Luckhurst is wrong in his comparison of Five Live with commercial stations though. When he says commercial, he really means LBC and Talksport. The funding of Five Live to those stations is incomparable, and if he really thinks that Alan Brazil, James Whale or Jon Gaunt are have similar shows to any of Five Live, he really hasn’t listened to that station. OK – I really don’t like Stephen Nolan’s programme on Five Live either – it can get all Gary Bellamy on you.
Personally, I don’t think that Five Live needs to do a great deal to become its very best – a little less entertainment news, and fewer obvious phone-ins wouldn’t go amiss. I believe it was John Simpson who was recently sitting in a Five Live studio for some phone-in or other who reportedly asked the presenter, off-air, why they’d just taken a particularly imbecilic call. He was told that there was no programme if they didn’t take such calls.