So Ed Vaizey is talking about selling off Radio 1 again is he?
Obviously this makes no sense at all – and does nothing to help commercial radio. I’ve said this before when Peter Bazalgette suggested something similar and again when Richard Eyre said the same thing.
I won’t run through the same arguments in detail again, but instead point you to Matt Deegan’s well considered piece.
At a time when the commercial radio industry is struggling, creating a behemoth in our midst that would suck up much of the available revenue, at the same time damaging many other services, including lots of small businesses – a group the Conservatives surely support – while almost certainly leaving listeners with a worse service (commercial operators will need to turn a decent profit and those expensive off-peak programmes would be first to go).
Nobody wins.
I guess I’m a little curious about why Vaizey is commenting on this issue. The Sunday Times piece notes that this isn’t party policy despite Vaizey being responsible for broadcasting. Recently at the Radio Festival in Nottingham, Jeremey Hunt, the Tories’ Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport spoke very knowledgably on radio (Click on the Wednesday 1 July link – Hunt was first on).
I can see why someone outside the radio industry might think privatising a service like Radio 1 would be a good idea – but they might want to run the idea past a few people who work in the industry. There really aren’t too many people calling for the sell-off of Radio 1 – especially not in the commercial sector.
[Update] Paul Robinson has a good piece online at Broadcast.