The All England Club

If you’re a radio presenter or a production company and somebody offered you the chance to develop a brand new national show, with pretty much a blank canvas, you might jump at the chance. But I reckon the reality is there’ll be relatively few people queuing at the door to pitch for the new BBC Local Radio Evening Programme.

A £150k commission PLUS presenter’s fees. What’s not to like about this gig?

For starters, there’s a PR mountain to climb. The new weekday evening show, airing across the network of 39 stations, will replace a wide collection of existing regional and local programmes. These often have small audiences, proportionately speaking. But they also enjoy massive listener loyalty.

Take Roger Day – the incumbent who presents the regional BBC show in the south of England. A facebook page has been established to try and save his programme. It may not be on the scale of the campaign which kept BBC 6 Music alive, but it demonstrates the kind of challenges the new show will face.

The commissioning brief for the new show talks of “one or more personality presenters”, which suggests that the BBC is looking for either an existing high profile name from within the Local Radio network or, more probably, a voice already familiar across the country. For the older listener, former pirate DJ Roger might have been the perfect choice – but he’s already ruled himself out – saying he doesn’t like the 60% speech element included in the brief.

Talk Talk : how will the new BBC evening show be distinctive?

And herein lies the second big challenge. How to fill three hours per night with relevant, original content? The tender document refers to “tie ins” with existing BBC brands such as Springwatch and Stargazing Live. Some observers see the new programme as being a radio version of The One Show – and you could see the attraction: the 7pm TV show plugging additional interviews and phone ins on Local Radio.

The budget for Radio England (a working title) has also raised a few eyebrows. The BBC is offering £150,000 to cover production costs, but also says that it will foot the bill for the presenter, who would be employed on a BBC contract. Whilst this doesn’t equate to an open chequebook, it does enable production companies to cast their net wider and set the bar higher.

The project also marks a post script for RadioCentre, the trade body that represents much of the commercial radio sector. At the end of last year – when much bigger cuts were proposed for local radio – its Chief Executive Andrew Harrison suggested that BBC Local Radio should outsource some of its production, just as network stations do. Harrison spoke of outsourcing entire stations in the Local Radio chain. Radio England may not be as radical as that, but it marks a step-change in policy.

Bids for the new show must be in by August, with a decision on the winner being announced in September. It’ll air in the new year.

So, who’s going to show their cards first?

 

Trenty Twelve

“It’s Len Groat – radio like it used to be!” sings the retro jingle into another hour of seventies music.

When I was growing up, Len was one the voices on what I considered to be the mutt’s nuts of broadcasting. You see, in the Seventies, Radio Trent was still fresh. It was breaking new ground in all sorts of ways, not least because it was live, local and fun.

High Hopes – Trent Sound wants a full time FM Licence

Thirty seven years on, Trent Sound is recreating what its founders consider to be the golden age of the station – which officially vanished from the airwaves at the start of 2012, when Capital FM replaced it. Trent Sound’s golden age, according to its business plan, was the late eighties. Indeed, the community station – currently broadcasting online – spent a considerable amount of money in having jingles from that era resung. You can’t accuse them of lacking attention to detail in that sense.

And Len Groat’s Seventies Sunday adds a genuine air of nostalgia, along with Danny Cox’s retro countdown which airs on weekdays. Together with Andy Marriot, Trent Sound is aiming to fill the schedules with familiar names from the past.

Yet Trent Sound’s management insists that this isn’t a retro radio station. It has long term ambitions to gain an FM licence from OFCOM and bring back “full service” local radio to Nottingham. Curiously, though, its business plan speaks of a licence covering three towns, two of which are outside the city of Nottingham. The aim is to operate a service broadcasting to Bulwell, Eastwood and Hucknall. All have sizeable populations – and the plan may be to pre-empt OFCOM’s own timetable. Community radio licences for the East Midlands are expected to be advertised next year – but with Nottingham itself having three existing stations (Kemet, Faza and Dawn) the regulator may be minded to award licences to outlying areas. 

Can Trent Sound survive in a crowded radio market?

The station has achieved much in little over a year. Already, there are programmes featuring local music sessions, interviews and features reflecting the area and Nottingham’s only show for the gay community. And the business plan sets out an ambitious proposition – to run a community radio station along with a major training outfit for news broadcasters – with particular emphasis on those who might otherwise be socially excluded.

Big plans indeed. Which, of course, will have to be paid for somehow. Competition rules state that Community Radio stations can only source around 50% of their income from advertising - the theory being that otherwise they might eat into the existing commercial market. But Trent Sound is going down the risky route of avoiding traditional commercial breaks in favour of sponsorship. At the moment, you can sponsor its breakfast from for £50 per week – an attractive and cost effective proposition – but only if people are listening.

What’s more, Trent Sound is only accepting sponsorship from local companies. National names are only allowed if they’re head office is based within Nottinghamshire. It’s certainly a healthy aspiration to maintain local routes – but some might question this policy at a time when advertising budgets are being squeezed. Back in the day, you might have got local councils and other public services on board to spend a few hundred pounds here and there. These days, it’s quite different. And excluding big names like Coke or MacDonalds might, in a roundabout way, damage the overall credibility of the enterprise.

The business plan is still very much a work in progress, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens once OFCOM releases more licences. Truly local radio is becoming increasingly hard to find – but the big players like Capital and Smooth have already got a dominant foothold in the market.

So whilst it’s rather nice to hear Len Groat all these years on (even if his show is voicetracked from Portugal), my own feeling is that Trent Sound will need to shake off its retro image if it really is serious about competing.

2013 could yet be an interesting year.