24March

Saga Radio's turn-off yesterday was a very low-key affair. The RDS had switched to SMOOTH at about 3pm. At 5.48, Mike Baker read a traffic bulletin, and promises a warmer week next week. At 5.50, some commercials are followed by Mike introducing Fleetwood Mac's Dreams. At 5.56, he segues into Telstar by the Tornadoes. The first sign that Mike had finished came when the 6pm news began without a jingle or station ident, just the newsreader announcing the time. After the bulletin, at 6.06, the test transmission begins with Sade's Smooth operator. The station launches at 6am on Monday, just 59 hours later.

Saga Radio officially launched on 16 October 2001; test transmissions had begun around 20 September. The first presenter was David Hamilton, and the schedule included specialist music programmes between 8 and 10pm each weeknight. These were taken off air in 2004, though week-end nostalgia programmes continued until the end.

On DAB, Smooth London was taken off air at about 6.20 on Friday, replaced by jazzfm.com; Saga 105.7 was renamed Smooth at the same time. It's worth remembering that when the West Midlands multiplex launched in summer 2001, the digital label Smooth was a rebranded Real Radio, alongside Jazz FM from London. When Jazz dropped the jazz and became Smooth London in June 2005, it moved to the station labelled Smooth, and Jazz became Real. Now Saga has taken the label Smooth from Jazz, the original Smooth is Jazz FM, and the original Jazz FM is still Real.

(Does anyone understand that last sentence, because we don't.)

Meanwhile, GWR's The Jazz has announced its launch line-up. After providing a continuous stream of music since 25 December, proper programmes begin on 6 April with a Jazz 500. Proper programming starts on 9 April: Mark Forrest (a free transfer from Classic FM) takes breakfast, Anthony Davis (Capital Life) 10-2, David "Kid" Jensen (Capital Gold) the afternoon show, with Margherita Taylor (yes, her from E4) and Helen Mayhew (ex-Radio 3) doing the evening shift. Week-end highlights include Mike Chadwick (Smooth) doing contemporary material on Friday night, Claire Anderson (Jazz FM) takes week-end breakfast, Tim Lihoreau (ex-Classic) does a new releases show, and there are history shows from Ramsey Lewis (Smooth), Digby Fairweather (ex-Radio 2), Courtney Pine, and Campbell Burnap (Smooth). The schedule also includes a show by Jamie Cullum, but we can't have everything.

It's worth noting that Smooth Radio's website includes no line-up for the West Midlands. Thanks for caring, people.

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3March

SKY Television has confirmed that its withdrawal from the cable market last Thursday will cost it more than £1 million per week in profits. Prior to cutting the feed, the satellite broadcaster denied supplying a deliberately distorted feed to the national cable centre on Sunday night, pointing out that drop-outs, technical cock-ups, and general uselessness are completely par for the course.

Following the withdrawal of service, NatCable finally changed the channel names to reflect reality, calling them "SKY (Sports) Snooze", a name we've been using for so many years that we'd rather like a month's free sub (though we'll cheerily donate it to the Better Flextech Programmes Fund).

The National Consumer Council, a government-appointed body, has put on its mortar-board and told both Mr. Branson and Mr. Muckdoch to stop behaving like they're in primary one, otherwise it'll be early to bed with no supper for the both of them. It's a shame the NCC couldn't be bothered to intervene in the Telewest v Nickelodeon dispute of 2004-5, which knocked the latter channel off cable for eight weeks and two days. Clearly, the government quango is only interested in matters we couldn't give a flying first about.

In an unrelated move, the DTI has asked OFCOM to investigate SKY's purchase of 17.9% of ITV late last year; it's the first time in five years that the Timidity and Inaction department has investigated an anti-competitive merger like this.

In other broadcasting news, the BBC has agreed not to pursue copyright claims against G****e when the advertising behemoth steals its television programmes. The Beeb will also present some commercials for its future programmes in a computer-readable form. Quite why the Beeb is signing away license-fee payers' interests in this this way is beyond us.

The Greenwich Rugby Time Signal is moving again, this time to become the Anthorn Time Signal. Does that mean that the world will henceforth run on Anthorn Mean Time, just over 9 minutes behind GMT?

And finally, Here's Humph. They had installed one of those lifts where you go in one way and come out the opposite way but they hadn't realised that the opposite way went into a solid brick wall.

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26February

Time for the quarterly RAJAR figures, this time covering the twelve weeks to 17 December 2006. Of particular reference are the figures for the third quarter of 2006 and the equivalent last year.

In each case, the figures are a weighted average of the most recent quarter's figure, and the middle three of the previous five quarters. This gives a trend figure based on a central one-year sample drawn from the past eighteen months, much more stable than the individual quarters.

National stations

A very quiet quarter for the BBC nationals, and for the terrestrials; the only significant movements are 6Music increasing hours by a quarter, World Service losing hours equally quickly. Neither loses much audience. In the commercial sector, a collapse of a half for Q's hours, and a third for Smash Hits. LBC's national rollout has boosted audiences and hours by 10% for a second straight quarter.

A year ago, Classic was ahead of Radio 5 on audience, BBC7 has added 25% of audience, but Asian Network is unchanged. Planet Rock and 6Music are the only other digital stations to show a substantive gain.

(More: the full national tables, and analysis for the Midlands) 1633 words

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23February

SKY Broadcasting is preparing to remove its channels from basic cable. SKY, which takes its name from its original target broadcast area - the area of west London approximately bounded by Staines, Kingston, and Yeading - airs some very populist, though unpopular, nonsense, including a continuous stream of heads talking about football, a channel of cheap imported tat, and the UK's longest running continuous comedy channel, which recently marked 18 years of pretending to report the news. From next Thursday, the UK's six million cable viewers will be spared such tedious dross as Eamonn Holmes's Good Morning Isleworth, gold-Blue Peter badge-holder Simon Thomas on Your Isthmian League (Division II) Matches Tonight, or the imported nonsense Lost Plot.

If the Murdoch-owned purveyor of crap goes off air, it will be interesting to see who loses out; we reckon that losing the six million cable viewers will shoot the morally bankrupt SKY below the waterline, which must be A Good Thing. We rather hope that Flextech, the programme-making arm of The Cable Corp., will make some good programmes of its own.

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21February

We recommend: Gabriela Kulka on Radio 3 (OK, OK, that's Polish Radio 3.)

Tim Luckhurst laments the decline of Radio Five from a breaking-news station to chitter-chatter and sport. If the BBC is going to do chitter-chatter and sport, would it be grown-up enough to admit that its 1994 changes to the network were a gross error, and reverse them? Nigel and Earl had a point.

Jeff Smith will be the new head of music at Radio 2. He held a similar role at Radio 1 between 1997 and 2000, responsible for turning the station from a credible indie playlist into one focussing on pop and dance music.

The ECMAs were presented last Sunday, with three wins for bluegrasser JP Cormier, indie band the Joel Plaskett Emergency, and for alternative group In-Flight Safety.

In an update to our piece on Monday, William Barrington-Coupe has defended himself against charges of fraud, plagarism, and being totally out of tune in the Hatto Trick. Jessica Duchen has evidence that Mrs. Hatto was alive until 2006, removing one particular lingering doubt.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft laments the loss of the Third Programme (1946-2007). He speaks of Roger Wright, the intelligent but wrong-headed controller of the channel, axing the 4pm weekday programmes, a bitter blow that suggests a failure to understand what Radio 3 should be doing. Those programmes were in the tradition of using radio for what it's best at, talking about music as well as playing it, whether it was Edward Seckerson on show music, or Julian Joseph on jazz, or the delightful Ian Burnside's Voices on Tuesday, either a thematic anthology of songs wittily introduced or a singer talking about her art. We're not going to rush to judgement on the schedule; best to let it bed in for a few weeks, become familiar to its rhymes and reasons, and then give a considered opinion.

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18February

This year's Show That Would Like To Be is going out on E4. Launched with a tremendous hype (albeit one that we managed to completely avoid), Skins (All3Media) is a series of self-contained 45-minute comedy-dramas, centred around an ensemble cast of teens at a sixth-form college.

Make no mistake, the first episode is a perfect example of Vic's Law of Pilots. The episode ends in a textbook example of plot cliché: borrowed car, handbrake, canal. Running through the first few episodes is a particularly strong plot involving Sid (Mike Dempsey), the titular skins, and a dealer with a moustache that's wider than his face.

Skins is never rushed, yet never wastes time with anything that doesn't advance a plot. It could be, but probably isn't the next My So-Called Life; both shows had an ensemble cast, both were able to address social concerns within the confines of a drama, both managed this without forcing characters into unnatural contortions. However, there's no particular reflection of cross-generational plots - indeed, we've seen one, perhaps two, sympathetic characters older than 20. Redemption by the end of the episode is not guaranteed.

(The bottom line: it's worth the watch. - 1066 words)

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24January

Last Monday, the Cudlipp Lecture was delivered by Paul Dacre, whose day job is to edit the Daily Hell viewspaper. Time, I think, for a point-by-point rebuttal of his arguments. Mr. Dacre's basic position is that the BBC is distorting Britain's media market, crushing journalistic pluralism and imposing a monoculture that is inimical to healthy democratic debate.

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