We left home listening to...
BBC Somerset, Emma Britton (0900-1200)
Now i'm already familiar with the Emma Britton show, often tuning to BBC Bristol or Somerset in advance of the brilliant Steve Yabsley show at midday. There isn't a marked contrast between Bristol's Graham Torrington and Somerset's Emma Britton; Torrington is a traditional laid-back local radio jock (he even does a Saturday night Late Night Love show just to complete the cliche), whilst Britton is a rather parochial, but enthusiastic broadcaster who is able to demonstrate interest in the tedious, compassion to the dramatic and a smile to the foibles of county life. If i'm being totally honest, i was of the opinion that because the differences between Bristol and Somerset were so slight that the rest of the country would follow the same template of gentle, easy-listening and often twee programming.
BBC Hereford & Worcestershire, Andrew Easton (1200-1600)
New Zealander Andrew Easton carries the mammoth four hour afternoon shift on BBC Hereford and Worcestershire. The stretch of the show we listened to felt like a bit of a timewarp to Radio 2 in the 90s with a fairly standard guess the year quiz featuring music and reminiscences of the 1960s. After that, the show continued on in a fairly lighthearted and irreverent manner with good humoured wit and lively presentation. Overall, a well recommended and entertaining show.
Somewhere around Birmingham, we started losing H&W and i did a quick scan up the airwaves to find not the expected BBC Birmingham, but...
BBC Leicester, Jonathon Lampon (1200-1500)
Despite not really being anywhere near Leicester, we came up with the BBC service from the city and decided to stick with it. Lampon's show contains a fairly well balanced current affairs discussion (today concerning standards of language), introduced with a well thought out collection of potential avenues of continuation. The depth of the material varies considerably throughout the show, but Lampon manages to deliver it consistently throughout. Imagine the Jeremy Vine show without the anger and bitterness and you're pretty much on the level of where this show sits. It serves a worthwhile purpose, i found it very informative and interesting.
We lost contact with Leicester as we were approaching the Potteries and after a couple of ILRs, we unsurprisingly came in to reach of...
BBC Stoke, Paula White (The Afternoon Show, 1300-1600)
The first show we had heard which includes a catchphrase ("Hiya Duck"), which is used at the beginning of every message or conversation and becomes somewhat irritating after a while. We know you're a local radio station broadcaster, you don't need to ram it down our throats. To my ears, Paula White doesn't sound like a natural radio host and her delivery is a bit stop-start a lot of the time and she can get a bit whoopy whilst laughing at her own jokes. Her show is very conversational, which might stand a better chance of working if she had somebody else in the studio to bounce off because there are far too many awkward silences. On the whole she is overdoing the "local lass" thing a bit too much and the result feels very contrived.
On to the content of the programme. A lot of it was fairly inane local radio call-in fare (how to get children off to sleep) and weak competitions (one line of a film - name the movie) without a great deal of material appearing to be particularly planned. In contrast to the formatted layout of some of my local programmes, one topic seems to suffice for at least half an hour with minimal effort to build anything else around it. Perhaps listening to Steve Yabsley has left me with high expectations of how much effort people should put in to their programmes.
But anyway, the most disturbing aspect of the show was a short segment at around 1310 where the host followed on from the sleeping children phone-in and was left to read out (apparently almost word for word) some knee-jerk story from a right-wing daily newspaper in the same tone as had been used for the rest of the show. It all felt incredibly judgemental and wrong in the context of the otherwise light and fluffy programme, especially as she immediately snapped back out of it and in to a delightfully unoriginal whinge about a chatty woman on the bus.
On the day we were travelling, Comic Relief was launching all over the country and various comedians and comic actors were giving interviews to practically every outlet of the BBC all over the country. Stoke's guest was Stephen Mangan, who proved that Paula is far more at ease when she has somebody else to bounce off of.
Now if i'm being totally honest, we hadn't fully lost contact with Stoke, but i could feel myself getting irritated by the stilted presentation of Ms White and the erratic nature of the show, so we scanned again and found...
BBC Merseyside, Billy Butler (1400-1700)
I'll admit an interest here, as i've heard several previous Billy Butler shows (including his legendary Scouse quiz spoof Hold Your Plums) and always found him to be an affable and likeable character. BBC Radio Merseyside is a station which very much caters to its audience and feels very much more cosmopolitan than anything else we'd been listening to on the way up. After being subjected to Radio Stoke, Billy Butler's show is remarkably slick and well put together.
More on the Mersey...
Over the rest of the long weekend we listened to Radio Merseyside a lot and found the output at times to be quite challenging. I don't think i've heard radio output with such a high level of genuine interest in the fundamentals of politics and policy outside of the likes of Radio 4 and the contributors to the phone-ins and open forum style shows (particularly 1200-1400) seem far better informed than the average joe calling in to most programmes.
On Saturday night, Linda McDermott hosted a well-promoted event "Come Dine at Mine", which encouraged listeners to hold simultaneous dinner parties as part of a fundraising mission for Clatterbridge Cancer Centre. Considering it was a one-off, the show was an absolute delight with plenty of guests in the studio, good humour and an entertaining food quiz. The whole programme captured the convivial dinner party style atmosphere perfectly and demonstrated remarkably good planning and preparation.
And while we're on the subject...
For some time now i've been listening to the Toby Foster: Bigger at Breakfast podcasts of BBC Radio Sheffield and it seems only fair to add a brief comment on this as i'm doing the other local radio i've been listening to. There was comment passed on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show when the last set of listening figures came out that they struggled for popularity in South Yorkshire and i think this show is the reason why - Toby Foster and his accomplices are delivering a product similar to that of the Radio 1 show with plenty of irreverent chat and comic diversions, yet tailored to the local audience. Its a no-brainer that Foster's show will attract a higher number of local listeners than a national show fronted by a man from the home of the arch rivals of South Ridingites, Leeds.
But what about ILR?
Most of it is crap, which is a shame because it never used to be. Star Bristol has just been dispensed with in favour of "Breeze 107.2", which has been advertised on billboards all over the city by a pair of legs. Quite how a pair of legs is supposed to signify a radio station, i don't know. Breeze effectively takes over the format of the failed Original 106.5, which was owned by the same group. All they have done is swap around the frequencies of the two stations and rebranded them, which is ultimately costly and pointless.
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