Glimmers of hope at Cooperland

BBC Radio 1 has been in something of a wobbly state since Chris Moyles left the breakfast show. Daytime DJs are aware that their listening demographic has changed since Nick Grimshaw took over in the mornings and the station's output as a whole doesn't gel as well as it used to. Certain shows on their own work well, but Greg James in particular seems to have let the talk of him being the Next Big Thing go to his head and the drivetime show is considerably less entertaining than his early breakfast show used to be. The friendly, engaging character who came from student radio is something of a distant memory in the face of some pretty lame radio output at times. In particular, Feet up Friday has now become some excruciatingly drawn out contest between several teams of listeners which leads to a low rent version of Scott Mills' old Wonder Years feature from 5pm on Fridays.

Later on in the weekday schedule, Several presenters (Annie Mac, Huw Stephens and Phil Taggart) have been hotdesking on the Monday to Thursday late night slot prior to the announcement that Taggart and newcomer Alice Levine would be taking it over on a permanent basis from January. This is a step in the right direction - Phil Taggart has been solid on these late night slots and sounds enthusiastic about what he's doing. Whilst Huw Stephens is a great broadcaster, he has sounded rather overworked at times recently cover this, along with Scott Mills show, his own weekend show and the Wednesday midnight indie show. I didn't manage to catch any of Annie Mac's shows in this slot.

The other ear-opener i've recently found is Adele Roberts who spent just over a week covering for Dev on the weekday early breakfast show. Whilst she was mostly working with Dev's features, she was a breath of fresh air from some of the self absorbed nonsense that goes on during daytimes. She is one of the best presenters i've heard come from 1Xtra to Radio 1, with MistaJam being the only other one i really rate.

A lot of criticism gets levelled at Radio 1 (particularly at the bottom of RadioToday articles) for sounding like a student radio station or harvesting all their talent from 1Xtra, but ultimately the problem remains that the breeding grounds for past stars of the station has been commercial local radio. The broadcast of tapes of teenage Scott Mills on air in Hampshire; or Chris Moyles on Radio Luxembourg or one of JK and Joel on Yorkshire Coast Radio only serve to illustrate how few opportunities there are for distinctive voices to flourish with heavily networked programming, particularly off peak amongst the larger commercial groups. The recent furore with Danny Baker on BBC London has served to illustrate that a tremendously popular broadcaster who generates huge loyalty from his audience is unlikely to get recruited because he *shock*horror* may have opinions occasionally rather than being the bland cardboard cut outs who fill two minutes of every hour on Heart between the mind numbing feelshit playlist and adverts.

But at least Radio 1 are gaining distinctive new voices, and not going down the Heart route of solely recruiting people who are already c-list celebrities. The station still has a lot of work to do in order to regain the momentum it had three or four years ago, sorting out the cheap and nasty sounding station imaging might be a start because every time i hear that girl with her teeth pressed against her lips saying the name of the DJ as if she's looking to start a fight with them, i still cringe...