My search for radio that I can listen to continues. I’m looking for a radio station that combines current music with a medley of lots of fun or serious bits inbetween. A conversation that is broken up with songs. Modern songs.
As far as I can tell there is absolutely no radio station anywhere in the UK providing this format.
Why?
The format of talkie bits inbetween songs appears to be a preserve of BBC radio. BBC Radio One is the only station doing talkie bits and current music, and the nearest to what I’m looking for. The local BBC stations do talkie bits, yes, but the songs they play are awful and are mostly the songs you’ll hear at the funeral of an old person.
As for the commercial radio sector, well, it just doesn’t do talkie bits, does it? The stations that do play a bit of current music don’t bother ‘talking’ most of the time.
Now and again there are ‘announcements’, usually telling us how hilarious this morning’s breakfast show was, and how even more hilarious tomorrow’s breakfast show will be. When the research is reporting even less people are tuned in, they add the fact that there’s a competition in the breakfast show too. Yes, you can tune in and marvel at somebody you don’t know winning or not winning whatever it might be the radio station has managed to secure as a must-have prize. A talkie bit, yes, but this is not for me.
On the issue of the songs/music that radio stations are playing, why is this always dominated by oldies? The…SAME…Oldies.
It doesn’t seem to matter how far away the late 1960s and early 1970s get, the pop songs from that era are still being played over and over and over again. Just as they were in the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s.
Why?
There’s been some great music produced in recent years, loads produced in the previous decade, yet on high rotation are those same bloody safe songs from the 1960s/1970s.
Do I learn from this that the only people happy with talkie bits to listen to, also hate any song that isn’t 50 years old? It seems that way.
Unfortunately, the staple talkie bit of a radio station playing current songs is interviews with the people singing those songs, and these only happen in the breakfast show when there’s not a mega-competition being played out. That gets a bit boring. Let’s have talkie bits about other stuff too, eh? And at other times of the day.
That ain’t going to happen though, is it. Radio station bosses think that the only time you can have talkie bits is during the breakfast show. The rest of the day the presenters have to mainly keep quiet. Well, unless they are pushing the breakfast show, of course.
If I look away from the commercial sector and trawl around the ‘community‘ radio stations, what do I find? Yep, virtually no talkie bits but lots of songs. Guess what era the songs are from? Yep, the 1960s/1970s dominate, and the presenters, dominated by the old and retired, come on with whistling ill-fitting dentures and speak their bits of trivia and ‘show prep’ they learned how to do in the 1980s.
“Just for fun, can you guess the name of a popular group from the 1960s that had John, Paul, George and Ringo in it?”
Sigh.
So, where’s a radio station I can tune in to that has talkie bits and isn’t just recycling the past?
England's England 