Quintin Jardine's blog

Who does the ad scheduling on Edinburgh’s Radio Forth2 these days?

Listening to Bob Malcolm this morning, (Bob is effectively the lock on our bathroom door. If Eileen can hear him, I’m in.) my attention was first caught by a pitch for a Mercedes E class estate. I was still wondering how many potential £35k car buyers would be listening at that time, when we moved on to a ridiculous, patronising, and thoroughly ageist ad, placed by the Scottish Executive and advising elderly people living alone or in care homes to go on-line (!) to check the care standards they should expect. Before I could finish contemplating the practical nonsense of that, the station moved on to the next ad . . . for a funeral undertaker. Audience demographic?

I mentioned this to a friend who has long experience of radio, as a broadcaster, and was surprised by his instantly furious response. But I understand it only too well. When Radio Clyde, in Glasgow, Radio Forth, in Edinburgh, Radio Tay, in Dundee  and one or two others were owned by a company called Scottish Radio Holdings, all of these stations were truly independent and local. It seems that now, a couple of takeovers later, that principle has gone by the board. Of all the Forth2 presenters, and I’ve been on air with quite a few in my time, Bob Malcolm is now the only one who is actually based in Edinburgh and broadcasting out of that studio. The rest of the scheduling is made up by presenters in locations all around the country. On the sister FM station, Forth1, it’s almost the same; only three of that station’s presenters work in Forth Street. All the others are in Glasgow, but they don’t tell the listeners.

People may not care about this, but they should. All of these stations are licensed by Ofcom, the regulator. There isn’t one single Scottish independent radio licence. They are issued on a city by city basis, and are meant to be run in that way, providing locally based, locally produced programming. That’s why it’s called Independent Local Radio.

What used to be Scottish Radio Holdings is now part of a group called Bauer Media. That is a subsidiary of the German Bauer Publishing Group. So what is that, and what are its operating principles? I imagine that information is all set out in its website, but it’s entirely in German, which I don’t speak, so I can’t be certain. You will find a statement on the Bauer Media site, but that tells you nothing about its ultimate ownership. All it does is attempt to blind its readers with bullshit. It tells us, ‘Our business is built on influential media brands with millions of personal relationships with engaged readers and listeners.‘ If that isn’t enough to get our attention, it continues, ‘Our strategy is to connect audiences with excellent content through our broad multi-touch point brand platforms, wherever and whenever and however they want.‘ What exactly does all that mean? To borrow the immortal, if mythical, word of the great David Francey  . . . Fuktifano.

But I do know this: the people who framed that philosophy and proclaim it on their ‘About’ page . . . which, incidentally does not mention the phrase ‘local radio’ anywhere in describing its ‘brands’; you have to dig deeper for that . . . do not give a damn for the people of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen,  etc. If you’re sitting in any of those three cities, at the very moment I write this, early evening, and you’re listening to what you believe fondly to be your very own local AM station, in fact, you’re all listening to the same bloke. I don’t know for sure where he is, but I suspect that when he finishes his stint, you might spot him driving out of Clydebank Business Park.

Should we be worried about this? In my opinion we should; what we have here is a single company holding a series of licences issued to provide specifically local services, and they’re not doing that.

I love local radio; I go back to the 70s and before that. I can remember the freshness with which it burst upon us, ending the BBC monopoly. During my career, I’ve been on local radio across the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand and even in Prague. So I’m speaking with a degree of knowledge when I say that in the SRH days, its stations were up there with the best in the world. There is no way that any of their managers would have permitted an ad for care for the elderly to bleed directly into one for a funeral undertaker, so crudely that they almost seemed combined!

So what’s happened? I don’t know, but this is how it’s been put to me, and I have no trouble accepting it as gospel. These stations are no longer being run by broadcasters, but by accountants, people who are interested only in overheads and the bottom line. When you hear your station boast that it plays ‘The sounds of the seventies, eighties, and more‘, what it’s actually telling you that it buys the cheapest music it can find, and uses it over and over again to fill its play-lists. I’m not going to be too rude about that profession, because it’s my daughter’s, but still, most of us will have heard its members defined as those who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

That might be a glib line, but this is not; if the people who run Bauer Media don’t catch on soon that what they are doing is devaluing their radio ‘brands’, then it will cost their company, big-time.