Ken Garner: Case for old-fashioned radio must be heard

SCOTS love radio. Commercial stations win some of the highest listening figures in the UK and generate more revenue per head than stations anywhere else in the UK. Scotland has more new community stations per head than England or Wales.

One recent survey even claimed Glaswegians were “100 per cent satisfied” with their choice of stations on the dial.

You’d think the broadcasting great and good would be praising Scottish radio to the heavens, but you’d be wrong.

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They think it’s rubbish. The only thing one recent major report said about BBC Radio Scotland was that it received “strong criticism”, before moving on swiftly to imply commercial radio was even worse, having “lost much of its substance and distinctiveness”.

Another national opinion poll found listeners “lukewarm” about radio shows: “only one in ten were very satisfied”.

One study, when it looked at broadcast news, did not even mention commercial radio news, which is where most Scots get their live news in the morning.

It all started going wrong with the Scottish Broadcasting Commission in 2007. Although part of its job was to look into the future of TV in Scotland, its full remit was to “take account of the importance of broadcasting to a modern, outward-looking Scotland”.

Last time I checked, radio is broadcasting. The First Minister himself called on the commission to reflect on the “interconnectedness” of “theatre, radio, TV and film”. But radio only got 1,000 words and two pages of the commission’s 25,000-word, 64-page report.

They were not impressed. In an unguarded moment, they even said their “ambition” for radio was that it should “complement other forms of audiovisual content”. So it has no merit on its own terms?

Then last year’s fracas over removing most of the BBC’s digital radio channels from Freeview in Scotland to accommodate the Gaelic BBC Alba TV channel confirmed all you need to know.

It was not, in fact, a row about Gaelic. What it proved, is the only thing that matters to Scotland’s broadcasting elite is television. It’s obvious radio should be kicked off your set-top box to make room for BBC Alba.

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The gods of broadcasting have spoken: there shalt be more television.

The Scottish Broadcasting Commission, remember, spent most of its report arguing that everything in Scottish broadcasting would be perfect, if only Holyrood was allowed to take £88 million a year out of the BBC licence fee and give it to … a brand new Scottish digital TV channel.

Let’s do something radical. Let’s look at this from the bottom up. Is there perhaps a sector in Scottish broadcasting that involves many ordinary people, improves their lives, has been manifestly popular, and costs next to nothing? There is: community radio.

From Ullapool to Campbeltown, Stornoway to Leith, there are 26 community-style stations already, with doubtless more to come by the end of this year in the third wave of new licences from Ofcom.

It’s an expansion driven simply by people’s aspirations for their town, their village, their island, their glen.

Nobody gets paid. But they are only allowed to raise half the money they need for their running costs – about £10,000 to £25,000 annually – from advertising, and that’s hard to come by these days.

The Welsh Assembly, however, has cannily created a modest system of discretionary annual grants of up to £10,000 to help community stations there.

So there is nothing to stop Holyrood deciding right now to offer to bankroll Scotland’s entire burgeoning community radio sector, for probably no more than half a million pounds a year. That’s less than 176th of the cost of that proposed Scottish digital TV channel.

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This is not an activists’ pipedream. At last year’s election, the SNP made a manifesto commitment to support the development of community radio and has already been in discussions with the sector.

But if it’s strong, local public service broadcast news that’s really so important to the commissars, why not plug an obvious gap in the market?

That gap is the one caused by BBC Scotland’s decision in the 1970s to opt out of BBC local radio expansion in order to concentrate on building a national station. What we’re missing are public service, mostly news-talk format, city stations, in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness.

Some commercial stations have bravely tried it, failed to make it pay and gone bust. You need public money to make this one fly. Given Scottish commercial radio’s audience success even in today’s tough times, it would be unfair, destructive and just plain daft to threaten to fine-slice the radio advertising market still further.

Unfortunately, by their slash- and-burn approach to BBC local radio in England, the BBC have recently shown themselves not to be trusted with such a development. But there may yet be a solution.

Whatever the referendum result, eventually, surely, powers over broadcast services originating in and serving only Scotland will be devolved to Holyrood. It is not even complicated to do, assuming the full break-up of the UK is not imminent.

You do not need bureaucratic new regulators, or new multi-million pound broadcasting corporations. The BBC Trust and Ofcom could simply be told that regarding Scottish station licences, they are accountable to the Scottish Parliament first, which would have powers to legislate on them, subject only to the broad principles of UK broadcast regulation.

In such a world, Holyrood could ask Ofcom to advertise new city frequencies and invite bids from independent operators, who could then apply for funding to the parliament, so long as they adhered to each licence’s agreed public service broadcasting format.

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Expensive? Not really. Local radio veterans reckon you could run such a city station as a tight ship under an experienced manager for little more than £1.2m a year.

This is no more fanciful and vastly cheaper than demanding £88m for a new digital TV channel for which there is no gap in the market – instead, corralling BBC Scotland output currently on other channels (BBC1-4, Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies) and plundering the archive, BBC Alba could be expanded to a full TV channel and made part-Gaelic, part-Scots English.

Holyrood, meanwhile, could afford a new, nationwide, city and community public service radio sector, for about £6.5m a year.

But you will not find such ideas in the papers from Scotland’s broadcasting consultants, advisers, commissioners or trustees. Instead, radio is at best ignored, at worst patronised.

The other week, I said BBC Radio Scotland’s decision to axe Janice Forsyth’s Saturday programme showed it just did not get popular music. It’s worse than that. Scotland’s broadcasting commissars do not get radio. Not one little bit.

• Ken Garner teaches journalism at Glasgow Caledonian University. His study of radio in Scotland – Radio In Small Nations – will be published later this year.