Change presenters, change station, change audience

Raymond Snoddy on radio – a talkSPORT football match made in heaven; record audiences; and how to replace dead Radio 4 listeners…

It’s the same with any job. Round pegs in round holes always work best.

Almost by definition not everyone at Sky Sports must have loved Andy Gray and Richard Keys, otherwise how come embarrassing off-camera clips came so easily to light, even though it was mainly a Scottish sense of humour in evidence.

It’s very doubtful whether talkSPORT will be paying the lads anything like £1.7 million a year. In fact the word is it’s £200,000 each for 15 hours broadcasting a week but otherwise what a match made in heaven.

Feed the Gray/Keys personas – personalities even – into an online dating site and up would pop talkSPORT.

It’s so obviously appropriate the only surprise is that no-one thought of it before. Maybe it was simply a question of availability until now.

Two blokeish blokes linked up with a largely blokeish audience – one that’s much larger than Sky Sports anyway – and presumably most of the people behind the microphone will be blokes too.

That’s useful to know just in case the occasional indiscretion about woman assistant referees slips out during an ad break.

No scientific research has been done but you can guess with some degree of certainty that a significant section of the talkSPORT audience must have been scratching their heads wondering what the original Sky fuss was all about.

Earlier today talkSPORT denounced that patronising approach to the talkSPORT audience, insisting that many of the contributors to the debate on the issue  condemned the lads’ behaviour at Sky.  That was then… the future starts on Monday.

But it probably would be better if Andy Gray resisted any temptations involving microphones and trouser-fronts. Just in case.

After all talkSPORT is owned by Belfast-based UTV and there are still some hang-ups about a lack of decorum in Northern Ireland.

It’s going to be hard work for the lads. Starting on Monday (Feb 14) they are going to be on air for three hours every weekday morning talking about sport with no live matches to provide the raw material.

Coming off the back of talkSPORT’s record performance in last week’s RAJAR figures, when the station shot through the 3 million mark for the first time with a massive year-on-year increase of 23%, we can safely predict that in the next quarter the numbers will rise again.

Even the feminists will be listening – to see if they can catch the lads out.

And what opportunities there will be for creative advertising. If the Equalities Commission is not there like a rat up a drainpipe they should change their agency.

The Gray/Keys kerfuffle does serve to highlight the importance of sport in all its forms for radio even though there is so much live sport on television.

Yet while a quarter of all listening is now via digital, the proportion of listening held by analogue listening is marginally up – 67% compared with 66.6% a year ago.

Scarcely no need to state the obvious, that analogue radio switch-off is a long way away.

So almost everyone is happy then?

Not really. Commercial radio people are never really happy (even though commercial reach rose year on year in the last quarter). A bit like farmers. The glass is nearly always half empty and there is always the BBC to moan about.

This time the RadioCentre has a legitimate right to have a moan about the BBC Trust’s latest dictates on Radio 4, Radio 3 and Radio 7.

Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC chairman and the Trust want Radio 4 and 3 to become more accessible and reach out to new younger audiences while retaining their distinctiveness.

Surely Andrew Harrison, chief executive of the RadioCentre, is onto something when he argues that the call for the two national stations to “extend their appeal, whilst retaining their distinctiveness, is a contradiction in terms. It’s like asking a station to become more popular and less popular at the same time. Radio 3 and Radio 4 should be proud of their unique character and do all they can to retain it”.

If Radio 3 should decide to go down the more popular classical route at key times of the day that would amount to increased competition – possibly unfair – for Classic FM.

Turning Radio 7 into Radio 4 Extra is a cute re-branding idea, which should get the station more attention, but should it have attracted a public interest test? The only way to do even better for Radio 7 from the BBC’s point of view would be to threaten to close it down and then issue a last minute reprieve. After all, the trick worked a treat with 6 Music.

As for Radio 4, the search for the “replenisher” group to replace those who can no longer listen to the station because they are dead seems a little fruitless.

The Radio 4 audience has demonstrated time after time that the only change that is acceptable is change that is imperceptible – in the way that Max Hastings introduced new-fangled devices such as features into the Daily Telegraph.

The declining numbers in the middling age groups of 35 to 54 hardly sound catastrophic – down from 30.4% in 2003-4 to 26.6% in 2009-10.

Part, at least, of that decline is due to an ageing population.

You can’t dragoon younger listeners to turn to Radio 4 or increase the percentage of ethnic minorities who may have other interests and preoccupations.

The one thing we can be reasonably sure about is that in the search for new less South East centric audiences the BBC is unlikely to turn to Richard Keys and Andy Gray (even if they are reinvented as new men).

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