Ahead of my appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Counterpoint, I ponder how institutions like the BBC are now subordinate to the talent they employ
The shower is where creative people get all their best ideas, closely followed by long walks and, as per Richard Curtis, while the kettle boils. My idea was to write about the demise of the BBC, but I think I’ve cracked some sort of code about today’s media epoch.
We have known since Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the World Wide Web in 1990 that the day would come that information could not be contained in analogue forms: the book, popularised by the printing press in the fifteenth century; the album, which had its heyday in about 1984 when Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen wrapped up pop music and iconography in a rotating package that spun at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute; and the moving picture, which had been entertaining millions since before little screens could fit in one’s living room.
The story of my lifetime, perhaps even beyond the slow frog-boiling of what is now called the Climate Emergency, is the democratisation of data, be it words, music or images. The new oil barons and bankers are the tech billionaires, and also the bankers. We’re still a capitalist planet, albeit one where you can direct people to an imaginary coin and coin it in.
But what of the old world? Imagine a person who grew up with three or four TV channels, who had to make their own fun as a child or young adult. They’d head to the pub after work, put the world to rights and go home, with an evening paper tucked under their arm, and settle down on to the sofa with Coronation Street or, from 1985 onwards, its East London equivalent.
They might tune into John Peel’s Radio 1 show and hear which bands are in session and which records Peel was playing at the wrong speed tonight. On the idiot box in 1985, at the risk of turning into Peter Kay, Open All Hours was in its fourth series, while the BBC serialised Howards’ Way the same year it bought Miami Vice, famously described as ‘MTV Cops’.
This was the year of Live Aid, the global jukebox whose ruby anniversary is marked with a musical in London’s West End called Just For One Day. It was a great day for fans of Phil Collins, who could see him in person in London or Philadelphia, and on TV in both; if you were there and you were 30, you are now likely retired. Dylan Jones wrote an okay book on the event, but I hope someone does a better job of it this year.
Live Aid was the day Queen became a global treasure, when U2 became stadium rockers and when Bob Geldof swore on TV. Note the medium on which he delivered his message: television, which had made its presence known to people in the 1950s, had now come of age. Not for nothing did Bono say that his wander into the crowd, which meant the rest of his band were forced to loop an outro several times over, was a search for ‘a TV moment’. At 25, he had only known a world where TV was king/queen.
Five years later, the information superhighway would muscle in on its territory: attention. The BBC, through its TV and radio service, had a hold on British media, which is why commercial radio, ITV, Channel 4 and newspapers run by men like Rupert Murdoch always snipe from the sidelines.
Significantly, back in 1985, the institution was greater than the talent: in 1993, Radio 1 controller Matthew Bannister sacked some of that talent to freshen up the sound of the station. Dave Lee Travis, who was 48, and Simon Bates, who was 46, were replaced by young pups Mark Goodier (now 63), Steve Lamacq (who turned 60 last October) and Jo Whiley, who will be 60 on July 4. Peel, who was to music what David Attenborough was to primates, stayed.
But what were DLT and Bates, and indeed the 46-year-old Bob Harris, doing on a station aimed at young people? Bob, who would be back on the BBC within a decade doing the overnight show on Radio 2, wondered at the time if ‘the type of bands my programme was introducing’ would have ‘an outlet in radio at all’. Bob needn’t have worried, because in the new millennium radio mutated into new, playable-on-demand (POD) forms.
Back in 1993, Chris Evans was about to shake up not just breakfast radio but the entire medium, with a style that was two parts Timmy Mallett to one part Danny Baker. Evans was so successful he could afford to leave Radio 1 and buy Virgin Radio, then follow Bob back to Radio 2 and steer its Breakfast Show for several years. I was a loyal listener even though I found his patter often irritating. That’s why they invented the off switch.
But Chris was at the apex of Old and New Media. Even as podcasting grew in popularity, the big beasts of radio still had their acolytes, be they Terry Wogan, Ken Bruce and Steve Wright on Radio 2, or Nicky Campbell and Peter Allen on 5 Live. These were BBC lifers who had a home until they couldn’t talk any more. In 2024, both Steve Wright and Johnnie Walker presented their final shows weeks or days before their deaths.
The moment that changed it all was when Radiohead decided to let their fans pay whatever they liked to own their 2007 album In Rainbows. Having seen out their recording contract, they gave the album away because they knew that it was their live show that brought in the big bucks; they performed the album in a session From The Basement, uploading the videos on to the relatively new site Youtube, soon to be bought by Google.
As I was writing this piece, Your Woman by White Town was playing. Its path to UK number one was helped by regular plays by Mark Radcliffe on Radio 1; it is inconceivable that a radio DJ could, by his or her own efforts, do the same today. Radcliffe is still on the BBC, albeit for five hours a week mostly on 6 Music, the station I nickname Radio Peel for its challenging playlist and championing of alternative music. It is interesting to note that Peel died in October 2004, months before Youtube came into being. Soon enough, the site started to influence the charts and take audiences away from radio: why wait for your favourite song when it was a click away?
In January 2025, Scott Mills took over the hallowed Radio 2 Breakfast Show. Mills came into radio in the late 1990s and looked up to the best in the business; now he is one of the best, but many millions fewer are listening. This is a BBC-wide problem, and not just because of the Jimmy Savile scandal they failed to deal with.
The BBC is in trouble for many reasons, but one of the key ones is because the talent is now the institution, not the other way round. All of this is to say, I’ll be on BBC Radio 4 this Sunday at 4.30pm competing in the music quiz Counterpoint. I’m up against a former British quiz champion, so wish me luck!