This piece has been edited since it went online on February 8 2024. Five days later, Steve Wright died at the age of 69.
So here’s Radio 2’s grand idea: don’t pension off the old guys, balkanise them and stick them on a new radio station.
Tony Blackburn just turned 81. Johnnie Walker (born Peter Dingley) is 79 at the end of March, Bob Harris 78 and Paul Gambaccini 75 in April. Steve Wright was 69 when he died in February 2024.
These four men have, or had, been with the BBC for literally centuries, if you add the half-century stands from Blackburn (day one of Radio 1 in 1967), Walker (aside from a decade away, pretty much continuously since 1969), Bob (1970 onwards), Gambo (1973-present) and Wrighty, whose first show on the BBC was in 1980.
If you include producer-turned-presenter Mark Radcliffe, who learned at the knee of John Peel, that’s over 250 years of broadcasting experience. Because the BBC have already lost Terry Wogan, Janice Long and Annie Nightingale, it may well be the case that listeners will be ordered to treat this quintet as National Treasures. Ken Bruce and Simon Mayo would have had this status too, but they go to a different school now and have to hit ad breaks. Plus we no longer know how much they earn, which is a perk of not working for a corporation mandated to tell us who is in which pay bracket.
Simon Mayo’s mum was a BBC producer. I hope, but do not expect, that he does more work for his old employer, although he is back on drivetime on Greatest Hits Radio. It was wretched to hear him on Radio 4 recently lamenting his departure on the show Great Lives, which was notionally dedicated to finding out more about his Radio 1 predecessor Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman.
There are precedents in broadcasters coming back to the Beeb, in the cases of both Johnnie Walker and Bob Harris. Were he not turning into a Bermondsey version of Ken Dodd, the incomparable Danny Baker would be absolutely perfect for the new station. Much as I call 6 Music Radio Peel, because it welcomes every genre and also has John Peel’s son Tom as a nightly DJ, I have nicknamed this station BBC Radio Love The Show Steve (henceforth ‘BBC Radio Steve’).
After it has been tested and shown (in defiance of logic) to be a good addition to the broadcasting landscape, I think this new station will be confirmed around the same time the BBC loses its biggest icon: David Attenborough (long may he reign). I still contend that the iPlayer will have a BBC Attenborough channel with all the old nature documentaries.
In fact, much as BBC Four is now a repository for visual archive footage, so BBC Radio Steve will air old radio docs and shows. Currently 6 Music air them overnight, and I recommend Leo Green’s loving two-hour tribute to Roy Orbison. Alan Freeman’s own History of Pop from 1994 is being rebroadcast in two-hour chunks on Thursday mornings between 1-3am, and is available on demand at BBC Sounds if you sleep at that hour.
In 2024, the target audience for this type of show is the type of folk who remember TV adverts from the 1970s. I remember when Brad Pitt fronted a show about folk singer Nick Drake, and there was a fun chat with Gilbert O’Sullivan one Christmas. It was interesting that the station marked the 65th anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly FOUR DAYS before announcing the proposed new station.
Its existence might mean that Sounds of the Sixties and Seventies will disappear from Radio 2’s weekend schedule. Since 2021, the station has targeted Mood Mums between 35 and 54 who remember listening to Zoe Ball, Sara Cox and Jo Whiley when they were younger. Rather handily, those three women contribute a total of eight and a half hours of broadcasting every day between Monday and Thursday.
Whiley, of course, was in a radio marriage with Mayo that never worked, never would work and is a stain on the network in the same way that putting Mark and Lard on at breakfast in the late 1990s was. Incidentally, Mark and Marc are on stage together in March, twenty years to the day after Radcliffe went to Radio 2 and ‘the boy Lard’ went to 6 Music to take over John Peel’s old slot (rightly, as he used to be a member of Peel’s favourite band, The Fall). A four-date Mark and Lard tour follows in the autumn, with a show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on September 26 and dates in Shrewsbury, Crewe and Warrington in early November.
Having come across to Radio 2 with Radcliffe at the ungodly young age of 16, I would love it if he brought his ageing pipes to Radio Steve, although he and Stuart Maconie have control of 6 Music between 8-10am on weekend mornings and both men have other pursuits (grandchildren, books and so forth). Over on Radio 2, Tony Blackburn is in the studio for Sounds of the Sixties for 6am, even though people under 55 don’t want to hear him play Diana Ross and assorted Merseybeat sounds every Saturday.
They want extra Dermot O’Leary before Romesh Ranganathan’s show, which begins at Easter when he moves into the Michael Parkinson-Jonathan Ross-Graham Norton-Claudia Winkelman slot of 10am-1pm on Saturdays. Having first moved Friday Night is Music Night to Sundays, Radio 2 then introduced a two-hour show where Paul Gambaccini plays what he wants. The plan is to simulcast Gambo’s show on Radio 2 and Radio Steve.
Ditto Sunday Love Songs which, until he died the day before Valentine’s Day 2024, was of course hosted by ‘Love The Show’ Steve Wright between 9-11am on Sunday mornings. I do wonder if anyone under 55 sends in a request for the show. When I listened to it in the 2010s, it had a quaint charm, with fuzzy phonelines and Handel’s Wedding March to soundtrack that week’s nuptials.
The tracklisting for the February 4 show had tunes from across the decades, with old favourites like How Bout Us by Champaign, Could It Be I’m Falling In Love by The Detroit Spinners, Easy by The Commodores, Everything I Own by Bread and the deathless Lady In Red, for those looking for a little romahnce. Last year Steve started to present half-hour Love Songs Extra shows which focus on songs and stories from a particular year. It is hard to quantify the loss to the BBC, let alone from this proposed Love The Show Steve network, that the death of lifelong company Wright brings.
Perhaps they will move David Rodigan (who is 72) to the new station, given that he was there when reggae had its initial explosion in the 1970s. It would not surprise me if Radio 2 moved the genre shows – Blues, Jazz, Folk and Country – to this new station too, replacing it with DJ-less mindfulness mixes.
This will also be an easy way to siphon New and Old Music into some of the other planned stations, which include a 21st century-only version of Radio 1 and a similarly DJ-less Radio 3. This means new artists can boast of having their music played on the BBC at a time when the century-old brand has competition from every other broadcaster, streaming service and TV platform, but still carries kudos much as how Rolling Stone magazine or the London Palladium do.
The BBC will justify these new offerings by hiding behind audience feedback and licence fee requirements, but something must be noted: they themselves created the gap they are trying to fill.
They targeted younger listeners, forcing older ones to flee to Greatest Hits Radio and Boom Radio to hear what David Jacobs used to call ‘Our Kind of Music’. I used to love DJ, who played music from the pre-rock era on Sunday nights: all the old singers, all the old songs, which can only be made palatable to mass audiences these days by being put through the Bublé filter.
After three years of the new era, the top brass at the Beeb have realised that it was a bad idea to turn Radio 2 into Radio U OK Hun, even though they had no choice but to shift the brilliant broadcaster Scott Mills (51 in March) from Radio 1, where the target listener is between 14 and 29. Having chased the old audience away, they are now trying to lure them back.
There is nothing wrong with their current weekend line-up: Rylan and Liza Tarbuck are on the station between 3pm and 8pm on Saturdays, and the pair will stay put with their karaoke on the radio and irreverent wittering respectively. Rob Beckett’s appointment for Sunday teatime drove Paul O’Grady out of the station before his early passing, while it was interesting to hear Richard Osman covering the slot at the end of last year. If anyone says Radio 2, it’s Richard from Pointless, although he has a well-paid weekly podcast as part of Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger network.
But what to do about the Radio 2 breakfast show, the station’s flagship music and entertainment show that Wogan made his own? Do they stick Steve Wright on Radio Love The Show Steve to go up against Zoe Ball, or move Zoe back to weekends (Rylan has her old slot) and shift Greg James, who is 40 at the end of next year, to Radio 2? We await the proposed schedule, once all the pieces are slotted in together and the contracts are drawn up.
Aside from Scott Mills, who follows Alan Freeman, Tony Blackburn and Steve Wright in sticking to the radio as his métier, the current lot of presenters are multihyphenates. Many of them are involved with independent podcast networks and other TV channels. Dermot O’Leary would rush from the radio studio to Wembley to host The X Factor; Fearne Cotton has her books, festivals and podcasts; Gary Davies takes Sounds of the Eighties on tour to supplement his two-hour Saturday night show and deputises for DJs on holiday. Even Zoe Ball did the voiceover for the ITV show last year which was trying to cast Mamma Mia.
This is the modern freelance life. A profile of Rylan Clark described him as ‘former X Factor contestant, Celebrity Big Brother winner, Radio 2 DJ, This Morning presenter, Gogglebox regular, podcaster and author’. The three-hour Saturday slot is part of his portfolio, just as Jordan North has his Help I Sexted My Boss podcast as well as the 3.30-5.45pm drivetime slot on Radio 1.
It is interesting that four DJs from the daytime schedule – Ricky, Melvin, Charlie and Vick Hope – have been poached from commercial radio, as indeed was David Rodigan himself. If you go right the way back, Radio 1 was launched to replace the pop-playing pirate stations, so this is of a piece with the broadcaster’s history. Alas, having pinched their DJs, the BBC are now poaching their ideas.
And what about a BBC listener like me? In spite of its awful treatment of talent, its tendency to cover up mistakes and its fear of the very audience it serves, the BBC is used by me every day. My listening diet includes live and on-demand shows broadcast on Radio 1, 1Xtra, 2, 3, 4, 4Xtra, 5Live, 6 Music and the World Service (though not local radio, with apologies to Three Counties).
This week (and it’s only Wednesday) I’ve heard the following: a Radio 4 programme on Scottish politics and one marking the centenary of the pips that end every hour of programming; a repeat of an old episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway and a so-so comedy sketch show; the first part of a new series on social media ‘gatekeepers’ and an episode of Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth show on the English language, which dealt with research into being multilingual; two old codgers talking about Public Relations in their show When It Hits The Fan, which goes up on Sounds on Tuesdays and is broadcast on Wednesday evenings; and the aforementioned two-hour celebration of Roy Orbison.
Plus Ten To The Top on Radio 2, because I’m a sucker for a pop quiz, and the Radio 1 Breakfast Show Podcast, that fillets the show for its links and features. Greg James is the last of the great ‘BBC men’, those who grew up with radio and love the medium. Greg genuinely seems amazed to have got the job of hosting the Breakfast Show, where he follows in a direct line from Tony Blackburn to Noel Edmonds (surely Radio Steve can’t bring him back, can they??) to Zoe Ball to Sara Cox. Perhaps they will run some old editions of Serious Jockin’ (with no g).
The death of Steve Wright reminds me that there will be no more great voices in British radio, just as there will be no more great British music writers. Everyone who wants to broadcast or write in 2024 doesn’t need to work for the BBC; they’ve got a website, or a podcast, or are too busy consuming content by others including in an endless scroll at their thumbtips.
As a listener, I just want good broadcasters introducing great songs with excellent sound design. I don’t mind glottal stops or regional accents, although I do think it odd that three regular Radio 2 presenters (Cox, Radcliffe and Vernon Kay) are from Bolton. Add in Clive Myrie to cover for Jeremy Vine, get Paddy McGuinness to dep for Ball and stick Radio 1’s Vicky Hawkesworth into Scott’s slot, and you can run an entire daytime line-up with a Bolton accent.
Radio Steve, as I shall now call it in tribute to Wright, will have voices that will suit its audience, but I will conclude this ramble by suggesting that the station seems to have a built-in obsolescence. Tony Blackburn’s reputation and broadcasting style – he invented the timecheck! – will of course last forever, but every DJ eventually fades his mic down for the last time, as Wright did in February 2024.
Perhaps Radio Steve is a metaphor for the BBC itself, falling back on Our Kind of Programmes now that everything is available everywhere all the time. Stuart Maconie said that on 6 Music, and it appears he has summed up the future of the Corporation: if everything is there for a listener, the BBC should try to stand out, not nick concepts wholesale from the commercial sector.
Or, as someone might put it, Love The Shows Steve. Serious grievin’, with no g.