From a BBC press release quoting Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer:

Go4it has done its very best to reach a children’s audience. Barney and the team have done a terrific job in creating some fine programmes – last year’s programme on bereavement was particularly outstanding – but we have to shape the schedule in the best interests of our listeners and we have not been able to find a successful way of putting a programme for children on an adult radio station.

I could have told them that years ago. Go4It always felt like one of those programmes that was only on because it was the BBC and the BBC has to do minority things, so its disappearance from the schedules as of the end of spring won’t be a great surprise.

But just because ‘it’s the BBC’ surely isn’t sufficient justification for putting a programme like Go4It onto a mainstream network like Radio 4 when none of the intended audience is listening. According to The Guardian:

Damazer said that this year Go4it sometimes registered zero listeners from its target four-to-14 age range… The average age of its 450,000 listeners was between 52 and 55, Damazer said.

Far better to hive it off somewhere else. Like online, perhaps.

Of course, Go4It was never aimed at me so perhaps it’s best that I didn’t like it or it would be doing something wrong (or perhaps I would be doing something wrong). It’s like the way I can’t stand Radio 1, but then that’s how it should be – I’m well outside of its target audience.

The difference between Go4It and Radio 1, though, is that you always know – more or less – what you’re going to get when you turn to Radio 1, whereas kids (or more likely their parents) have to remember when Go4It is on and actively tune to it at the right time.

In an age when you can turn to Cbeebies pretty much any time of the day for some Roary the Racing Car or In the Night Garden, its days were clearly numbered.

It was probably doomed from the start.

It won’t be missed.

Two greats of radio and TV died yesterday, but while one received tributes on Radio 4, and will be highlighted in a special show tonight at 18h30, the other’s passing seems to have gone by relatively unnoticed.

Ned Sherrin, who died following complications with throat cancer, was probably better known for presenting Loose Ends for the last 20 years than he was for That Was The Week That Was, Up Pompeii or his theatre work in the west end. In that role he broke new talent across pretty much every field, and many big names should be grateful for the lucky first break he gave them.

But it was Ronnie Hazlehurst, who died in Guernsey following a stroke, who provided the soundtrack to so many a 70s and 80s childhood, and whose work will be best remembered and longest surviving.He was three times musical director of the Eurovision Song Contest, conducted the UK entry seven times (and the German entry once), and was responsible for some of the best-known theme tunes on British TV, counting Last of the Summer Wine, Blankety Blank, Are You Being Served, To the Manor Born, The Two Ronnies and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em to his name.

A name frequently tagged on to the end of a long run of programme credits, he rarely received the public recognition he deserved for the brilliance of his compositions. They may have sounded like nothing more than cheerful introductions, but they often had a hidden depth, as explained by the BBC:

The composer said he always tried to make the music fit the title of the programme – using a piccolo to spell out the title to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em in Morse code. (Source: BBC News)

There’s only one thing you can say to that:

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Technorati Tags:bbc, ned sherrin, ronnie hazlehurst

Radio 4 comedy dramas I can take or leave (usually leave, by preference), but I do enjoy the comedy quizzes. Particularly I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, and occasionally Just a Minute, although after his behaviour at our awards a few years back I’m gone off Nicholas Parsons.

The News Quiz, though, is a particular gem, so I was glad to get some free tickets for an episode last night.

They record it in The Drill Hall, just off Tottenham Court Road, so it’s an easy walk from the office. Rich met me there, and we headed across together, to be poured into a sparse hall with 200 other Radio 4 listeners for the hour and a bit recording.

It was very primitive set-up. The cast and contestants sat at cloth-draped tables onto which someone had tacked a Radio 4 logo. It was all done in one take that lasted an hour and a quarter, and then hacked down to be broadcast tonight. I listened to it again, and you have to give the editors credit: they did a very good job of representing the whole thing in a 27 minute programme.

The verdict: excellent. Most fun, and somehow through the magic of judicious cutting you get all the best bits on the radio, so the broadcast version is like a greatest hits of the live performance, which is only fair for those listeners who can’t make it down to London.

BBC tickets are free. You can apply for them here, although where this programme is concerned I’ll know in the future that listening at home is just as good as the real thing.

A nice call this week from Radio 4. Actually, it was a follow-up to a voicemail and an email, neither of which I’d had time to reply to, so I feel quite grateful and honoured that they should try for a third time.

Anyhow, after my last slot on Word of Mouth, they’ve asked me to return for the new series, which starts this month, this time talking about acronyms – most specifically those consisting of no more than three letters.

I thought that might have been a bit of a toughie, but it’s been quite fascinating to research. My original understanding was that the acronym TLA (for Three Letter Acronyms) was a product of the Internet age, but it apparently appeared in that form in the instruction manual for the ZX81, way back in – rather obviously – 1981. So, I guess we need to credit the Sinclair people there.

Before that, there wasn’t really a neat phrase to describe these little shorthands, but they have been in common use for decades. Their official birth, it would seem – or at least the point at which they became recognised as an entity in their own right rather than just another bog-standard abbreviation – was in the Roosevelt administration. He himself was a TLA, of course (FDR), but he was famous in his day for starting up a whole host of administrative departments known best by the TLAs that described their functions. These have spawned yet further agencies so that today we have CIA, the FBI, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), and the INS (Immigration and Naturalisation Service) among others.

The original TLA administrative departments were part of the New Deal programme of 1933 – 1937, which in retrospect has the air of a communist Five Year Plan about them. Even at the time they were not universally accepted, though, and many detractors labelled the abundance of new abbreviated departments Alphabet Soup.

I think we agreed that I’d go on and do it this week, and I think we said either Wednesday or Thursday, but my diary is a bit confused on that point. Either way, it’s been an interesting dig – there’s far more than I’ve put down here, but it’s going to need a bit of learning.

The news that Apple’s popped out a new bootloader so you can run Windows on a Mac has gone bonkers. It’s in the papers, on the news and, as of this afternoon, on the BBC World Service, who belled me this morning for an interview.

They apparently have a new policy of not doing phone interviews, so I wandered
down to Bush House after lunch to do one in person. It was a fantastic afternoon. The sun was shining and I could have easily managed without my coat.

I really like Bush House. The last time I was there was for Book Club on Radio 4, and before that, I’m thinking it must have been BBC London, before they moved out to Marylebone. There is something quite grand about the place, and it’s very spacious and airy, with wide shallow staircases and big open hallways. The lifts are old copper and brass affairs with buttons that light up and little counters by the calls telling you how long you have to wait until the next one arrives, which no doubt only serve to irritate when you’re due to start reading the news in 30 seconds.

It was an easy piece for a business programme, mainly talking about why a business might now want to buy Apple computers to run Windows instead of traditional Dell and HP workstations, and about the effect it would have on Apple’s bottom line, both of which are easy to explain. As with all of these things, though, it was over in a flash, and I’d imagine our 10 minutes of talking was probably slashed to 60 seconds by the time it made it to air.

What it actually sounded like, though, I don’t know, as there are so many iterations of the World Service around the world, all running to slightly different timing to cater for local needs, that I’m not sure what time it went out in the UK.

When I got back to the office, Radio 4 had been on the phone looking for someone who would speak out against it. I suspect they’d have had some trouble with that; everyone I’ve spoken to seems to think it’s a good thing (me included). They said they’d call back if they couldn’t find anyone else but, as they didn’t, I can only assume that there is at least one detractor out there somewhere.

I have spent the weekend not doing the things I should have been doing. Most specifically, I’ve not worked any more on researching the book. Or writing the damned thing.

I’ve not been idle. I’ve now made two batches of toffee: one butter and one treacle. I’ve visited Andrew and looked at the 22 staples in his leg. I’ve tidied up the huge box of cables in the bottom of my cupboard that has been like that since I moved here. In fact, since before I moved here as I specifically recall moving it out of the flat like that when time was getting tight, promising that I’d tidy it up in due course. That’s almost 18 months ago now.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, I’ve started to copy my tapes to MP3. It’s a daunting task. There must be miles of magnetic ribbon waiting to be copied, and already I’ve found some cringeworthy candidates.

There’s appearances on BBC Essex, BBC Three Counties, BBC Southern Counties, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC London, TalkSport, hours and hours and hours of stuff on LBC, Link FM, Pilgrim FM, news-reading and adverts.

And one advert in particular, which I’d completely forgotten about. Probably with good cause: Tango.

The fizzy drink people wanted to run a campaign of unknown nobodies doing the voices of the better-known nobodies who had already been doing a series of instantly-recognisable ads for pop for the last three or four years. Somehow, I’m not sure how, I was one of the chosen nobodies.

It really is quite terrible.

Fortunately there is all sorts of useful and highly listenable stuff in there, too, to the extent that my iTunes now boasts volume 1 of Paperweight by Stephen Fry, The ‘Best’ of Rambling Syd Rumpo (of whom nobody will ever have heard) and the Julian and Sandy double tape.

There is no longer any room for Tango adverts, I’m glad to say.

A very interesting day. A couple of hours with Stephen Fry tonight. Half an hour with Phill Jupitus this morning. In between, a very nice extended lunch at the pie shop with the rest of the team to mark Julian’s 14 years at the mag.

So the day started hideously early. Half five, to be precise. Cold. Dark. Unpleasant. Even a long hot shower wasn’t quite enough to balance the appeal of another hour in bed. I was at the office just after seven (even at that time the Cleveland Street toast shops were open) and out again at eight for the short walk to 6music in Broadcasting House for the breakfast show.

Turns out there’s a friendly nest of Mac fans there. Phill Jupitus had a PowerBook in his bag, his producer had an iPod, the intern had a Mac of some sort… they all got very excited by the Mac mini I’d brought along.

I think it went OK. I nattered for 20 minutes or so, but it’s difficult to tell how it sounded unless you’re listening in. Paul recorded it on Skyplus, and it’s on the BBC listen again player, so I’ll have to catch it some time before it expires.

It was very small in there. About the size of the old LBC. Smaller than the new studios. Quite modern, though (as you’d expect for a station that age), except they seemed to play a lot of their music off CDs; at least as much as they did from hard disks, which I found surprising.

Tonight, though, there was no music. I was over in Bush House for a recording of Book Club. It’s a monthly programme about, obviously, books, presented by James Naughtie (everyone called him Jim). Each month you have to read a different book, and then the author and a small group of readers come along to ask and answer questions. Tonight it was Stephen Fry talking about The Hippopotamus, to be broadcast on the first Sunday in March.

I was a little bit early, so mooched around in the rain for ten minutes, and then wandered inside to meet the producers. They’ve smartened up the foyer of Bush House since I was last there, and the security has been beefed up, too. All sorts of locked glass doors and people in fluorescent jackets.

The rest of the book club types looked like regular book club types. Wild hair, corduroy trousers, a poorly-kept beard or two. As we sat around waiting for Stephen Fry to arrive I asked who had come the furthest. ‘I’m from just down the road,’ I said, pointing in the general direction of the office.

‘I’m from Sheffield.’
‘I’m from Maidenhead.’
‘I’m from Tel Aviv.’

‘Tel Aviv?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t come just for this, did you?’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It was a good excuse to come to London.’

Oh…

There was a bit more silence.

‘So has everyone read the book?’ I asked.

There was a bit of head-hanging from those who didn’t know it so well.

‘I translated it into Hebrew,’ said the woman from Tel Aviv.

‘That’s quite a responsibility,’ I told her. ‘Do you have to send it back to the original publishers so they can check you’ve made an accurate translation?’

‘Oh, no. Not at all. You can do pretty much what you want. In fact, I’ve added some bits of my own in the Hebrew version. Hebrew can be far more filthy than English.’

But she didn’t elaborate.

They took us downstairs to where Stephen Fry was standing around being as tall as everyone always says he is. It was probably exaggerated by the fact we’d been crammed into a small, low-ceilinged corridor to drink terrible, terrible, terrible wine and shake hands with him and Jim Naughtie, but even taking that into account, he was as sky-high as Chris of the Phin had said he was. He’d seen him walking the streets near the office, this morning, no doubt in the slippers he was wearing tonight, and stopped him to tell him I’d be coming along tonight.

Now we weren’t supposed to read out our questions, so I dropped my notes on the seat beside me, but I’m sure someone else sneaked a peek, because someone else asked the only one I’d properly prepared, so I had to quick-think another one on the spot. It went down quite well.

‘All the characters in the book except one seem to develop and move on by the end because they’ve had their delusions shattered, but Ted doesn’t seem to have changed at all. Why is that?’

Only trouble is, I think the way I said ‘shattered’ it came out as shit head, so it will probably be trimmed out before it gets anywhere near the radio.

In spite of that, though, he said it was a good question, and that he’d been wondering that himself yesterday when he’d re-read it for the first time since it was published.

Even if it does all get trimmed out, that doesn’t really matter. I went along because of who it was and what he was talking about, not so I’d get on the radio. It was quite surreal sitting there as he read extracts, especially when I’ve heard him reading the same bits on the audio book six or seven times by now. Perhaps more.

Of course, it all flew by very quickly, and an hour and a bit later I found myself wandering out of Bush House with the controller of Radio 4, who had come along to sit in. I had thought he was blind at first, but he got into the driving seat of a Saab, so I guess not.

I had hung around for a bit to have another quick chat before wandering off, so we talked about Apple stuff. He’s a friend of Jonathan Ive, and he asked me if I’d seen Tiger yet.

‘The shuffles are sold out at the Apple Store today,’ he said.
‘Mac minis are going quickly, too,’ I said.
‘Then there’s hope yet,’ he replied.

Meanwhile in Downing Street, Tony Blair adds Andrew Gilligan to his Christmas card list.

Or does he?

The government has got pretty much everything it wants in the wake of the Hutton Enquiry: an apology from the BBC, being cleared of ‘sexing up’ the report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, validation of its reasons for going to war and, perhaps the biggest prize of all – a stick with which to beat the BBC.

Tessa Jowell, overseeing the review of the BBC’s Charter says the outcome of the Hutton Enquiry will impact on the renewal of the BBC’s charter.

That, surely, is good news for every MP.

And a potential disaster for the British media.

It is no secret successive governments have wanted to exert control over the BBC, although they have had little way of doing so because of the way it is run. At a guess, though, I’d think the most likely outcome this time around would be the disbanding of the Board of Governors, which regulates the Corporation’s output, and responsibility for overseeing what the BBC produces being given to Ofcom, the communications regulation body, which has control of everything from mobile phones to national TV and radio stations.

The government has been questioning the BBC’s right to have a web site with arguments that it is so successful it harms the viability of other sites in the UK, but then is that really a reason to can it?

If the BBC is regulated by the same body that oversees independent TV, what would there be to stop them taking the easy way out and forcing it to stick to a very rigid public service remit, closing down its more frivolous services such as BBC Three, and those that question the government of the day (including News 24) and instead fill the schedules with ‘worthy’ informative pieces.

Independent TV, meanwhile, would be forced down a completely opposite route so that they two do not clash with one another.

In both cases, it would be a disaster, and TV in general in the UK would suffer greatly. The same could be said for radio.

Some say it should lose the income it receives from the License fee on account of the fact that they don’t see why they should pay for the License if they themselves don’t watch the BBC’s channels. If they think this is a good reason for the BBC to be regulated by a central body then they clearly don’t understand the damage that would be done to the independent services if they were forced to compete with the BBC for advertising revenues. With the available revenue stream split in two neither would be able to survive on their current scale. The pool of available ad revenue in the UK is barely enough to support the independent channels on their own.

It all comes down to one thing: if the BBC was not so good, so trusted and so successful it would not find itself in the crisis it is weathering just now. Likewise, if it was a private company rather than a public body, there would have been no Hutton Report, and if there was, it would have been unable to do the damage that might be done to the BBC.

No wonder campaigns are already springing up on the web to save an institution of which we should all be proud.

What’s the worst thing that could happen during a job interview? Perhaps a fire alarm.

Fortunately I was the interviewer rather than the interviewee, but if it was me sitting there waiting to answer an hour of questions about myself I can’t imagine I’d have been too happy at the prospect of clambering down five floors of fire escape with 500 other people, only to climb all the way back up to the top again when given the all clear.

Still, it was a chance for some unexpected fresh air on an exceptionally hot day that saw us sitting out in Soho Square eating salads at lunch among the painfully fit topless guys all keen to show off their perfectly tanned perfect pecs. Tonight, nachos, cheese and free gossip with PRs in Porters Bar.

Had an instant message from Danny mid-afternoon with advance warning that the arts and culture show for which he interviewed me last week is now online. That’s a pretty quick turn around considering it was pre-recorded and has since been broadcasted on a station in Saskatoon, Canada.

Danny sounds great – very Radio 4 – and the show, being entirely devoted to the medium of blogging, has some interesting guests. My two short snippets (neatly positioned in the first and third parts) pale into insignificance beside Rebecca Blood, who came across sounding very friendly, natural and authoritative. Kind of makes me wish I’d not been quite so disappointed in her book (and said as much in print).

I don’t know how long it will stay online, but there’s a little archive of the shows building up here. It’s the one entitled ‘Understanding Blogging’. I’ll be popping back tomorrow to listen to some of the others.

I was interviewed by Danny Bradbury about Blogging for a Canadian radio show today. Hopefully a copy of it should be up on the show’s site when it goes live, so I’ll listen in if I can. It was interesting being asked about my own blogging experinces, though, as usually I just get to recommend other peoples’ blogs or talk about the phenomena in general.

One of the questions was why did you start, which is always easy enough to answer – I started it because I wanted to write something that would expand my repertoire out of just plain reviewing and reporting into more free-flowing descriptive, less structured pieces. It also seemed a good way to keep the site content changing on a regular basis.

As for ‘is blogging a threat to journlism’ – something a lot of bloggers have been saying for a while, I’m absolutely certain it is not.

That’s an assertion most often made by bloggers who don’t have any connection to journalism in their everyday lives. If they did, I’m sure they would realise how eroneous it is. Sure, the word journal derives from the French ‘jour’ – day, hence daily updates and all that, but beyond that it has little to do with the printed or broadcasted media in any country.

Some blogs are excellent works of investigation. Many concentrate on a specialised subject like cancer, fishing or photography, which could technically qualify them as being regular specialised (online) publications. Others concentrate on towns and cities, including London and Tokyo. That could get them counted as commentaries on the life of (and life in) a big city and so be like regional papers.

Still others philosophise, which I guess is what I’m doing right now. It annoys the hell out of me when other people do it, so this entry is probably annoying the hell out of someone else right now.

Journalism is not about the narrow view, though – it is about the coming together of many minds and varied thoughts. Even a right-wing newspaper is written by a team, each member of which has a slightly different take on what it means to be right-wing, and a left-wing economics journal represents multifarious views of how to most equitably distribute the wealth of a nation, even if its contributors all share a similar ideological background.

So until the hundreds of thousands of blogs online right now are distilled into just thousands, or perhaps just hundreds, each written by many voices, blogging will never be a threat to the established pillars of journalism in this country or any other.

Ironically, though, perhaps it is the search engines that will ultimately do what the blogs alone could never achieve. By providing an easy way to search this quickly growing mountain of digital opinion, and comparing the results side by side, they are producing a set of ad-hoc blogs under the Google or Altavista or Dogpile banner, each of which is produced by a team of unconnected writers, who neither know one another or realise that they are contributing to anything more than their own site.

Blogs, then, in and of themselves, are not a threat to traditional journalism. Search tools like Google and Yahoo, perhaps, are.

I didn’t intend to write all that. I was going to write about the very lengthy briefing I went to this morning at the Guardian archive. Great building, great coffee, but very cold room and a very long talk. Interesting – all the new Apple stuff – but something I wrote about for the next issue of PCW, so it can be read in print in a few weeks’ time.

After all, I wouldn’t want this blog to become a threat to traditional IT journalism.