Going digital

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 1st July 2009

There was much talk (or you could say waffle) about expenses, salaries and the Ross/Brand affair when Steve Hewlett interviewed the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, for The Media Show last week (Radio Four). But they ran out of time before reaching the topic any self-respecting radio listener is most concerned about: when will the UK be switching over to digital? Do we need to start saving now to replace all those old-fashioned analogue-receiving sets that will become redundant when the signal is switched off? And what will become of them: the cheap plastic box in the bathroom, the matchbox-sized transistor for under the pillow, the sneaky set in the study for use when we’re supposed to be working and the fancy B&O with speakers in the lounge for late Beethoven or Late Junction on Three?

It’ll be one of the biggest exercises in waste disposal as overnight the entire nation jettisons its armoury of radios. Will there be a carbon indulgence scheme for the biggest users; anyone with more than five sets to dispose of being obliged to plant a windfarm or half an Amazon rainforest?

Hewlett also didn’t get a chance to ask the DG why, when so much money is being invested in the new technologies, so many parts of the country still cannot receive the digital signal or at best find it very intermittent. Are there plans to improve the transmission system before the switchover from analogue to digital? What, too, about car radios? Only the deluxe models offer digital radios. Surely there’ll be outbreaks of road rage as drivers stuck in a jam are no longer soothed by the mellifluous ramblings of Chrises Moyles and Evans.

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