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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Silence in the air

Kate Chisholm on the latest radio offerings

News announced last Friday that the recent series of economic earthquakes has forced Channel 4 to withdraw from its plans to launch a digital radio network has sent shockwaves through the radio community. But what does the loss of the three new stations promised by Channel 4 — one of which, 4 Radio, was designed as a direct rival to the BBC’s Radio Four — mean for us as listeners? Would we ever have found the time to listen to them? Will we notice that they’re not there?

According to the latest figures, 7.7 million of us have so far been lured into buying a far-more-expensive digital (DAB) radio receiver, but we digital-listeners tune in to just 17.9 per cent of all radio, and most of that we could have heard on our old-fashioned analogue sets. Have we wasted our money on a technology that is going nowhere? The BBC has successfully developed new digital-only stations which offer different kinds of programmes to new audiences — especially the Asian Network and the newly renamed BBC Radio Seven — but there’s only one commercial station, Planet Rock, which lives up to its name as a music-only station. The rest have all gone; too expensive to keep going, or run out of business by the BBC’s canny competitiveness. Genuinely independent and innovative DAB stations such as Oneword, which was devoted to the spoken word in literature, drama and conversation, found it too difficult to create a financially viable niche, even though it costs just £18,000 to create a one-hour radio drama (compared to at least £200,000 for the equivalent on TV).

Digital radio, you may have noticed, is no longer being sold on the quality of its signal. When it works, it’s brilliantly clear, but who cares whether those embarrassingly sploshy kisses on The Archers can be heard more explicitly via DAB if the signal cuts out just as Lilian rounds on Matt. The digital signal can be as fickle as the voters of Florida; you’re never quite sure whose side it’s on. And when it decides against you, it doesn’t just fade away and come back again like the soothing ins-and-outs of a tinny transistor, but viciously crackles and pops at you before disappearing altogether. It’s the transmitters, I’m told. They’re not up to the job.

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