I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a bit sorry for Mike Harding. The long-serving host of BBC Radio 2’s ‘folk, roots and acoustic’ show was given the heave-ho last month, and the far-from-underemployed Mark Radcliffe took his place last week. One might ask what Harding had done wrong, and indeed Harding has been asking it repeatedly. He says he was sacked by phone and given no sensible reason for his dismissal.
Ah, the freelance life! I have been sacked so many times from so many supposedly cushy numbers that they all meld into one vast megasacking, but as far as I remember, they rarely give a reason, or at least they almost never give the real reason. On one occasion, though, someone did. The editor in question had taken out an eminent older journalist for lunch and asked him if there was anything he fancied doing on the paper. Eminent older journalist pointed at my column and said, well, I wouldn’t mind doing that. Editor came back from lunch, rang me up and sacked me. To my everlasting pleasure this man was himself sacked quite soon afterwards, and the eminent older journalist is still alive but not too well, I’m sorry to say, but maybe not as sorry as I should be.
The real reasons for Harding’s dismissal, though, are not hard to work out. Radio station controllers don’t seem to have an enormous amount to do, and enormous desks behind which to do it, but rearranging the deckchairs does lie within their brief, or ‘refreshing the schedule’ as they call it. Often this means changing things that didn’t need to be changed and leaving alone things that did and do. Bob Shennan, the current incumbent at Radio 2, was the man who moved Radcliffe and Maconie to 6Music, which didn’t need to happen, having previously cut down their hours, which didn’t need to happen. Of his daytime hosts, Ken Bruce is often said to be the most ‘vulnerable’, possibly because he produces the best show. It must be a very stressful environment in which to work, conscious as you would be that excellence may never be enough, and might even be too much.
Harding, though, has been at least partly responsible for the great and glorious revival of folk music. His show has been knowledgable, wide-ranging and compulsory listening in the bearded community. But it is also a little less than trendy and, with the emergence of woolly-hat-wearing young bands like the trustafarian phoneys Mumford and Sons, you can see that this might be a problem. In particular, Radio 2 just loves its Folk Awards, which every year is attended by famous non-folk musicians who say they have loved folk for years but you know they haven’t really. Harding is 67, an awkward age in radio. A few more years under his belt and he would qualify as a national treasure, which would make him unsackable. As it is, the very slight fustiness of his show — which is what many of us like about it — has told against him.
And Shennan feels he has to make his evenings ‘younger’ because a couple of years ago the BBC Trust compelled him to make his daytimes older. A single sentence in a report no one else read — complaining that Radio 2 did not cater enough for older listeners — meant a subtle shift in the station’s music policy, with fewer new tunes played during the day, and more creaky old stuff from the 1940s, 50s and early 60s. The BBC Trust may be legendarily useless, but it wields surprising power. Some Blur-hating octogenarian bends someone’s ear at a party, and Radio 2 is made a little bit duller than it was before.
Does any of this matter? Probably not, except to the millions of people who listen to Radio 2 because it’s the only music station that comes close to representing their tastes. Fortunately, there is life beyond it. Folk, after all, is the music of the oppressed minority, and the newly oppressed Harding has responded by turning his show into a weekly podcast. I found it on Facebook, and I’m sure it’s equally easily Googleable. He sounded a little more bad-tempered than usual this week, but otherwise much the same. I also enjoyed Mark Radcliffe’s show, as it happens. So we end up with two weekly folk shows for the price of one: a decent New Year bargain. But a few Radio 2 presenters will be feeling even jumpier than usual, wondering where the axe of Shennan will fall next.
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