Discerning listeners

So which pop radio station do you listen to? It’s a question people who run pop radio stations often feel compelled to ask, without really wanting to hear the answer.

So which pop radio station do you listen to? It’s a question people who run pop radio stations often feel compelled to ask, without really wanting to hear the answer. Most of their friends and contemporaries listen to Radio Four, and so do mine. But I need music to work to, and to wash up to, and Radio Two has come to occupy a significant place in my life. Ah, Radio Two. Once old, fuddy and duddy, more recently it has been home to Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and still it’s the most popular radio station in the country. Maybe the most hated, too.

There is of course a long-running campaign, in the Daily Mail and elsewhere, to privatise both Radio One and Two, on the grounds that they are commercial stations already in all but name, with a giant subsidy and no ads, and therefore operating at an unfair advantage over the poor, benighted commercial stations out there which no longer make any money for anyone. O woe! Let’s disregard the blatant commercial self-interest of many such campaigners, and also the entrenched loathing of the BBC so many of my journo chums seem to feel. What’s left is a terrible snobbery about pop radio: mush for the proles. You would never know the vast qualitative difference between Radio Two and the commercial stations if you listened to neither. It’s primarily a matter of intent. Commercial stations exist to deliver listeners to advertisers at the lowest possible cost. Their economic model assumes there are millions of thickies out there who haven’t heard ‘Against all Odds’ by Phil Collins quite often enough.