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).
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.
The advent of new technologies is always fraught with Luddite antagonism and economic realities. People suffer. But what’s discomfiting about the digital switchover is the way it’s being managed by the government. Going digital will not be a consumer choice, but a political imposition.
So far the Corporation has responded to the byte-sized revolution with some incredibly creative use of the licence-fee funds. As digital listeners we now have more choice than ever, from the advent of the Asian Network and Radio Five Live to BBC6 and BBC7, and those with only analogue receivers have not suffered as a result. Radios One and Two are booming while Radio Three’s coverage of music is broader than ever. Over on Four, the schedule’s fit to burst with programmes that titillate, infuriate, astonish and inspire. On Thursday morning I was intrigued by a programme about Samuel Smiles, The Grandfather of Self-Help.
Smiles published his book, Self-Help, on the same day in 1859 that Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared. The first edition sold out immediately and by the time Smiles died in 1904 it had become second only to the Bible as the most-owned book in the country. Smiles advocated ‘The spirit of self-help’ as ‘the root of all genuine growth in the individual’ and that this should be ‘the true source of national vigour and strength’.
Nowadays much of what he said is regarded as the oppressive moralising of a Victorian Do-Gooder and the root of Margaret Thatcher’s misguided ideas about the defunct role of society in shaping the national destiny. There was, though, something disarmingly refreshing about Smiles’s clarity of expression, and his practical response to the harsh working lives of most of his readers. Take his crisp verdict on those with great riches, which are, he says, ‘no proof whatever of moral worth, and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the worthlessness of their possessor as the light of the glow worm reveals the grub’. None of the talking heads interviewed for the programme could compete.
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